Harley-Davidson's famous racing boss Dick O'Brien was looking in the 1960s to strike back at Triumph and its 500cc twins that were winning Daytona. With the help of star tuners Jerry Branch and Neil Keen, plus some clever work at the Caltech wind-tunnel, Harley came back with a race-winning flat-head 750 AND tested a strange prototype called the Midget that was even faster but is lost to history. Find out about the $60,000 Goodyear tires as Kevin Cameron and Mark Hoyer talk about this amazing story.
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00:00:00We are back with the Cycleworld podcast, another episode. I'm Mark Hoyer, I'm with
00:00:06Kevin Cameron. Our topic this week is Harley strikes back. And we're not
00:00:13talking about last week, we're actually talking about in the 1960s. Some upstart
00:00:18British makers showed up at the Daytona 200 and you know with their fancy
00:00:24overhead valve 500s and beat the Harley flathead 750s. And really, Kevin, that's
00:00:31kind of where I want to start is how ridiculous is it that in this 1967
00:00:38Harley was racing a flathead. It's just crazy. I mean, NASCAR. It is. There they
00:00:45were. But now, you know, NASCAR is using 427 overhead. You know, Ford's like,
00:00:50here's our camera. Like, check it out. We have all the power. You know, just doing
00:00:54things that were actually, you know, moving forward. And here we are racing
00:00:58flatheads. And as we'll find out later, putting essentially, air quote, I just
00:01:04made the air quote sign, folks. Air quote, quarter-inch head gaskets to find out
00:01:10about, you know, engine running and breathing. And that's sort of the West
00:01:15Coast. That was a West Coast development with, was that Axtell or Branch. And
00:01:22Neil Keen. There's lots to talk about. There's a lot of really interesting
00:01:27stuff here. But Dick O'Brien was the Harley Davidson, you know, racing head,
00:01:33racing manager at the time. 1957, yeah. 1957. He's, you know, he's OBE, they call
00:01:40him, he was legendary. Legendary nuclear profanity out of the guy's mouth. It was
00:01:48awesome. I interviewed him in Florida. He was doing, I call him, he was working in
00:01:54Florida. And he was like, ah, god damn it, keep sending me these, and then
00:02:00profanity NASCAR heads. And they're still asking Jerry Branch in his dotage
00:02:05retirement in Florida to port some NASCAR heads for him. So, you know, knew
00:02:11what was up, and a lot of profanity, and ran the race department forever. But you
00:02:17have an interesting story about where he came from, circa World War II. Yeah, I
00:02:23went to see him, and he said, come to the house. So we sat around and talked
00:02:30about things. And he said that a really exciting thing in his life was that when
00:02:39he was in the services, he worked in a unit that, whose job was to restore to
00:02:45flight status, captured enemy aircraft, so that they could be evaluated by U.S.
00:02:52test pilots to discover their special strengths and weaknesses so that American
00:02:57pilots would have tactics that would work against those aircraft. And he said,
00:03:06we, we worked around the clock. He said, all those rules about uniforms and
00:03:11buttons and things like that, just out the window, all they wanted was ready to
00:03:17fly aircraft.
00:03:18How cool is that?
00:03:20Yeah.
00:03:21I agree.
00:03:21Incredible, yes.
00:03:22Amazing.
00:03:23So he said, then the war ended, and suddenly the uniform regulations were
00:03:31back in, and everybody quit. And that was the end of that unit. Never did another
00:03:37bit of work, useful work, as long as it existed. But that's, that's sort of what
00:03:43you expect in wartime. Results, results. And in peacetime, well, we have these
00:03:50regulations for a reason, don't we? So we're going to enforce them. So post-war,
00:03:59Indian won the first two Daytona 200s, and probably equipment, big base motors
00:04:07left over from before the war. And then there were Norton years, Norton singles
00:04:14won a bunch of Daytonas. And in 1954, that came to an end because the people at BSA
00:04:21decided, we are going to go win the Daytona 200, and we're going to crush
00:04:26them. And they brought three twins and three singles, and they finished one
00:04:33through five. And I think one of the, one of the bikes was a couple of places off
00:04:38the tail end, and the management in England wanted to know why it wasn't one
00:04:42through six. And that's what management is for, to ask the unreasonable.
00:04:50Yep, got to have goals, no matter what.
00:04:54So that ensued a long period of Harley-Davidson dominance. Why a flathead?
00:05:01Well, Harley-Davidson were familiar with the value of overhead valves, the value of
00:05:06overhead valves being that the air does not have to, or the mixture does not have
00:05:12to wriggle this way and that to enter the cylinder, because the valves are above
00:05:18the piston, and the air flows down past the valve, and straight at the descending
00:05:25piston. So it's a, it's a very comfortable arrangement.
00:05:29And pause in a moment to help out folks who've never looked at a flathead and
00:05:34don't know what a flathead is. It's understandable. But essentially, you have
00:05:40an engine block that's sitting on top of the crankcase, and the piston is in the
00:05:44engine block. And then next to that, in the engine block, are the valves pointing,
00:05:49the heads of the valves pointing up. I'll, I'm sorry, Spotify, I'm going to use my
00:05:54hands. But you have your cylinder over here, and you have your valves over here,
00:05:58and the valves are opening, you know, to and fro. And the air is coming up this way,
00:06:04and it's going around the corner, and then it's going in, and it has a long distance
00:06:08to travel from the valves next to the cylinder. And then you have a combustion
00:06:12chamber that is a warehouse compared to, compared to something that you could make
00:06:19with overhead valve.
00:06:20It existed for one tremendous reason, which was, it was dead easy, even at a low
00:06:25compression ratio, to give that engine squish. Because all you had to do is bring
00:06:30the part of the cylinder head down close enough to the piston top, that when the
00:06:36piston approached top dead center, the mixture between it and the head was whoosh,
00:06:43blown into the combustion chamber over the valves, which are, as Mark noted, right
00:06:50next door. And during the early years before the war, in the 1920s and before,
00:06:59the squish head, squish flatheads accelerated well, because they could run
00:07:05more compression without knocking than could overheads, like the Harley eight valve
00:07:12and the Indian eight valve.
