America’s King Of Formula 750

Formula 750 is the closest thing to royalty that vintage racing in America has. It harkens back to the glory days when Harley-Davidson XR750s were competitive in the right hands, and many of those hands were from Michigan. Jay Springsteen and Rex Beauchamp to name two, plus Bart Markel from a few years earlier.

In the early ’70s as a novice, it was possible to show up at a dirt track event, win your heat, and still not qualify for the main event! That’s because they took the 12 fastest times, and you might not be one despite winning your race. Everyone was sharp as could be and had plenty of chances to hone their skills and perfect their setup because there was a race somewhere within easy driving four nights a week if you included Santa Fe Speedway over in Chicago, and most of them did. There were three seasons of dirt tracking from spring through fall. In the winter time they went indoors to elbow each other out of the way on the concrete floors of poorly ventilated arenas or outside to race on the ice of the frozen lakes and rivers in the cold, clean air.

In the early days they didn’t stud their tires, just “tractionized” them by backing up onto a set of spiked rollers and spinning the back tire until it was intentionally shredded. It sounds strange now, but to a 15-year-old shop rat who didn’t know any better it was gospel.

John Ellis, King of Formula 750, grew up in the best place on earth as far as he was concerned: Grand Rapids, Michigan. Once he entered a TS250 Suzuki in the Jack Pine Enduro—500 miles of rough woods riding over two days. It was there that John and I were first linked together without knowing it, and it is here where I ask you an important question if you are a vintage motorcycle racer: How strong are the links in your chain?

As a high school projectionist I was asked to accompany and operate the school district’s 16mm projector for the showing of a film to a local club. I needed the $5 it paid and didn’t especially care what the film was about. I should have. It was about the race through the North Woods on an unbelievable variety of machinery from little dirt bikes to full-blown hogs.

The term “Jack Pine winner” took on a new glow for me, and when I met John Goodpaster, AMA referee for the vintage racing events put on by AHRMA, “You’ve won the Jack Pine heavyweight class!” I laughed out loud. He had no idea how I would know that. We were linked by our common past through motorcycles even though we didn’t know it. He was older, but we both rode Triumphs, so the connection was made.

Meanwhile, John Ellis had moved from his job at McGovern’s Cycle Sales to one at John Esler Triumph in Grand Rapids and loved it. He joined the gang of mechanics who raced, lived, breathed, slept, and dreamt motorcycles. Esler had famously built the very first AMA Grand National Championship-winning machine, a Garden Gate Norton, and his mentoring of those around him was invaluable and appreciated. He served on the competition congress of the AMA and knew everyone who was anyone in the business and was happy to share his enthusiasm and knowledge with those around him.

Through the same years, I was having the pleasure of being tutored by Matt Hall, CZ guru and all-around two-stroke fundamentalist. Hall explained the finer points of the breed to me. (There were three: fuel, ignition, and compression, but those divisions are topical and none of it is all inclusive). A good deal of my experience at tuning two-strokes was of the trial-and-error sort, but I remained a true believer that some undiscovered trick was out there, just waiting to be found, that would make my machine the fastest. Two-strokes seemed to still be in some formative hot-rod fantasy, just waiting for the right kid to think to try this or that and set the racing world on its ear. Did you know we used to stuff the balance holes in crankshafts with corks and epoxy them in to make more power?

John and I remained unknown to each other when we both began racing in 1966, and in ’68 we both bought the new Yamaha DT-1 and the available GYT kit, which included a pipe, cylinder, and head. The bikes were a marvel compared to my Triumph twin. They were not especially good motocross mounts but they were fine on flat tracks, scramble, and TTs and that is where we both were.

I was working for a shop by then, too, Speede Service in Carbondale, Illinois, a university town which was infamous for having been the per-capita motorcycle capital of America for a while until the school banned students from owning them or having them on campus. In the flush times, all of the people I needed to know to launch myself into the cycle racing world were close at hand and my boss at the college newspaper was the first winner of a big bike race at Daytona on a two-stroke: Ron Muir. Ron, who was on my case to get out and roadrace from the night in the pressroom when he discovered I was dirt tracking.

Of course, none of these names matter to you if you don’t know who they are, and this is not meant to be a name-dropping contest. They were famous, all of them, in some way and I was nobody. Neither was John Ellis. Yet we had the advantage of knowing the answers to a thousand racing questions, and it shows how closely linked all of motorcycling was when it came to racing.

I wave out to the West Coast as I say this and let them know I understand their self-appointment to pre-eminence once the manufacturing impetus shifted to Japan and they became the import coast for all things new and different each season. Here in the Midwest we didn’t care so much who got them for us, or where they came from, so long as we had something competitive to race. But back to John Ellis—he did what novice racers with talent and ambition do; he accumulated points and moved up the Junior status then Expert, the DT-1 getting him over the first hurdle and a Trackmaster-framed Triumph 750 getting him past the second.

Things changed at the Expert level, for both of us. It was more serious. It was expensive, and there were men there trying to make a living. And you come along and threaten to eat into their winnings. There comes a time in a young racer’s life when he has to ask himself if this is what he is meant to do. Winning at the highest level might be the hardest thing to accomplish and the most dangerous to do. But is it a life, or a hobby? In my case it was the cost of trying to keep a TZ750 in tires and pistons that helped me decide where racing belonged in my life. John did not roadrace, but had gone top drawer with his expert dirt tracking and had an XR750 that was doing right by him.

For John Ellis, it was someone he loved who made the decision for him and he didn’t even know them yet. When he found out his wife was expecting their first child, he hung it up and walked away from racing for good. Well, he thought he had.

Look for Part 2.