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didn’t work, you had to have a reason why. People were heavily invested in it and everyone had a stake in it, so they needed to know what went on. So if you didn’t do well, that could be uncomfortable.
What made you decide to move on from being a factory Harley mechanic, make the move back to southern California and start up Storz Performance? Well, I really liked the job and I liked the people that
I worked with. I didn’t particularly care for Milwaukee and the weather was difficult
-- I’m from the midwest anyways, but it was a notch worse in terms of the length of winter, the duration, the temperatures -- all that didn’t agree with me. I got the to point where I wasn’t sure how much more of that I could stand, so Steve Moorehead and I worked together in 1979 and towards the end of the season I thought about
it and decided that I’d had enough. I came back to Southern California and tried to find a job as a racing mechanic, but I couldn’t. I thought “Well, what am I gonna do?” There weren’t too many things available; there was some motocross stuff, but I’m more of a dirt track guy so I wasn’t too interested in that. Anyways, I thought I’d try and start my own business. Timing is everything in business and it turned out there were a lot of west coast privateers that didn’t know much about XR’s, didn’t know how to work on ‘em, etc...So I kind of had a readymade clientele and that’s how it
38 THE PULSE • ISSUE FIVE