00:07:13Well, Harry Ricardo made a lot of money on the Ricardo heads, that design. So Ricardo
00:07:19was an engine, engine researcher, as Kevin has pointed out in the past, he didn't like
00:07:25math. And what's good about that is, you know, he used math, but his, his books are
00:07:31written in words that we understand. And so if you've never seen, yeah, if you've never seen
00:07:36the high speed internal combustion engine by Harry Ricardo, you ought to grab that
00:07:40because it's, it's spectacular. So Harry did a lot of work. And one of those was a
00:07:44beautiful squish head, he figured out how to make a flathead really run. And just to kind
00:07:49of close the loop on the design of the flathead, all the mechanical bits are in the
00:07:53engine block. And the flathead is a flathead, you could, you could bolt an iron bar, if
00:08:00you made just a little room, like you could just really put a flat bar on it and, and
00:08:04chip out a few things, put some fins on it, whatever.
00:08:07As long as there's room for the valves to move.
00:08:09Yeah, you just have a little bit of room for the valves and some airflow to the piston.
00:08:12And that's it. It's just a big, a lot of times it was a chunk of iron. And then there
00:08:17were some really cool stuff for the Ford flatheads of the era, like aluminum, neat
00:08:22intakes, and people are still running flatheads out at Bonneville. So I guess Harley's,
00:08:28you know, not entirely behind the times.
00:08:31No, and they had, they had built the EL in 1937, which was an overhead valve, their first
00:08:38real production overhead valve engine.
00:08:42Yeah, the knock and it showed them beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was the way to go
00:08:51in the future. But they had the W model, and then the, and then the K model, which were
00:08:58flatheads, and they were serviceable. Under the AMA's rules, a flathead could have 750
00:09:05CCs and an overhead can have 500. And there were people who felt that this was terribly
00:09:11unfair, ultimately, their opinion prevailed. But there was this period when it was
00:09:20overheads, notably Triumph and BSA, before that Norton, versus the Harley flatheads. And what
00:09:29happened was that in 1966 and 67, Meriden, where Triumph had their R&D setup, decided that
00:09:41they had to win Daytona and do well in American racing. Because this would boost sales, this
00:09:50is the usual reason for going racing. And so they took an engine that was in stock form, 32
00:10:00horsepower, and they souped it up, up, up, up. And they did a lot of really good fundamental
00:10:08work to accomplish this until they were making about 48, 48 and a half horsepower. And in 66,
00:10:19Buddy Elmore won the 200 on one of those Meriden Triumphs. And in 67, it was reliable Gary Nixon,
00:10:28who took the win, also on a Meriden Triumph. And this really annoyed management at Harley-Davidson
00:10:38because, who are these guys? We own this place. We've been doing it for years. Let's show them
00:10:45what we can do. And so they were working on different projects. I think in 67, the midget
00:10:57became active, the notion of a seven-eighths scale race bike.
00:11:03Yeah, that's why they call it the little bike, the midget. They were looking at reduced frontal
00:11:09area, lower drag, and just packing it into a little smaller package so it would do its top
00:11:16speed and perhaps be more agile as well. And Harley-Davidson was forward-thinking at the time
00:11:23to the extent of going to Goodyear and saying, what will it take to get 16-inch wheels on this thing,
00:11:2916-inch tires? So they had to pay for the mold and they had to pay for a bunch of other stuff.
00:11:36But the result was these little wheels and tires for the midget. And it was built and tested by
00:11:47Harley factory riders. And they liked how easy it was to go fast on it, but it was uncomfortable
00:11:53because it was too small for them. And they weren't sure that a human would last on this
00:12:02little motorcycle. So at this point in the fall of 67 or the early winter, a bunch of guys were
00:12:19at C.R. Axtell's shop. Now, Axtell ran a dyno and he did comprehensive engine modifications.
00:12:28And he basically existed for Ascot, the track in California that sustained so many riders
00:12:36in this period, which was actually an engine development university because all the talents
00:12:46gravitated to Ascot and ideas that worked, you could see them clearly.
00:12:53Yeah, Axtell's a legend, folks. So I'm sure many of you know who he is, but if you don't,
00:12:58it's worth researching who is C.R. Axtell. You should go out there and read up on it. We've done
00:13:04a number of stories on him over the decades and great work.
00:13:11Neil Keen was one of those present at the time. And Neil was a strong rider in his day. And when
00:13:18he retired from racing, he began making chassis. And he was a man who stayed with it. He wasn't
00:13:26one of these people that retired to the porch with a rug over his knees.
00:13:31Well, he was really something because he was such a great rider and he was constantly developing
00:13:37his equipment. And not just like, oh, I'm going to open the spark plug gap, but doing really
00:13:42fundamental research, you know, hands-on fundamental research tested at Ascot.
00:13:49So there's a customer's Harley KR, the flathead racer, sitting, waiting to be
00:13:59worked over. And they got to talking about the flathead idea.
00:14:06And then they decided, let's pull the heads off. They're going to have to come off
00:14:10for what this rider wants done to his bike anyway. And let's just have a look and talk it over.
00:14:16So they take the heads off and everybody crowds around. And a couple of voices are saying,
00:14:23man, I've seen the heads for the Auburn's and the Hudson's, the racing stuff.
00:14:27This is completely different. Wonder what's going on there. I mean, it looks restricted
00:14:34and it doesn't look. And then another voice popped up and said, why don't we make a couple of
00:14:42quarter inch head gaskets and try it. That would do away with any restriction, but it would also
00:14:50put the compression ratio down around model T numbers, three to one. So there was a, there was
00:14:57a hangup. Axtell's bandsaw blade welder. You get a big bandsaw with a blade welder. You buy the
00:15:05bandsaw material in bulk, cut it to length, draw it around, and it electrically welds the joint.
