O'Brien Harley-Davidson's War Eagle

Let The Race begin: Part IX

Factory teams both a blessing and a curse

The meeting in Jim France's office ended there, we had from September to March to decide what to do. I had already contacted several major rock groups to develop a theme song for the BOTT and they in turn agreed to give us a percentage of profits and along with that, we were scheduling a Friday night Rock Concert in the infield after the Twin race. This would have brought in an easy 200,000 bikers in the Infield, giving France an extra $5,000,000.

Other track owners, on their own, did bring in rock groups the day or night of the twin race and bikers came, usually 10,000. At Elkhart and Loudon it averaged 50,000 to 75,000... We never told the BOTT riders that France and the AMA sold them down the river. I did agree to stay on as director of competition and went to the Nationals and do all the technical inspection for our riders and the AMA Superbike riders. It was March and I was in middle of doing technical when our first full factory sponsored bike came in and it was a 900cc Yamaha Virago V-twin, of all things it was entered in the stock class. The idea we had when we set up the twin classes was to keep factory boys in GP to duck it out and leave the amateurs alone.

This would become a big problem, as the Stock Class factory Yamaha ridden by Chris Steward was also full house. The problem was that in 1981, if I thought a rider was cheating I would pull him down after the race, but now that the AMA was running things there had to be a protest before anyone could be pulled down and the AMA officials had a practice of coming down harder on the person protesting rather than on the guilty party. At all Nationals I was under orders to reject any protest. While I was inspecting a privateer Suzuki four cylinder Superbike, Muzzy Kawasaki's team manager walked up to me and asked me if I’d noticed what was written on the cylinder base? I said “You mean 1000cc big bore kit?” And he said “Yes, and what are you going to do about it?” … I told him I was under orders to ignore anything that's illegal that doen’t effect safety. That day I counted 11 Suzukis and Kawasakis running in the 750cc Superbike race using various sizes of big bore kits. We were glad to see one factory come into the BOTT because it brought in privateers but it had it's down side as factories start pushing their weight and money around, forcing the AMA to change the rules and force the privateers out…

1982 season is off and there's no H-D factory bike

It's vino time as James Adamo takes the GP class on his Reno Duck and flies it into the winners circle followed by John Long on his Beemer. David Roper is third on a Hog. Jon Minonno on the Big "D" Triumph takes Modified Production Expert class. Next comes Talladega and again Adamo and Ducati romp the field. It's Elkhart Lake, WI and we were in H-D's back yard. This time Malcolm takes 1st on the Sid's O'Brien Flowmetrics Ducati and nearest H-D is in 7th. The following Monday, I head to the Harley-Davidson factory that I left ten years before. I meet with brother Dick to find out why H-D is sitting on its duff. 80% of all dirt track riders are dropping out because all factories dropped out except H-D. I told him I went to a lot of trouble get the BOTT going so you could get the factory dominating both Dirt Track and Road Racing. He said he was working on it and he would be in BOTT in 1983, in all classes and fully factory backed.

The rest of the season went as expected: Loudon, NH Adamo and Ducati; Monterey, CA: Adamo and Ducati; Pocono,PA:  Adamo and Ducati; Sonoma, CA: Adomo and Ducati; Kent, WA: John Williams and Ducati; Daytona Pro-Am: Adamo and Ducati. At this time I was approached by Yamaha to build a Virago 900 for the GP class but they would only supply stock production parts. I got Jim Young to ride the bike and I’d pay for the parts needed, we would split the purse. The Virago had a very bad  Achilles heel the cam chain. The engine had no flywheel to speak off and had to be spun at 12,000rpm to be competitive and when you did it would eat up cam chains. We got the bike to place 4th in two races and had to dump it. Yamaha never again built a twin for BOTT. The last race of the season was at West Palm Beach, FL and John Tesauro placed his Moto-Guzzi in the winners circle while riding with a busted kneecap.

1983 and Hog's invade BOTT

The first time I saw the 1983 XR-1000 was at the 1982 October Pro-Am when Dick tried to enter it in stock production but couldn't because it had not been registered with the AMA. David Mc Clure rode the bike and they ran it in GP just for testing. The bike was running a set of my one of a kind heads, which would have beeen illegal as the devil in a stock class. The bike was clocking 140mph plus. Dick said he would be running four factory bikes in 1983 which included Jay Springsteen in GP, David McClure and Gene Church in Stock Class and me, in which ever class I wanted to run. I was shocked to see that Dick had named the factory XR-1000 "Lucifer's Hammer” to go along with Satan's colours of black, white and orange for Halloween. I told Dick I didn't think mom and dad would be proud of that, but he said the idea came from his second wife whom Dick had dated for a long time (she was the secretary of the president of AMF, Rodney Gott).

Dick divorced his first wife Joyce and soon afterward she died of cancer. At the time, I thought about getting Jim Young to ride the GP bike but one evening, Jim and his wife went to a 7-11 store and while she was in store someone put a bullet in Jim's head. She came out to find Jim humped over the front seat van, dead. Jim had gone to Calvary Temple church just the week before and accepted Jesus as his Lord and Saviour. I picked Chuck Quenzler and ran the XR in Modified. I was not happy about the XR to start with as it had too small of a tank to run in Superbike and it sure neither looked like a Cafe-Racer nor had the equipment to take on the Ducatis.  The whole Idea of BOTT was to prep it for merger into Superbike and at the time only Adamo and one or two other Ducati riders were trying, bless their heart, to hang in with the big four. Dick made it quite clear he couldn’t care less about Superbike and I would not be allowed to enter the Harley in Superbike.

