"I got interested in racing after watching an AMA flat-track event. A friend of mine invited me to Cedarburg Fairgrounds to watch Champion Carroll Resweber. I didn't know who he was at the time, but I knew he was doing something different than everyone else out there--and that something was not shutting off! The sound of the racing and the speed as they came by the wall really got me hooked. After that I was into racing, and I used to get the records of the Isle of Man TT and sit and listen to the sounds of the Honda six-cylinders and the two-strokes.
"I had a little Ducati Bronco that I started running in scrambles and at the local flat-track. My Honda dealer sold me a 150cc engine that he got out of a wrecked bike, and I shoved it into the Bronco frame. I must have been about 18. I did all the welding and fabrication myself, and then raced the bike against 250s. It didn't cut it, but it was all I had.
"That bike and that project set me on a course of tuning and modifying, and that's the course I'm still on today. Even though I'm retired, I still wrench at about 20 races a year, and I still build bikes for racers. I still work as much and as hard as I ever did, but to me it's not work. I love working on bikes, modifying them and creating them. It's like I'm an artist and motorcycles are my medium. And even though I'm not racing myself, I compete with them, so vicariously I am the guy in the saddle."
David Lloyd
Team Manager, Lloyd Brothers Motorsports
1977 Honda CT70
"My first bike was a Honda CT70 that my friend and I found in a dump behind an old TV repair shop, back when it was cost-effective to fix your TV instead of replace it. It was one of the old rusty-colored ones with the separate right and left handlebars. I think it caught fire before we found it--I remember the seat being half burned off.
"We spent a week working on it to make it run. Eventually it ran; however, the throttle cable was broken so the only way you could ride it was to hold onto the handlebar with your left hand and pull the cable with your right. I just wrapped the cable end around my finger and off I went! It definitely started my love for motorcycles."
Charles Falco
Chair of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Arizona and curator for the Art of the Motorcycle exhibit
1960s Honda 50
"I bought a used Honda 50 in the mid-'60s, when California thought it reasonable to let 15-year-old boys without helmets or training have motorcycle licenses. The guy who sold the Honda explained how to shift, watched me ride up the block and back, and then sent me on my way in Southern California rush-hour traffic to my house, 15 miles away. Within a few months, before crashing it into the side of a car that turned in front of me while I was lane-splitting, oblivious to any possible danger, I had covered several thousand miles, with only one other near-death experience. I was pretending it was a motocross machine when both hands were jarred off the bars upon landing, and I only managed to regain control within a few feet of flying off a 40-foot cliff. Some people learn from their mistakes. Others, like me, bought another motorcycle."
Doug Toland
Former FIM World Endurance Champion and current Honda R&D tester
1960s Tecumseh-powered mini-bike
"I was lucky to even get a motorcycle because one of my father's last experiences on a motorcycle was getting 'ran over' by a jeep in a blackout during World War II! The day I first soloed on a bicycle, I took off around the corner with an incredible feeling that I still feel today. When I rounded the second corner, I ran smack into the back of a parked truck! I was about 3 or 4 years old."
"When I was 4, my parents got my older brother a 5-horsepower Cat mini-bike, and he would sit on back while I tried to ride it. I remember heading straight toward a block wall and he bailed me out. Deja vu of the parked truck! A kid down the street did the same thing on his Taco mini-bike and actually took out the wooden fence--all without safety gear, I'm sure."
"Santa brought me a yellow 3.5-hp Tecumseh mini-bike when I was 5. It had a rigid fork, a high-rise, Schwinn Sting Ray-style handlebar, about 5mm worth of rear suspension, a paddle-style rear brake and NO front brake! In an effort to get more speed, I would manually hold the governor control wide-open during our local drag-races up and down the street. My father eventually fabricated a foot pedal for this, so I could keep both hands on the handlebar."
"Back in the '60s, you could ride on the streets in Orange County without the cops bothering you, and there were plenty of fields to ride in. (Bruce Ogilvie told me a similar story about growing up in Riverside, and said things changed when the police got a helicopter!) We also had a vacation home in the local mountains, where I rode dirtbikes every weekend for years. I only came home for gas, food, water or when it got dark. I would ride out of our front yard for hours at a time and loved every second of it."When I was about 14, my older brother got a '74 Honda CB400F Super Sport. When he wasn't home, I figured out how to hot-wire it, and used to go riding around town, terrorizing the neighborhood and had the same feeling as riding the bicycle for the first time. The big difference was that I didn't hit any parked cars or block walls!"
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