00:15:14And then there's a little grindstone there. You grind off the flash so it can go between
00:15:20the guide bars. And you have a bandsaw blade. What they wanted to do, they could saw out the
00:15:28outline of their quarter inch head gaskets, but they wanted to saw out the interior outline.
00:15:33And that meant drilling a hole, passing a straight piece of bandsaw through it, and then welding the
00:15:39end. So you had a captive blade. So there was a, there was a waiting time. People drank coffee
00:15:46at Axtell's and Neil went out to somebody else's shop whose bandsaw welder was working. And he came
00:15:53back with the necessary stuff and they completed making these quarter inch head gaskets. A quarter
00:16:00inch is, you know, it's, it's a fair amount. So they build the thing up with this, with this
00:16:10extra combustion chamber volume. And it makes the same horsepower that a KR makes,
00:16:19a race engine, makes stock. So they knew they had something because
00:16:25what they had given away in terms of reduced compression ratio,
00:16:30they had made up exactly in better flow from the two valves that are sort of over the horizon over
00:16:39there. And the air is having to come out of them and come across this through a little slot to the
00:16:45combustion chamber and, or to the cylinder bore, and then down to follow the piston sinking on
00:16:53intake stroke. So they talked about this for a while. And finally, somebody says, let's call Obie
00:17:01and tell him what we got here. And so they phoned up Dick O'Brien and they explained what they had
00:17:09done. And Obie and his shop foreman, Roy Boekelman, imagine having a shop foreman,
00:17:23having so much racing business going on that you've got a race shop foreman. These were days
00:17:30when Harley-Davidson was in the R&D business in the old time way. Let's try it. So Obie comes,
00:17:40he sees the thing, he sees a dyno run. He realizes that they can recover a lot of the compression by
00:17:48just squishing the head down onto the piston. And they put modeling clay in the thing and flow it.
00:17:56And this is really looking good. Well, I learned all of this from Neil Keen
00:18:05in phone conversations and emails. But the public, when Harley-Davidson came out of their
00:18:16Meriden tailspin and won the 200 twice in a row, the story they put about was, well, the new bike
00:18:27is a bunch faster because instead of one chainsaw till it's in carburetor, now it has two of them.
00:18:35And the other was that being at the Caltech wind tunnel, which was staffed by people who had done
00:18:45all kinds of aero work in the war, they had come up with a real fairing, not just a plow, an air
00:18:54plow. Because I have seen so many fairings on bikes that are narrow at the front and wide at
00:19:01the back. And as one aero grad student who went to Bonneville said to me, there's a lot of bikes
00:19:11and cars here that would go faster backwards. Because what you want to do is to get the air
00:19:19around the bulk of your machine up front and then pull the sides of the fairing in,
00:19:25like the way an aircraft fuselage or a fish body tapers inward.
00:19:33Well, I talked to a long time Bonneville motorcycle guy and I said, well, how do you
00:19:43design your body work? And he said, do you ever see a salmon?
00:19:48Yeah, right. So this, people call it the Caltech fairing or the Harley fairing. And
00:19:58when put on a 250 that already had a fairing designed for it, it went faster than it did with
00:20:05its original fairing because it was not a snow plow, air plow. So the flathead had all sorts
00:20:18of difficulties that had to be overcome in years past, one of which was wet sumping. That instead
00:20:28of oil being shed from the crankshaft, being thrown into a receiver where the scavenger oil
00:20:37pump could pick it up, the scavenge pump would be either overcome or the oil would go in a
00:20:44different direction. And what would happen is that oil would whirl around between the crankshaft
00:20:52OD and the ID of the crankcase. And they called this wet sumping because a dry sump system has
00:20:59a scavenge pump that's supposed to take the oil away as fast as the crankshaft can shed it.
00:21:06But when this illness comes, it's like a high speed viscosity measuring apparatus.
00:21:16And O'Brien told me, he said, when it happens, he said at Daytona or someplace with a fast
00:21:24straightaway, he said, it's like an invisible hand came down and just held your motorcycle back.
00:21:31You can see it slow right down. So they had to do a bunch of internal streamlining at different
00:21:38times to make sure that the oil shedding from the crankshaft actually did make it to the scavenge
00:21:44pump. And you'll see in the history of a lot of engines that had close fitting crankcases on
00:21:53full circle crankshaft flywheels, that one of the first modifications that anyone does on tuning is
00:22:00to take a quarter inch off the crank, which makes it a lot harder for it to trap oil in there and
00:22:06lose a lot of power and push the oil temperature way up so that instead of oil, you have water.
00:22:14So, uh, suddenly triumphs faced this 56 to 58 horsepower, absolutely transformed Harley.
00:22:27It's got this wonderful Caltech fairing on it. It has dual carburation, uh, and it has the
00:22:36powered up engine as a result of an accidental meeting of interested parties at CRX still shop.
00:22:46Now it's all very well to imagine that these corporations have giant
00:22:53electronic brains that spew out winning solutions. Well, yeah, go ahead. Sorry.
00:23:00But it's, but it, it often happens that this kind of cut and try
00:23:06discover something that has been overlooked.
00:23:12So, uh, once they got this thing working, the compression ratio was just under six to one.
00:23:21And they, the triumphs were nowhere. I think the first year, the highest finishing triumph was in
00:23:29sixth and the second year it was the ninth. So the people in Meriden were, were still
00:23:36trying to improve their engine, but it was farther behind every year. So, uh, and this led,
00:23:44this led to a competition committee meeting at the end of 68, where triumph representatives stood
00:23:55up and said, we want the new class in racing to be six 50 CCs because we have a six 50 that we can
00:24:04base our racer on. This is class C racing where the basis for any race engine is to have a 650
00:24:12the basis for any race engine has to be a production engine.
00:24:25I was told once by an AMA official that a certain engine, we won't mention the maker's name.
00:24:32Um, it's stock because, uh, it's the same amount of metal melted down and made into a different
00:24:39shape. Yeah. So, uh, we know that rules are there to serve whoever makes them.
