Objects in the Mirror...

Jeffrey Butts

I was in the wrong place at the wrong time. I wish I had been around to see it. If only I had been interested in that at the time. All phrases of regret, ones each of us has likely used at one time or another.

In December, Russ Lindborg and I got together for a pre-holiday lunch at a local eatery and exchanged some reading material. I left him with "Potside Companion", a collection of Burt Levy short stories (and some truly awful poetry). Burt writes entertaining columns in both Grassroots Motorsports and in Vintage Motorsports. Russ left me with his copy of "Grand National, America's Golden Age of Motorcycle Racing", by Joe Scalzo.

If you have ever wondered about the attraction some of us feel for dirt track bikes, I can heartily recommend this book. Although it goes back into the history of dirt track from the 1950's and carries it forward to about 15 years ago, the primary focus of the pages are on the Grand National tour during the late 60's to the late 70's. Up until the 1985 season, to be the American Motorcycle Association (AMA) Grand National Champion and carry the #1 plate, you had to race in five different disciplines; mile, half-mile, short track, TT (aka Steeplechase), and road-racing. During that period the top riders were very fast at any venue. Once they separated the asphalt from the dirt track, the "jack-of-all-trades" requirement was gone.

"Grand National" is written from the perspective of a war between the American and the Brit bikes, between Harley and the legion of vertical English singles and twins like Matchless, BSA, and Triumph. The guys riding the British iron (referred to in the book as Lime Juicers) are cast as the underdogs. The Harley guys are the men in black. Scalzo, while giving them credit for their many National Championships, frequently highlights the fact that the Milwaukee team was often its own worst enemy, a circumstance brought on by the factory's insistence that there was no favored tuner or rider. As a result, Hog pilots competed as hard against other members of the factory team as they did against the independents and the challengers.

Why did I like this book so much? I was there. I saw AMA National events at the San Jose Fairgrounds and at Ascot Park in Los Angeles. Every one of them was close, with many lead changes starting with the heat races and progressing through the semis and the main events. I saw Kenny Roberts race when he was a Junior Class rider. I saw Don Emde, Gary Nixon, Dick Mann, Gary Scott, Mert Lawill, and a bunch more guys mentioned in this book. Although I never raced against any of them (remember, I was just a "Sportsman" novice, and not a very good one at that), I raced on the tracks that they did including Fremont, Lodi, Hayward, Salinas, Hollister, and the Sacramento Mile. This is a terrific book with loads of insight into factory strategies, rider personalities, and is a page-turner that you will have difficulty putting down. I have ordered a copy for myself.

That got me to looking at a couple of other books in my library, including one my brother Dave gave me a couple of years ago about the history of Laguna Seca Raceway. Now I can tell you that I have never, ever, been to the "new" Laguna. On the other hand, we lived in Fort Ord (Monterey) when the track was opened and we saw many regional and national level sports car races at the track. The timing here was the late 1950's and for about the next 10 years. Again, this was in a wonderful time during the history of sports cars. The regional events were populated by the same kinds of cars that you could buy at the dealer. Some, in fact, were driven to the track, raced, and driven home. In the national events, Ferraris and Maseratis, Porsches and Jaguars, all the big names were there. Drivers included Gurney, Moss, Hall, Ginther, McLaren, Clark, Hill (both of them), and a score of others who raced sports cars, formula cars, and anything else they could get their hands on. Like the AMA bike riders, these guys could, and would, do it all. These were the days of the USRRC, the precursor to the Can-Am, and then the rise of the Can-Am and Trans-Am championships. I got to see these cars and these drivers race at Laguna Seca, Riverside, Ontario, Kent, and a host of other venues.

As I approach retirement I have taken more time to look back on my 30+ years in the semiconductor industry, the semiconductor revolution. I currently work with a group of about 130 researchers doing truly groundbreaking science in the field of microcircuitry. I have seen the industry growth in technology from the sharp end of the spear. Instead of KR's and XR's versus Bonneville's and Gold Stars, instead of Chapparals versus Lola's and McLaren's, we had Intel and IBM versus the Japanese. It has been an experience worth remembering.

In both two-wheel and four-wheel racing, and in the world of technology, those of us in our generation have had the good fortune to be there during groundbreaking times. We were in the right place at the right time, were around not only to see it, but in some cases to participate in it. No regrets. Wow.