Allan Girdler (86d) about to put Dennis Kanegae (51E) a lap down. When asked about this devastating blow to his racing career, Kanegae stated, tongue firmly in cheek, “I don’t know where Allan found this new speed. He has this unshakable persistence to be consistent on any track surface. My hat’s off to him.” Photo by Janice Blunt

Never in my life have I found it more difficult to fake modesty.

When my friendly rival, Jeff Evans Sr., stood up to accept his second-place trophy, he pointed to me in the stands at Perris Raceway and said, “Allan took off so fast I thought he’d been shot.”

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Go ahead, look at the picture first. My bet is, you won’t be able to guess what it is, or why it’s shown here, until you read the blog, a clear case of 1000 words giving value to one photo.

How so?

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Just what Robert Frost had in mind with the road not taken, I don’t know, but my puzzle begins years ago, just after CBS bought Cycle World.

CBS founder Bill Paley asked CW founder Joe Parkhurst, “Why do people ride motorcycles?” and Joe said, “It’s fun.”

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Photo by Jeff Allen

Kevin Cameron is a friend and colleague, so this rant will begin with a total agreement: Honda’s air-cooled Singles are the best class of motorcycle in history.

This is firsthand fact. My shed houses a 1975 XR75, a 1989 XR250 and a 1999 XR100, owned for 15, 22 and 10 years, respectively, and I’ve never had to lay a wrench on any of them, not once. Like a Chevy V-Eight, the only reason an air-cooled Honda Single stops is because it’s out of gas.

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CW Associate Editor Mark Cernicky (50e) Photos by Jamie Blunt

We members of the Southern California Flat Track Association were pleased, but not surprised, when our season-ending doubleheader’s Pro-class entries included Josh Hayes, newly crowned AMA Pro American SuperBike champion, and John Hopkins, lately of MotoGP. Their seasons were history, and they like keeping in shape and practice and, well, racing. (Hayes and wife Melissa, also a Pro roadracer, are graduates of American Supercamp, same class as yer reporter, and she was on the program, too, in the Open class.)

Also entered was CW’s own Mark Cernicky. This was a logical surprise, in that Mark’s experience has been in roadracing and supermoto. But then, early in this season, he showed up at the club track (in Perris, California) with his Honda XR100 just to have something to do that day.

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Constant surfers of this website will recall, I hope, that some months ago I did a half-Egan and bought a 1973 Triumph Trophy Trail, a bike I’d wished I had for 30-plus years. 

This was an eBay deal, so this report is something of an object lesson. 

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Photo by Marc Urbano

The record book now shows that Bryan Smith and the Werner-Springsteen Kawasaki 650 have won two straight national mile races. There’s an asterisk, someplace, noting that Smith was in the hunt for the season’s first mile, the Arizona race won by Joe Kopp and Ducati, until the Kawasaki suddenly went dead in mid-turn.

After the race, in the pits, the engine ran fine. Back in the shop, on the dyno, flawless. Then Bill Werner consulted the tech guys at Kawasaki, and all was revealed.

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