00:24:50And Harley Davidson had a, uh, seven 50 or a, they had the, the, uh, sports here by this time,
00:25:02and they could easily make a seven 50 out of it. So they counter
00:25:06proposed that the new formula be seven 50 CCs. Anything goes in terms of unsupercharged engines,
00:25:15all HV overhead cam to stroke, bring it. We'll let you run it. And this was a wonderful thing
00:25:27because once it got its legs, this formula brought the Japanese companies in with their new
00:25:35hundred horsepower, two strokes. It brought Honda in, in 1970 with this tuned up CB seven 50.
00:25:42And we know the classic story about Dick man, the, the man who, of whom it was always said,
00:25:49I don't know where he came from. Damn, that guy's lucky.
00:25:55But Dick man was the person who had the experience to say, this bike doesn't feel like
00:26:0280 to 50 RPM. This bike feels like 7,800. That's how I'm going to ride it. And, uh,
00:26:12the other Hondas did not take account of the problems with the cam chain man's bike had just
00:26:20had the cam chain replaced. And he, he put that race together, uh, held the bike together with
00:26:28his skill and won the race. So there was that Honda won it in 70 and Triumph BSA won it in,
00:26:39uh, 71. And, and it was the beginning of the full seven 50 racing era.
00:26:49And it had been triggered really by, by this, uh, Harley having to strike back against
00:26:55Triumph's Meriden bikes and Triumph wanting a bigger formula so that they could run an engine
00:27:04that was not obsolete as their 500 definitely was at that point arm wrestling. Yeah.
00:27:13And seeing Honda showed up to Daytona is a little bit of a stretch in the sense that
00:27:18that was really Bob Hanson, right? That was really a hand.
00:27:23Hanson was an advisor and he was given a use of one bike for his rider,
00:27:32but it was a Japanese team with, um, European or British riders. And it was, I think it was under
00:27:42the control of ICOS on actually. And they were a bit out of their depth at Daytona and a little
00:27:52bit, um, overconfident. And I think Hanson was partly the bringer of experience at Daytona
00:28:06because in England, it was well known that you don't go all out on lap one at the Isle of Man.
00:28:15You ride with some care and you notice everything about the engine when you're sure that it feels
00:28:23free, that it feels like it's not tightening, that it doesn't have little misfires go for it.
00:28:30And so many, uh, Isle of Man TTs have been one on that basis, not, not going hell for leather
00:28:37from the, uh, start. They don't wait around anymore though. No, no. Well, they got race
00:28:46bikes today that are as reliable as airliners and, uh, or more so they in MotoGP there's remarkably
00:28:56little difficulty ever. And the reason for that is that every motorcycle on the grid is a
00:29:05design for racing factory motorcycle. There are no production based anything's out there.
00:29:11There are no, Oh, well, this is our valve spring model. It sells for a $800,000 less.
00:29:18It's a real deal. Um, I want to go back. So we have a letter that was written to Don Emdy and
00:29:27it was written by Jerry branch. Um, the, uh, progenitor Jerry, Jerry was so remarkable. Um,
00:29:36I saw him at, um, uh, I saw him at an event and he was, uh, he was just as vigorous and sharp as
00:29:46ever. And it was remarkable. And he wanted to share the midget with, uh, with Don Emdy noted
00:29:53historian, um, and, uh, Daytona 200 winner himself, a racer, uh, circa 19, you know,
00:29:58in the sixties and seventies. And, uh, so Jerry wrote this letter and I wanted to, there's lots
00:30:04of great things in here. We did a story on it for, uh, one of our print issues, um, a number
00:30:08of years ago that Don wrote. And we had some photos that had never been seen. Um, you know,
00:30:13he said the, when we say, Oh, seven, eighth scale, one of the points in the letter was it's
00:30:18essentially the seat height was essentially about as high as a taller fellas knee.
00:30:26It was really small. And, um, so that was one thing. The other was going into the wind tunnel
00:30:32at Caltech to, to test this. And this is just, um, this is very interesting and it's what we
00:30:37know about motorcycles. Motorcycles are wretched aerodynamically. They're just,
00:30:42they're just garbage. They don't have enough. Yeah. They just don't have enough. And you know,
00:30:47wings are helping with certain things. But, um, anyway, uh, when tests began, it was tested with
00:30:53the bear motorcycle, no fairing or rider Caltech said it was the dirtiest thing they'd ever had in
00:30:58the wind tunnel, worse than a sheet of plywood of the same frontal area. That's wonderful. Yeah.
00:31:06I read that as just, it says, this was a, and this is, then we tested with the, uh,
00:31:11the rider on board. Uh, this was also bad, really bad. Um, so they bought a test dummy.
00:31:17They went to like some outfit, um, in a Sierra Madre, which is, uh, uh, North of Los Angeles.
00:31:23And it was a company making test dummies for Ford and GM where they would crash the cars. And they
00:31:27were, you know, they were life size and life weight. And, uh, like the masses were, uh,
00:31:32you know, we're, we're aligned with what a human mass would be. So how heavy is your head? It's as
00:31:37tall as that. They got a test rider was five, seven, and one 60. And they put, um, put that
00:31:42in the, uh, put that on the motorcycle and, and tested that. And, you know, they worked on the
00:31:47fairing. So this is something that you've noticed, or I've noticed that Daytona, um,
00:31:53I think it was rich Oliver racing at Daytona on his TZ two 50, and he would come off the seat
00:32:01and make his back a more continuous arc with what was happening with the fairing. And that is what
00:32:06Harley, uh, did in the Caltech wind tunnel was designed the fairing to align with the dummies
00:32:13back so that they could reduce the drag. And I've seen that at Daytona many times where people will
00:32:20move their body so that their leathers stop flapping, or, you know, they, they do things
00:32:25to accommodate, uh, they can feel the leathers lie down on their back rather than, than, uh,
00:32:31indicating that it's a terrible low pressure area, a low pressure area behind the motorcycle is,
00:32:38is dragged because you have positive pressure on the front. And if you add to that negative pressure
00:32:45on the back, then the engine is having to push really hard because the difference between
00:32:51positive and negative is, is a large difference that has to be made up by engine torque.
