Page 38 - PULSE-3-RIDERS-BIKER-SUPPLY

38 THE PULSE • ISSUE THREE
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What sort of prototype bikes did you help develop throughout that time? Pretty much anything they produced which was mostly two-strokes and often times twins, and we had a schedule that we had to do two hundred miles a day, then come back and write a report about what we found. Sometimes it was kind of hair raising, ‘cause one time
I was getting on a freeway on the on ramp and the engine seized, and it turned out it was ‘cause there was no vent in the gas cap. (laughs) So here I am layin’ in the freeway thinkin’ “What happened?” and ultimately with all of our high-tech engineers and all this at the time, and they put a gas cap on it with no vent so it ran out of fuel.
You did develop the first four-stroke which was the XS1? Yeah, it would have been 1969 that we were doing the prototype riding on that. We would go up to Baker, Califor- nia which is out in the desert and we would run them as hard as we could from Baker out by Death Valley and then back to Baker. It didn’t take long to figure out -- there’s a lot of desert between Montebello and Baker that we could’ve gone to, why are we out here? It turned out it was the closest city to Las Vegas and all the Japanese engineers would load up at five ‘o clock and head to Vegas. I was a test rider with Don Dudek and him and I would look at each other as we sit in this hotel in Baker, California (the hottest place in the world) and all the Japanese had taken off to go have fun in Vegas. So that’s why that became the prime testing ground -- it was the closest place still in California to Vegas. Even though I feel like I made