Right from the start I found out that the only thing different between an XR-1000 and a Sportster were the aluminium heads which were taken directly off the XR-750. The rest of the bike was junk and we had to replace rods, pistons, flywheels, cams, engine sprocket, clutch, transmission, shocks, forks, wheel rims, gas-tank, brakes/ disc and the ignition system. The entire crankcases had to be re-machined and the oil system re-routed. This took five months but once done, the dynamometer had us at 90bph. At Daytona we hit the traps at 165mph. We did not win there but did take 1st place at Talladega, Lexington, Elkhart Lake, Monterey, Brainerd, Sonoma and 2nd place at Loudon and Daytona Pro-Am. We became the first Harley-Davidson not only to win a Pro Series National Road Race since late Cal Rayborn in 1972 but won the BOTT Camel Pro Series National Championship. For brother Dick, things did not fare so well. Jay Springsteen did win Daytona and beat Adamo who came in second. Adamo and Leoni would come back and teach him a lesson he would not forget and they beat Springsteen at Talladega so bad that Jay crashed the bike trying to catch up. Again at Elkhart Lake, in the back yard of Harley-Davidson, Jay crashed "Lucifer's Hammer", not just once trying to catch Adamo, but twice, putting the bike  totally out of commission.  This was not the only problem to hit Dick in the face as the AMA caught on that Gene Church was riding the factory H-D in stock Amateur class while holding a National Expert licence… So they kicked him out of the class at end of practice.

The next day Gene entered the Modified class on his XR-1000 but got beaten by a 600cc Ducati Pantah ridden by Mills III, which made Dick madder than the devil. David McClure won the stock class but this went sour when he was protested for having a illegal rear wheel which it was, it was magnesium!!! McClure got out of trouble thanks to Dick faking the paper work from the factory where he wrote both the 15" and 18" wheels were production. The AMA took his word for it and never checked the alloy... Chuck, on my bike, was the only H-D to win that day. We all showed up at the factory the next day. Chuck and I needed lots of parts for our XR as we had to replace crankcases at every second race because of the horsepower we were developing. Dick was mad as ______about Church being kicked out of the stock class and wanted the AMA to transfer his points from Stock, which he earned illegally, and transfer them over to MP class. The AMA obliged and it was at this point that I resigned from the BOTT.  

Dwaine Williams tried to protest the rear wheel again and Dick told me straight out to inform Dwaine to back off or he would hire people out to blow up his motorcycle shop... This is when Dick and I really got into each other and Dick said to me "When the president of H-D gives me the order to go and win races, that's what I’ll do whether I have to cheat, lie or what ever, so little brother, stay out of my way". At next two races Dick dropped Springer and picked Dave Emde to ride Lucifer and both times Adamo and Leoni pounded Harley in the ground. Only at the Daytona Pro-Am did Lucifer beat Adamo, using its superior horsepower. Stuart Beatson JR won the stock class, god blesses him, as he took in his stride everything Harley-Davidson could through at him with their cheater bikes. At one point he road his BMW from NY to California, won the race and road the bike back to NY.

At the Daytona Pro-Am H-D tried to protest a screw he used on his bike as being illegal but failed and as a result the H-D factory team tried to beat up the AMA and BOTT officials until the speedway police stepped in. After 1983 Harley-Davidson never built the XR-1000 again and as time went by, the XR lost more and more races. Harley did build one more race bike the VR-1000, which was another cheater as the AMA thought it was going to be a production bike... It turned out to be a failure. Leoni, on other hand, did what I wanted H-D to do, he got with the big Dr "T", that's Taglioni, or as some would say, Mr Ducati, and he used the BOTT to prepare Dukes for Superbike and the future and boy, did they. There is one sad note in that Adamo was killed at Daytona about the same time the BOTT also died. He is still missed today as a twin rider who took it all and gave some back.

Dick O'Brien's final decision

Dick retired from Harley-Davidson at end of 1983 with another Dirt Track National Championship and I, at last, got him a piece of the BOTT Camel Pro Series with a win in Modified Production. I kept flow testing racing heads till my wife Nancy died in 1994 and I then retired. Dick went to Statesville, NC and went to work for Mock2 who built Harry Gants NASCAR Scole Bandit. Dick did all their head airflow work and Gant came in second in the point standings in 1984… But Dick was caught cheating on the restrictor rule and found NASCAR not as forgiving as the AMA and got kicked out… Dick divorced and remarried for a third time and moved to Florida.

From 1985 to 2003 my wife and I tried to witness to Dick about Jesus Christ but Dick still went his own way, first to be received into the AMA Hall of Fame, then into the Springfield Mile Dirt track Hall of Fame. In early 2003 he was recognized by NHRA along with Don Garlet in Orlando Florida and Old Big Bertha went to the Harley-Davidson Museum in Milwaukee. I never gave up and, in December of 2002, I felt prompted in my heart to call him again, as his alzheimer and asthma were getting worse. I asked him " Dick, do you in your heart know that Jesus Christ is the Son of God?" and he said yes! In January 2003, Christine, my beautiful wife, and I went down to see him for the last time…

His memory was almost gone and I wondered if he did really know what I was saying about Jesus and was it too late, did he close the door too often, stay in the world to long? I didn't know then and I don't know now but who really knows the heart of any man, be it a brother or sister, mom or dad. We can be only what Jesus told us to be and that is a witness. For me it was hard, as I still felt I was that 15-year younger brat that threw his carburettors in the wood the day before that race in 1945.

Let me ask you this: how close are you to the things of this world, what purpose do you think God has in you being here? Oh yes, one last thing as I asked Dick “In your heart is Jesus the son of God”

Copyright Jesse O'Brien 2005