00:32:58So you, the bike leaves behind it, this, this terrible, uh, vortex, uh,
00:33:06assembly is just whirling, whirling little vortices shedding from every part of the, of the
00:33:12bike. And, uh, ad agencies love to show the motorcycle in the wind tunnel with these
00:33:20beautiful streamlines. They're so graceful streaming past. And you think to yourself,
00:33:26oh, what mastery they've, they've made this nearly perfect vehicle.
00:33:32But when, when you actually get in the tunnel, um, you've got people who are accustomed to
00:33:37dealing with streamlined bodies and they say, this is the dirtiest.
00:33:44Yeah. And then, you know, motorcycles are just bad that way. You know,
00:33:48you put a body in the middle and you can't, you can't make a big pellet out of it. They outlawed,
00:33:53you know, the front of your fairing, I believe it's, you know, has to be sort of in line with
00:33:56the axle because back in the day of Moto Guzzi V8, you know, they, they made a big torpedo out
00:34:02of it. The fairing was like way the hell out in front of the bike, streamlining all of that and
00:34:06making that airflow, smoothing it out and trying to huck it off the back. So your best look like a
00:34:12salmon. Yep. Your best advantage on a, on a motorcycle really is reducing frontal area.
00:34:18That's the, that's the way you make progress. And that's the point of the midget of downsizing the
00:34:25bike. They said their best calculations thought they thought they got 15% less frontal area
00:34:31on the midget. And they thought they might get, um, something on the order of 170 miles an hour
00:34:38out of it. They never ran it at Daytona, but they thought they might get 170 miles, uh, an hour out
00:34:43of it. They tested on the back stretch, which would have been at, um, no, let's see when it was
00:34:52the highest horsepower. You gotta, he's saying the highest horsepower we ever got out of flat
00:34:56heads, flat heads at the time was 57.3 at the counter shaft sprocket. Another thing that is
00:35:03hard for people to believe was that we ran 4.7 to one compression. Yeah.
00:35:12They would, the bikes would slow down by 10 to 15 mile an hour, uh, on high test gas.
00:35:20If you don't have the compression, you don't need the octane. That's a, that's a good lesson
00:35:23for your street bikes. People. There's a big difference between high octane fuel and, uh,
00:35:30ordinary knocko, which is that, um, the volatility you can, you can build,
00:35:39you can build in as much octane number as you want by adding things like triptane.
00:35:46Um, and the four good octane structures, these are just chemical structures. So they're usually
00:35:53shown in the textbook looking like tinker toys made of carbon and hydrogen hydrocarbons,
00:36:01but those, um, folded highly stable and therefore knock resistant molecular structures
00:36:09don't evaporate very well. I almost said something unacceptable. So this is what actually
00:36:18lies behind stories about, Oh, we lost 300, a hundred revs on the top. And the crew chief
00:36:25went out to the union 76 station and got some, uh, regular and the RPM came back.
00:36:32Well, this is something that lots of race teams have had to learn, which is
00:36:38gasoline is not a pure substance. It has some highly volatile stuff
00:36:43on the low end and on the high end, it's like lamp oil. And the deal is that the
00:36:50highly volatile stuff helps the whole thing to evaporate. And the heavier stuff is necessary
00:36:59to resist knock, but, um, it can turn out the lamp oils lamp oil is what clogs your pilot jets.
00:37:08Cause the light stuff goes away. And then the lamp oil kind of goes and gets in those
00:37:14gets in there and call it that in the textbook, existent gum. And I can imagine that somewhere
00:37:21floating in platonic space. Well, I don't know what they're doing with gas, you know, here in
00:37:26California, what, what, uh, what recipes they're putting in, but, uh, I let a car sit and the, uh,
00:37:34the center jets, they slide on a jet bearing. It has a diaphragm and that's how you,
00:37:39that's how you choke it. It's an enrichment. So you, it's an SU carburetor. So you pull the jet
00:37:43down on the needle. That's the only, or it's the only orifice that fuel flows through. There's no
00:37:48idle circuit. It's just a single jet. And then the CV slide sits in it. And when you want it to be
00:37:54enriched, you pull the choke and it slides the bearing. It slides the jet down in the bearing
00:37:58with a little fork underneath. They won't move. That stuff is like super glue. And I've used
00:38:05everything. The only thing that cuts the old gas is MEK methyl ethyl ketone. And you don't want
00:38:12that on your cereal folks like MEK. I don't even like having it around, you know? So you just get
00:38:18a little jar and put a few drops and try to dissolve it that way. Well, there are a lot of
00:38:22fuel components that are listed by the state of California. And one of them is benzene. Benzene
00:38:30in Northern Minnesota solidifies, but it's a wonderful fuel. It has an excellent high octane
00:38:38number. And trouble is that it mimics the six carbon ring structure that are common in plants.
00:38:50So it gets into your body and it's like the secret agent. It's wearing plain clothes,
00:38:58looks like Mr. Average, but it gets incorporated into your metabolism and you can become quite ill.
00:39:05There was a Turkish doctor who discovered why unusual numbers of Turkish shoe workers were
00:39:13experiencing leukemias. And it was because they were inhaling benzene fumes all day long. Benzene
00:39:21is a wonderful adhesive for rubber. Rubber dissolves in the stuff. It's also a great
00:39:27fuel, but we want to live, not die. Yeah, we got to balance this stuff out.
00:39:34I realize we're not going to live forever, but so far so good. Let's not push it. Yeah.
00:39:40At least not with benzene. So one of the conditions that Neil Keen set for me,
00:39:52he said, I don't want you to publish this until I'm sure that you're showing proper respect for
00:39:59what Harley accomplished in building this thing. He said, this was the MotoGP bike of that era.
00:40:06And people had put their thought and sweat into creating those miles per hour. They weren't
00:40:15terribly fast by today's standards, but they were winning races in 1968 and 69. So I had to send him
00:40:24one draft after another until finally he said, okay, I would still change this, that, and he
00:40:32listed a bunch of stuff, but he said, you can go ahead now. And that's how we were able to run that
00:40:40story in the print magazine when we did. And I felt honored to be trusted by Neil that way,
00:40:48because his era was very important to him and the accomplishments that were made then.
