Off to the Races

Back in the 1980s I wrote a TDC column (then in Cycle) titled “Sleeping in Vans.” It was about weekends spent roadracing at tracks within a few hundred miles of Boston. We drove to them overnight, leaving 11 p.m. Friday and arriving for sign-up and first practice the next morning. Whoever wasn’t driving slept in the right-hand seat, far short of a bed. Trust whoever’s driving not to doze off, as he will soon trust you. No heroics—each drove one tank of gas.

At the track, unload (no ramp—these 35 hp 250s weighed 25 pounds less than a Lambretta), put the bikes on their stands, and head for registration. Mix two-stroke oil and gas, gas up, air up. If you hadn’t entered by mail and been given numbers in advance, you cut them out of shelf paper and stuck them on.

This was the 1960s, when gas was 32 cents, and you could—if you paid dealer net for parts—replace a piston and its single ring for $6. If you seized when the heat of combustion made the piston too big for the cylinder, there were two possibilities. A happy seizure was one that could be cleared by just removing melted piston aluminum from the cylinder wall by sanding or hydrochloric acid. Slip a fresh piston and ring on that con-rod, drop the cleaned-up cylinder back over the studs, and you’re good. A sad seizure? When you pulled the heads and saw the porous chrome plating of the bore was chipped or peeled. Junk. That meant a fresh cylinder. Forty-odd dollars flew away.

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Seizing was death and taxes: inevitable. The game was to jet down until the spark plug insulators were white—appliance white—because power rose as you neared the best-power mixture. There were no oxygen sensors, so tuning relied on “reading” the spark plugs for the information they gave.

If your engine was correctly timed “out of the truck,” checking again after first practice would reveal that the mag was now out of time. With a dial gauge and holder screwed into a spark plug hole, and the trusty Okuda Koki meter’s clip leads across that cylinder’s contact breaker, you slowly rotate the engine to find TDC, zero the dial gauge, and back up the crank to see where the points were opening. Then you retimed at 2.0mm BTDC.

Track food? Soggy sandwiches from the cooler? You pick. Another practice and the clutch is slipping. Lay the bike on its right side to avoid draining the trans oil and pull off the left-hand engine cover to get at the clutch. We didn’t have spare clutches, just plates. So everything had to come apart to check each and every one. Is it coned? Is it blue? Is it cracked? Out with the bad, in with new from the spares box. Back together again.

Track time and wrench time alternate. Everyone is tired but up. We are young men on a mission. The Vietnam War raged. The Beatles were new and fresh. No one could know his future. Off weekends we went to the North Shore to see and hear Chuck Berry or the Flamingos at the Ebbtide. The tracks were our natural home because racing pushed everything but now out of mind. I am real and my bike is real. Not sure about the rest.

Sunday after racing, everything back in the van and homeward. We racers-for-a-day would emerge from the eight-hour return trip to jobs, phones, and bosses.

The bikes went down the basement stairs and back onto their build stands. Another weekend was coming.