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started. Of course as dirt track began to decline over the years, it was necessary to make some street bike parts and get into that world, so that’s what I did.
Could you talk a little bit about the history of Storz Performance and how it’s developed from day one until now? The streetbike thing started little by little and
then we got this idea that
maybe we could make
a regular sportster look
like an XR a little bit. We
took a ‘86 or ‘87 sportster,
fabricated some pipes for
it, had a gas tank made
for it, made a tail section
for it, and that thing looked
pretty good. We took it to
Cincinnati for a tradeshow
and that thing got a really
good reception. We real-
ized there was a demand
for this and as far as I
know, it was one of the
first commercially avail-
able street tracker kits that
you could buy. At that time,
people were not thinking
of sportsters in that way
-- everyone knew that the
XR750 engine was sportster derived, but that wasn’t on anybody’s radar at the time. Being in that position and being the first one to do that really helped us and set a path for the direction that we were going to go.
What are some of your fondest projects that you’ve worked on throughout the years? Well, there’s no specific project. The show bikes that
we’ve produced here, I like all of them for different reasons. We decided to do a cafe racer spinoff after we did the original dirt track one and there have been versions of that; I’m pleased with the work, I like all of them. One thing that occurs to me while we’re talking about this, when I started the dirt track part of it and I wanted to build a little catalog of parts, I started thinking about
where I could get parts. Through a series of leads, I found a guy who knew Enrico Ceriani in Italy, so I started communicating with this guy and asked if they could make forks for us. So I went to Italy and got to meet Ceriani and that was a really big deal. I’d never been out of the country before, so to meet those people and see another part of the motorcycle world that you don’t know. That wound up being a big deal for us; we sold a lot of ‘em for dirt track and even- tually street bikes as well. Eventually, with permis- sion of Mr. Ceriani who has since passed, we own the name Ceriani in the United
States as a registered trademark and there is no Ceriani in Italy anymore.
What kind of bikes are you riding these days? I still have a GasGas trials bike and a Husqvarna Supermoto 450 that I ride and I have a 1970 Triumph TR6 that I ride, so I’ve got a little odd combination of bikes of all the stuff that I enjoy.
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