00:40:56Another thing that happened in the Caltech tunnel was that the engineers there were familiar with
00:41:01how radial aircraft engines were cooled, air-cooled radials. And they said, let's build
00:41:07some baffling for the cylinders on this engine. Just see how it goes, because air passing over
00:41:16the front tire enters the fairing and is slowed down to make enough pressure to push it through
00:41:23the thin space. Cooled great in the tunnel at high speed, but around a racetrack at 65 miles an
00:41:32hour in the hairpin was terrible. The engine's overheating right and left.
00:41:40They had a lot of problems with that, and they wanted to run five quarts of oil, but they couldn't
00:41:46fit it. And so they ran four and they made a custom oil tank and stuck it under the engine.
00:41:52And I think they put it over the front of the engine somewhere, directing air.
00:42:01Yeah, it was all part of the package. I was looking at the letter again, and
00:42:09Jerry said it costs $10,000 just to put the ground plane in the tunnel. So you need to put
00:42:15the earth down if you're going to test a ground-bound vehicle. To put that down and calibrate
00:42:21it cost $10,000 at the time. Well, I think that was probably a moving ground plane, wasn't it?
00:42:28Oh, it could be, yeah. I would think so. So the tires you were talking about, getting Goodyear to make
00:42:34the tires, all you need to do, we'll make the tires for free, but you need to pay for the
00:42:39molten tooling. And they paid $60,000 to do that. Yeah, and that was a good sum of money in those
00:42:46days. That's twice the cost of a house in California at the time. Because, just compare the price of a
00:42:54new engine for any motorcycle today and that $588, not thousands, $588 for a ready-to-run racing
00:43:06engine, Triumph racing engine, at the same time period. What would an engine replacement
00:43:13race engine cost today? Yeah. More. That $60,000 just shows you that
00:43:24Harley at that time were willing to spend money to get real results. And we have to admire that.
00:43:33Meriden, Triumph was doing the same in England. They were arm wrestling for the U.S. market.
00:43:40And to the extent that a Daytona win can improve success in the U.S. market. And in those days it
00:43:48did. But Triumph put, meanwhile, of course, they were making these big changes. The bike that they
00:44:00brought in 66 had an oiling problem to the connecting rods, and they scattered one engine
00:44:07after another. And when it came time to build something for the 200,
00:44:15they basically, it was like the college student sorting through his,
00:44:22very much needing to go to the laundry, underwear. How about these? No, not those.
00:44:27How about these? And eventually they got enough parts together that they built an engine that
00:44:34lasted and won the race. They fixed the problem before 67 by switching the way oil was sent to
00:44:42the connecting rods. The 66 engine had the stock system, which had a grooved bearing on the timing
00:44:50side. And oil was pumped into that grooved plane bearing and a hole drilled into the crankshaft,
00:44:57rotated in the groove with the crank. Oil was supposed to flow in that hole against
00:45:05centrifugal force and then enter another drilling that went diagonally to the sludge trap.
00:45:13And this was not a good arrangement at 8,500 RPM, but it worked fine on the street.
00:45:21Worked fine. And this is one of the things that racing shows us. I think they broke a
00:45:27lot of crankshafts because they increased the specification of the steel twice before they
00:45:33got to a chrome molybdenum. People call it chrome moly. You've heard people say chrome moly.
00:45:40They got to a chrome moly crank that had the fillet radii where the crank pins
00:45:47join the cranksheets, polished to a high finish in order to eliminate any little surface defects
00:45:56that might open up as cracks, because a lot of those crankshafts came to pieces.
00:46:01So they're working on all these problems. The swingarm consisted of two pieces of tubing
00:46:08raised into a forged lug at the front, the pivot lug, and that was just not very stiff.
00:46:19One of the things I used to do when I was a tech inspector is to take hold of the top
00:46:24of the rear tire of a bike that's on the inspection stand and yank it back and forth
00:46:28side to side to make sure swingarm bushings, check. Spokes are tight, check. Tire is inflated,
00:46:38check. It's a good test for your Norton Commando too, your ice elastics. We should do a whole
00:46:44program on ice elastics, but you can take the wheel and you shake it and you can say like,
00:46:48yeah, that's a little bit, you're supposed to have about 10 thou clearance with your ice elastics,
00:46:52which is, again, we could spend 20 minutes talking about that, but it is, it's a good,
00:46:57it's good on any, especially older bike, you know, just give you an idea of what you might be in for.
00:47:04So they, they reinforced that by making a U-shaped steel pressing that welded along the length of the
00:47:11pivot tube and then welded along the length of the beams, like other motorcycles had at that time.
00:47:17The steering head was the most peculiar thing. All the tubes supporting the steering head
00:47:22attached to the bottom of it. So most of the steering head stuck up, unsupported. So first,
00:47:30they put a bracing tube from the region of the seat coming up diagonally to stiffen that up some.
00:47:37Brake hop is a symptom of a flexible steering head. You don't want to experience it.
00:47:45You don't want to experience it. Some of those Triumph 500s did. So the next step, they,
00:47:53they changed the steering head so that it was located lower so that the tubes came in and
00:48:00actually braced it rather than just holding the bottom of it by their fingernails. Rational stuff,
00:48:07things that if you were going racing with a production bike, you would give the thing a
00:48:12once over and say, well, here's my list of things that I want done first. And they're all pretty
00:48:18obvious. They, Triumph was late in, in having more damping on rebound in the fork than on
00:48:28compression. They had a, a shuttle valve that greatly improved things for them.
00:48:35I believe that was, I believe the rebound damping was introduced on the 1958
00:48:41Triumph Trophy. The street models didn't have it. 1958 Triumph Trophy had rebound damping.
00:48:48The little shuttle that went up and down.
00:48:52So another thing they did was the bearings supporting the camshaft, the exhaust camshaft.
