Although I’d watched a race from afar in 1963 in Colorado, my first exposure to paddock life was in the Northeast club races of the AAMRR, once characterized as “the redundant vowel and consonant association.”

Knowing a little of Honda’s high-revving accomplishments in FIM grands prix, my head was solid with four-stroke dreams. When acquaintance Andy (Andres Lascoutx) went racing with a 125 Honda Benly twin, I longed to give it two carburetors in place of its one.

“Do it, then,” I was urged. I was a deep novice at machine shop, but managed to machine the carb face of the Benly’s head to expose two separate intake ports. Another of that type carb was found and I mounted the two of them, side-by-side.

As part of that process I hung out briefly at Honda of Boston. Long enough to hear one of my favorite tales of unexplainable customer behavior. The machine in question was one of the early leading-link fork twins. Its owner, admiring it from a distance, saw two black hoses hanging down, just behind the engine. Give them a moment’s thought and you know one is the engine’s crankcase breather and the other the breather for the battery (fair-sized, because this was an electric-start model).



Dangling hoses didn’t look right to the customer, so inspecting more closely, he saw that they neatly fitted – one inside the other. Surely that’s how they are supposed to be? He fitted them together and put it out of his mind.

Nature did its work. Oil vapor from the engine filled the battery, and sulfuric acid mist from the battery entered the engine. Imagine the result.

We took the twin-carb Benly to a race at Vineland, New Jersey. It made its glorious blare but to this day I suspect it was slower than stock, and that my friends protected me from that fact.

One day I got a call from Andy, saying that Boston Cycles (the Yamaha dealer) had a TD1-B 250 production road racer that someone had ordered and never picked up. Would Andy like to take it off their hands at dealer net, plus ten? (In that faraway time people took jobs in dealerships just to get parts at “cost-plus-ten”).

‘Should I buy it?” he asked. I knew a little about the TD1s. Based on stock engine cases, they were created to fit AMA rules in the US. Instead of being a project of unknown extent as were souped-up streetsters, production racers were ready to race. Replace the rim protectors with race tires, air up and gas up, then race.

“Yes,” I said. Little did I know, I had signed up for two-stroke world.
Andy took the TD1-B to Vineland and went out to practice. At some time during that day, I saw Ed Labelle’s Manx Norton 500 flick sideways and snap back. He carried on. Attention-getting. That wasn’t “vintage” either – production had only ceased two years before.
Andy came in.

“It’s wonderful,” he said. “If I want to go faster, I just twist the throttle more. If I want to stop quicker, I just pull the lever harder.”
The innocence of youth. In a short time we would come to know that the lining on its brake shoes was linoleum, and that the rear shocks were simulations. As another friend would later put it, “Why bother setting the timing? Sure, you can re-set it, but isn’t it just as likely to vibrate back into being correct?”

He had a point. Set the timing with care. Start the engine. Check the timing again and it would be ‘way off. The magneto’s breaker cam was inches away from the nearest bearing.

We had so much to learn.