Just another
vintage motocross story...

My friend Andy seems to always get me in trouble. The problem is, it’s usually the kind of trouble you like to be in. Andy and I have been riding motorcycles together for the better part of 20 years. The jokes and good-natured grief we give each other continue unabated, and the stories of 20 years ago are just as funny today as they were then. This is why the first thought that popped into my mind, as my left foot was frantically trying to find a footpeg after the start of a recent vintage motocross race, was something like, “That little sucker must have kicked my footpeg up when we were on the starting line.” Perhaps I need to back up a little bit here.

Andy started racing vintage motocross a few years ago. Now, we had both raced dirt bikes since we were old enough to start them by ourselves, but I bought a house a few years back, sold all my motorcycles and really hadn’t been involved in dirt bikes since. So Andy calls me up one day and tells me he’s got a bike I can ride and that I really need to come try vintage motocross. I point out that not only have I raced dirt bikes made in 1974, but I raced dirt bikes in 1974 and didn’t remember them handling very well, or stopping very well, soaking up the bumps very well or keeping me off the ground very well. Andy says, “Not much has changed.”

I go race and have the time of my life. It was a time portal to a place where people rode bikes for the passion of riding, not glitz, glamour and start money. (Andy is fond of telling the story of fouling a plug on the starting line and instead of starting the race without him, everyone just shuts down their bike and waits for him to get a new plug!)

The next week I can’t walk very well and I’m buying aspirin by the case. But I can dial the phone and the hunt is on to find a 1974 CZ 380. Why that bike? There are several reasons, I suppose, the first being that they are so durable that there seems to be plenty around. The second is that they are fast (relatively speaking anyway). The third is that they were shrouded in mystery in 1974 and so expensive that no one I knew could afford to own one. Now they are just another 25-year-old dirt bike with a value to match.

I finally find a bike in Washington or Oregon or something like that, and the fellow says, “I’ll send you a picture when I get it together.” And I say, “Don’t bother, just leave it apart and send the pieces UPS.”

I get my $1,500 kit bike and quickly spread the parts out on the floor. When the peanuts settle, I quickly surmise what the term “original” means. The crown jewel is there, however, a straight, unmodified CZ red frame. Well, about $2,500 later, I’m thinking I have a pretty nice 1974 CZ. So much for the idea that vintage is the budget approach to dirt bike racing!

Unlike Andy (who is currently leading or seriously contending the AHRMA national series in several different classes), I manage to race only a couple of times a year and that is on local tracks. The problem with vintage motocross is that unless you can travel to a national race, you generally end up racing on tracks designed around the supercross craze. You can race 25-year-old machinery (and 45-year-old bodies) on modern tracks, but the consequences of missing those all too-prevalent timing jumps when you have only 4 inches of suspension travel requires some contemplation.

After one of these races we were sitting around saying how great it would be to get back to covering natural terrain as fast as possible, the whole idea behind motocross in the first place. Well, one member of this group was a fellow named John Garmon, who you think is a bit of a nut anyway, until you meet his mom, and he decides to do that very thing. This is a no joke Field of Dreams with motorcycles. John takes this perfectly good 400-acre cattle farm and converts it into a real grass, 1.5-mile-long, motocross course. Only one artificial jump on the whole track, and it lets you fly forever horizontally (like an X-15), not vertically (like an Atlas rocket with a bad fuel pump). On top of that, he gets Brad Lackey to show up just in case any of us got to thinking we were fast!

Which brings us back to the start of the first moto, with me trying to find a footpeg so I can shift and preserve the only decent start I was destined to get all day. I have read that when an individual is under severe stress, time slows down, and I certainly believe it. I must have thought of 50 or 60 things I was going to do to Andy when we got back to the pits in the quarter of a second I had to think about it.

It finally dawns on my peanut-sized brain that the peg is simply not there. About this time the sound of a CZ at 11,000 rpm starts competing with thoughts of doing Andy bodily harm and I put my hand up and slow down. My frantic activities during all this must have indicated to those around me that I was something to be avoided, as no one ran over me on their way to the first turn. Perhaps there is something to be said for racing against people who have to be at work the next morning.

I motor back to the start gate, and there, in a nice little pile, are all the necessary components needed to assemble one complete 1974 CZ footpeg. The flare on the mounting pin had finally worn off. I did not realize it at the time, but this was the beginning of the best day of racing I have ever known.