7 minute read
Daytona: A Perspective
WORDS & PHOTOS: GREGG BONELLI
You may have heard that there is nothing like Daytona. That’s true, but it’s not what you think. I’ll try to be more specific since our season begins there next year. Motorcycles left the beach and came to the Speedway in 1961. I came six years later; my college newspaper boss having told me I didn’t have what it took to race there. If you can race there, you can race anywhere they said at the time, and that’s true still. It is not the world’s most difficult track, nor is it the longest or the most dangerous. But it is iconic in the singular bludgeon it uses to beat down those who think themselves brave enough to do anything—Speed. You can go faster, longer, than anywhere else and still be road racing. Oh, yes, the Isle of Man has longer straights and the mountain course is unparalleled. But it is public road and looks like it, even out in the remoteness of the empty meadows. Going fast on a public road, or something that looks like it, is relatable to our everyday riding experiences. It’s thrilling to go flat out through the village past
the pub on the way home, but it’s been done. Daytona International Speedway, is a speed factory with degree banking. It is a huge unnatural place with no visible buildings or skyline. Jet planes take off and land next to the backstretch, but that’s the closest marker you’ll have for how fast you’re going. When the TZ750s came and I got my one lap qualifier chance after no practice—thanks to never making it pass sound tech until the last second—I was numb when I saw the trap speed of over 180 miles per hour. It had seemed fast when I was out there, terrifyingly so, but the reality of it was in another realm. The G forces pressed me into the tank so hard that it pushed my lips apart and left teeth prints on the inside of my Bell helmet. No, I wasn’t smiling. I had 200 miles of that to look forward to and wasn’t all that sure that I was up for it. We finished, but it took something out of me: the everpresent desire to ride something that would go faster was gone when the race was over. There was no chicane on the backstretch then, just a sudden lurch from being at top speed to being in the air at 31 degrees looking down and away as you were pinned to the tank with forces strong enough to keep you from lifting your head up. It smashed all of the travel out of the suspension instantly and the bikes that were weaving were actually flexing their spokes and frames in an undulating harmonic of ‘now we’re loose, now we’re tight’ that would last as long as the race or until something failed. The Goodyear man came around and looked at our wheels and those of us still running tubes with tightened valve stem nuts were told to leave them loose because some tubes had their stems ripped out by the centrifugal loads inside the wheels pulling down causing a sudden flat tire. Tubeless tires were recommended, but we had spoke wheels and that was thought to be too risky. Years before, Hailwood had come to the Speedway when the FIM sanctioned and ran the first U.S. Grand Prix, but he didn’t win. He set a speed record beforehand, but the bike let him down in the race. The AMA and the FIM had just split up over their philosophies of racing machines and while it looked to some like Harley-Davidson was acting the spoiler by pulling out to keep its flathead 750cc racers alive against the specialized OHC European GP bikes, it was more fundamental than that. Harley’s view was that racing should be about what you sold in your showroom, not some specialty shop creation no one else could buy. The European tradition had never been about that, with separate races being
put on for production machines mostly for endurance and the Grand Prix contests being dominated by special-built machines. This was true of cars and motorcycles and what would become Formula One as well as the precursor to MotoGP. Harley had more of a NASCAR mindset and believed what you raced on Sunday would sell better on Monday, if it won. There was a bit of hypocrisy at work, however, as Harley had purchased Aermacchi after the war and catalogued their suspension and brake components making them legal for AMA racing while none of their showroom bikes had them. The little 250cc Sprint off the showroom was replaced by the Aermacchi purpose-built GP bikes with different everything from the pushrods to the frame to the Oldani or Ceriani brakes. In the big bike class, however, was the exotic dinosaur of all time, the flathead XR750 with Cal Rayborn winning national road races on a diesel locomotive-driven, archaic tube-framed device with
Gregg Bonelli (16)
Italian suspension and brakes all pretending to be ‘Made in the U.S.A.’ The U.K. had to be restricted to OHV 500cc machines under the new rules and were still able to garner wins with Gary Nixon and Gene Romero on their little Daytona twins and later on the 750 Triples with their Rob North frames. The game was played out on three levels with engineers oceans apart, quality talent at the controls and Daytona as the battleground. Every year after the season ended there came the silly season where dummy engine machines were trotted out and displayed at international shows around the globe foretelling what would be new in the spring. Come March, and Daytona, the speculation ended as the time came to line ‘em up and let ‘em race for 200 miles to see what they could do and who could do it the longest. I was there to see Gary Fisher scream away from the start on his Honda CB750 to everyone’s surprise and then fail with a mechanical issue only to be replaced by the venerable and steady Dick Mann on his similar machine showing what big-bore Japanese machines were capable of. I was their every spring, come hell or high water, through many jobs, several women, and advances in license from Novice to Junior to Expert. I had no illusions, however, about winning the big one; that took support
and money and I had neither. I built my own bikes, tuned them, and finished as well as I could. I took consolation from the fact that I often beat Kenny Roberts, who frequently failed to finish. I was there through many failures by many riders to manage all the place required and mourned the passing of some great racers and good friends. Still, I kept going until we stopped going. Now AHRMA is going back. In 1994 I finally won my race on the same 1972 Yamaha TR3 I had been bringing for thirty years. AHRMA’s F500 was well attended at the time, and I had started well, ran up front and been patient when there was a red flag and thankful that I had thought to park a gas can behind the wall just in case something like that might occur. On the restart, I was third going out onto the banking and the leaders pulled away and disappeared. Unknown to me they both failed to finish having run out of fuel and the little dice I had with an RD400 through the infield the last few laps was actually for the win. Racing was different after that. Having won Daytona, all other races are in a different perspective than before, which is one of the reasons it is so worth doing. There are braggarts out there, running their mouth about how they did this or that, but when you ask them to tell you about the time they won Daytona, they are usually left silent. Sure, there are different races of different lengths with different fields and all that, but its still the same racetrack and whether they change it in little ways or not, its still unique in the racing world. Daytona—there is simply nothing like it.