00:49:01In the past, the ignition cam had been mounted on the end of that. And so while the cam is lifting
00:49:09valves and jumping around in its oil clearance, bad things are happening to the ignition cam.
00:49:18And so they, they did what Mack McConnie of Everett, Massachusetts provided to them.
00:49:25He was the first one to build this. Ignition cam supported in its own sealed bearings
00:49:32and driven by a T slot, a peg and slot coupler to the camshaft.
00:49:39And instead of contact points that swivel on a pin, which is the way they look in a distributor
00:49:45from the distributor era, it used Bendix points, which were just a piece of spring
00:49:52steel with the contact on one end. The other end was anchored solidly. So it had minimum mass.
00:49:59It was quite stiff. It could follow the cam up to very high RPM,
00:50:04which is why Bendix used it in their Magnetos. So there were all kinds of little details like
00:50:10this that, that had to be done before the stock Triumph could survive 200 miles of racing.
00:50:19Yeah. The points are important because of scatter to the spark. You have an inconsistent spark
00:50:24happening at the wrong time and you know, points floating around. And, and once you're not lighting
00:50:30it at the right time, you don't make the right power or terribly, you may detonate and heat
00:50:35things up to failure. Yeah. Very rapidly. Not enough time to react. I've talked to a, I've
00:50:44talked to a, a Chrysler engineer who had done a lot of work with
00:50:52uncontrolled timing and other such events. He said, when an engine actually pre-ignites, that is
00:51:01the charge begins to burn before the spark. This is not detonation. This is pre-ignition.
00:51:08They are completely separate. When this happens, he said, the engine can only survive
00:51:13one or two cycles before it punches the piston, a hole down through the center of the piston.
00:51:21And the metal is, is curled downwards as if a bullet had gone through there.
00:51:28The bullet in this case is high pressure gas. So all these little details, and of course,
00:51:36class C is what was behind trying to race things that were not meant for racing.
00:51:44And on, you can look at that one way and you can say, well, it's a, it's a reliability contest and
00:51:52you're showing how reliable your bikes are. But then the other point of view says,
00:51:57these things have been worked over so hard. There's nothing left that's stock on them.
00:52:02So it doesn't, if a Triumph or a Harley-Davidson or a BSA or an Indian wins the Daytona 200,
00:52:09doesn't give you any information about what motorcycle to buy.
00:52:13It just tells you who's, who's worked the hardest to get their thing to finish.
00:52:21And people don't do these things like changing the crankshaft material twice,
00:52:27upgrading it. They don't do these things because they're engineers and they're trying
00:52:32to make things more nearly perfect. They're doing it because there's a terrible problem
00:52:38that will prevent them from achieving their goal and they have to fix it. It's desperation.
00:52:45Desperation is what drives a lot of engineering.
00:52:48Uh, Pratt and Whitney had a problem with burners, uh, popping open on JT3 engines years ago.
00:52:58And that had to be fixed right away because I think there's 300 PSI in there and takeoff.
00:53:05And you've got to put your best people on the thing and, and, and get it fixed right now.
00:53:11So that the roar of voices complaining about it doesn't grow too, too loud.
00:53:18You want to keep all this stuff under control. And of course, product development.
00:53:26One of the major purposes of product development is to uncover the defects before the customer can.
00:53:34And in the old days that used to mean, uh, four or five
00:53:37crusty old guys dressed in all weather gear with their sandwiches in a, in a, uh,
00:53:44waxed canvas pocket setting forth on their motorbikes for an all day go.
00:53:52And some of them may be coming home on the truck.
00:53:56Yeah. Bertie, uh, I think it was Bertie, Bertie Hauser. He was the, uh, test. He kind of led
00:54:02testing racing. He led, uh, testing at BMW. And then he, I think he was given racing for,
00:54:08for a while, a number of years ago. I remember him. Yeah. And Bertie said, uh,
00:54:13because them to hell drive us, hell drive us. So as hell drivers would go out and hammer the
00:54:19equipment, um, someone at triumph, uh, when triumph was coming back in, um, the United
00:54:24States sort of circa 95, uh, someone at triumph said they couldn't believe what customers could
00:54:32break. Yeah. So it's, uh, it's pretty cool. Like you just, you really do. You, uh, run the stuff
00:54:41and you hammer the daylights out of it in hopes that you find every weakness before you deliver
00:54:46the product to the customer. And then even then you'd be shocked at what we could break.
00:54:51Yes. When I, when I visited, uh, BMW test track in the South of France,
00:54:57um, they made a presentation on their product testing and they said, our sales,
00:55:06the figure of our sales and their constant increase is a result of our presenting a variety
00:55:13of attractive new models to the public. Often if we just kept on making, um, instead of going
00:55:221200, 1250, 1300, 1350, uh, they just stuck with the thousand year after year sales would
00:55:34slowly decline. So they have to have something that you can't do without, but if it doesn't
00:55:42live up to the BMW reliability standard, they're going to hear about it. So he said,
00:55:49what this has compelled us to do is to automate product testing wherever we can so that when a
00:55:56bike goes on a test track, it is carrying a complicated and very fast computer and as many
00:56:05sensors as we can stick on the thing. And a lot of the preparation of the data for the engineers
00:56:13to look at takes place on that computer before the test is really quite over. So this is,
00:56:21this is a whole segment of modernity that is not often talked about. Well, everyone's doing it.
