Page 37 - ISSUE-5-PULSE-ADVENTURE-NWF

bikes and writing reports on them which
were pretty much universally ignored by the Japanese (laughs), but that’s another story. So anyways, I’d been there for six or seven months and I went up to the San Jose mile to watch. I was talking to Shell Thuet who ran the Yamaha team and I’d worked for before, so he knew who I was -- he said to me “Too bad you’ve got such a good job, I need some- body to go back east with me to help me with Hank Scott.” I thought about it and the next day I quit my job. I quit a paid job to get in a motorhome with Shell and his wife (who were wonderful people by the way) with nothing but expenses just because I wanted to be part of the dirt track thing so bad -- the people, the racing, the equipment -- everything about it was just the best. We did that and we were back in a place called Harrington, Delaware and Dick O’Brien (the boss of Harley David- son Racing) came up to me and said “Hey, we’ve got an opening in the racing depart- ment, you better get right up there,” and he walked away. (laughs) By this time they’d hired Brett so I thought they would only hire one person and that’s never going to happen, but when he told me that I did exactly as I was told; got on an airplane, went to Milwau- kee, and interviewed for the job. It was pretty interesting because we got there and the only person I knew besides Brett was Bill Warner and so I stayed at Bill’s house and he’d take me to work with him everyday for about three days. We went out to the track and did some tuning sessions with a couple of the bikes, but they never once asked me if I wanted the job. They’d say “Go get a physical, do this,
do that,” and I thought it was pretty weird.
So finally, Bill says to one of the managers “Are you gonna hire him?” and they said “Of course we’re going to hire him, he’s here,
isn’t he?” So the presumption was that if you showed up, you’d get hired I guess. (laughs) That was quite a ride with Harley.
What are some of good memories
you have of wrenching for Ted
Boody on the factory Harley team?
Well, that was a really cool deal ‘cause I don’t
think anyone expected much out of Ted and
they didn’t know what to expect from me, so
as a combination it worked really well. Ted
had been groomed by Bart Markel, he pre-
pared his bikes and taught him a lot of stuff,
and really groomed him into being a factory
level rider. I’d never met Bart before then and
he was a really nice guy -- he was really cool
about handing Ted over to me and said “If you
need help, I’m here. If you don’t, I’ll stay out
of your way.” He was true to word and just a
super guy. So we had that vote of confidence
from him and Ted was gung-ho, I was gung-
ho, and we built the equipment and went
racing. It was kind of interesting at the time,
there weren’t enough XR-750s to go around,
they were always short in terms of what they
could produce. I said “Where are the bikes?”
and they told me “Well, you gotta make one.
The crank cases are over there, the frame is
over there.” (laughs) They weren’t kidding,
from the flywheels up and that’s how I learned
about XRs. It was really good in retrospect to
learn the whole bike that way, but it was such
a great experience because you’re working
with legendary people. The staff at Harley
was the top of the pyramid, so you really got
to learn a lot from them, absorb stuff, and be
a part of a successful racing effort. Let me tell
you, it was a business with them; it was not a
goof-around deal. We had debrief meetings
every Monday when we came back from the
races -- if you didn’t perform or your program
>>
WWW.ADVENTUREMOTORSPORTSOFNWF.COM
37