00:56:29We're using BMW as an example, but Concord 14 launched 2007, 2008. We were, um, up ripping
00:56:36around and in Northern California and, uh, you know, they want to get to market. So the thing
00:56:41about building motorcycles and selling them for money is you have to be in the market. You have
00:56:46to go do that. You actually have to sell the bike. You can't just sit back and develop forever. You
00:56:50have to say, this is what we're selling. And it's, it's a point that is sometimes lost on small
00:56:55makers who have dreams, but they aren't, uh, fully fledged. Let's say it just happened. I've
00:57:01seen it happen. So Kawasaki knows they got to sell the bike and they think, yeah, we're, we're,
00:57:06we're right there, but they never stopped testing. And they had a motorcycle on the press launch
00:57:10where the top trunk that was the computer you talk about. And it had just big bundles of wires
00:57:16disappearing all over that motorcycle. And I was just joking around with the Japanese
00:57:20engineers. And I said, ah, bento box. And everybody laughed because it was a lot of
00:57:24bento boxes, what you have at your lunch and basically, and, um, you know, we all chuckled,
00:57:28but they were in there, you know, grabbing data and I was out there, you know, dragging foot pegs
00:57:33and doing photos. And this is not a new idea because when the B29 was in flight test, uh,
00:57:42in 1942, um, they had two racks, tall racks with instrument dials,
00:57:53gauges on just covered with them. And there were two movie cameras, uh, running continuously during
00:58:01the test. And as soon as the aircraft, the test aircraft landed, uh, the film was handed to
00:58:09people who rushed it to processing. It's the same thing that goes on now, except it was being done
00:58:15by rather more primitive means. And they're just like my career. I'm not kidding. I'm not kidding.
00:58:23Yeah. The data went to a special, uh, lab where, uh, all these data points were reduced to smooth
00:58:35curves that the engineers could look at and use them to decide what is going to be on the agenda
00:58:42for today's flight test. That's the reason why it had to be done very quickly. So it's the same
00:58:48thing as it's being done today with, uh, by digital means, um, only nowadays we can gather much more
00:58:56data and we can process it faster and present it in a, in a human understandable form.
00:59:03Well, the sensors are so cheap now, like you can just go because they're made in such mass
00:59:07quantities. Like if you wanted to instrument your, you know, Yamaha XS650, and you wanted
00:59:13oil pressure and oil temperature and intake pressure, all you need to do is, is have a piece
00:59:19of metal. You can drill a hole in that fits the O-ring and the sensor, and you just stick it on
00:59:24there. And it has one screw that holds it on. And then you need a brain to process it, but you could,
00:59:28you could sensor the daylights out of, uh, any bike you want. Uh, you can't see it in the frame,
00:59:35but my, uh, 900 SS is here. And I put an electronic ignition out of the Eastern block,
00:59:41former Eastern block. It's beautiful, programmable electronic ignition.
00:59:45I can talk to you about that, but Ducatis have basically an idle and a high RPM. So they had
00:59:52like a 10 and a 35, and it was essentially a switch in between. There was no curve. It was
00:59:58just a switch. So you buy this and you get a curve and you can program the curve and you can
01:00:01make it run really nice. It has other inputs. You can do quick shifters. You can do temperature
01:00:06things, pressure things. You can put a map sensor. So I have an automotive map sensor that was like
01:00:11$22 that I can wire into the brain on that thing. And I can do what an automotive distributor would
01:00:17do, which is advance the timing at a high vacuum. Yeah. Meaning you're at cruise and you can light
01:00:24the fire sooner and you might pick up a few miles per gallon. Because the fire is moving more slowly.
01:00:29Yeah. The turbulence and the mixture is weak and it's not turbulating as much as it might want to.
01:00:36And, uh, anyway, it's really great how you can just, uh, sensors are really, really cheap.
01:00:42What I was saying about, um, my career and, you know, processing film and doing things analog is
01:00:47that when I first started at Cycle News, uh, sort of 1995, 94, 93, it was 94. In 1995, I would get up,
01:00:57I bought a brand new Honda VFR 750 and I would get up at four o'clock in the morning on a Monday
01:01:04because that was our day to print Cycle News. So Cycle News was America's weekly
01:01:08motorcycle newspaper and we were printing it every week. And I would ride from my house in
01:01:15Brea, California. I would ride to LAX and I would go to Delta Dash or one of the other
01:01:21airlines and I would pick up unprocessed film sent from Grand Prix races, sent from the Nurburgring,
01:01:28sent from Austin. And I would take that film picked up at the airport directly to the lab in
01:01:34Long Beach where the office was. There was a lab that we used and had an agreement with
01:01:38that they would take the film from us and we would be able to process it, get it back to the office,
01:01:44make the line screens and print the story analog. And we had modems. I know this is like old guy
01:01:53stories, but we had modems where we were getting, you know, Michael Scott would be sending in his,
01:01:58Michael Scott was a great reporter. He did, he did PR and other things. And, uh, he, uh,
01:02:05he would send it over by modem. The phone, the special modem phone would ring and you'd run over
01:02:10there and it had, you know, wires and then you'd take this handle and you'd pick it up and you'd
01:02:16wait to hear just the right sound. You had to nail it because it would make the old modem sounds that
01:02:20no one knows what they sound like anymore, but it's like ticking and you know, you take that
01:02:26thing and you'd have to slam it into the rubber cups, the receiver. Yes. And you slam the phone
01:02:32in and that audio message would be converted into the data that made the story that we could use on
01:02:40our, our like windows 3.1 machines, you know, like crank crank computers. And that was advanced.
01:02:48That was really advanced. And then we got email and we were able to, you know,
01:02:53send digital photos and it's all, it's all wonderful. I'm sure. Yep.
01:02:59Well, we're, we've wandered off from, from Harley, Harley Davidson, flathead road racers,
01:03:04but that's kind of old timey too, isn't it? That's how things used to be flatheads.
01:03:09And, um, but, um, we hope you enjoyed the program, uh, low compression, high compression
01:03:16racing, improving the breed aerodynamics, wind tunnel spending money. That was pretty neat.
01:03:22You know, so, uh, it's well to bear in mind that one of the experienced old hands
01:03:28in the competition committee, uh, was Bob Hanson and he was known for his,
01:03:35for calling for the vote when the crucial opposition had gone to the men's room.
01:03:42That's perfect. They had to watch. Yeah. They had to watch out for him. Yeah. Well, good.
01:03:51Well, thanks for listening folks. We appreciate it. Uh, this episode is brought to you by Octane
01:03:55Lending. You can go down in the description and click the prequal flex link. It's a, it's a great
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