Three Wheeler Racers From Back In The Day Now On 3WW???

[phantomtracer]

Was that rm125 a kit or did you make that yourself?

[onformula1]

Sent from my SM-G386T1 using Tapatalk

[onformula1]

My family raced a lot of desert, Gp's and cross country races.

Here is a old picture of my 1982 250r I raced, it was a hand me down when my father bought a 1983 250r with a 300 kit to race the open class.

It was set up for desert racing, but we would put the headlight on, a six pack rack and a set of 8 paddle gliders on and go duning too.

Taken at the gecko side of glamis.

Very fast 250r for the day with lots of old school parts. Received a blue plus 2" swing arm the next weekend.



Sent from my SM-G386T1 using Tapatalk

[onformula1]

We didn't start racing motocross on 3 wheelers until the 1985 250r came out.

Sent from my SM-G386T1 using Tapatalk

[Jmoozy27]

My family raced a lot of desert, Gp's and cross country races.

Here is a old picture of my 1982 250r I raced, it was a hand me down when my father bought a 1983 250r with a 300 kit to race the open class.

It was set up for desert racing, but we would put the headlight and a set of paddles on and go duning too.

Taken at the gecko side of glamis.

Very fast 250r for the day with lots of old school parts. Received a blue plus 2" swing arm the next weekend.

I thought it looked a little short. Those 1st gens are so compact stock. That is a huge tank. That has to be a 4 gallon tank.

[onformula1]

I thought it looked a little short. Those 1st gens are so compact stock. That is a huge tank. That has to be a 4 gallon tank.

Yes, if a recall it was 4 gallons and the white color was light enough you could see how much fuel was in it from the side.

Its a Malcolm Smith tank we bought at his old shop in Riverside, CA. One of the coolest shops ever, I got to meet him too, very nice guy but you could tell he was not the biggest 3 wheeler fan, but his company sold lots of 3 wheeler parts under the MSR name.

Small was good for me at that time, I was 11 years old. (I was fairly big for my age)

Little parts run down-

Bassani porting, head mods, pipe & silencer, 36mm Mikuni carb, mossbarger reed cage, Helm & Sons intake, boost bottle and wheel spacers, Terry Cable extended travel fork kit, Progressive springs front & rear, revalved shock, K&N filter, PK chain tensioner, Barnett heavy clutch springs, Magura twist throttle set to MX setting...Yeah! Mugen vented front fender was my favorite part.

With my light on it (At that time...LOL) I killed in the 100 yard sand drags, Competition hill, Oldsmobile hill and The Wall, Hundred Dollar Hill, ETC.

A Helm & Sons 70 to a 250r is a big jump!

Thank you to all for sharing, thank you for reading my thoughts... sharing is fun

I just wish I had pictures/videos like some of you guys......Fires are a B!tch!

[Joseph Farrow]

These are all good documents of history and great stories on top of that. Zipping around that flat track on thoses screamers looked fun as hell. Was there any cross country racing back then? I'd like to see one of those setups.

Yes we called them "Hare Scrambles". They would run a summer and a winter series. We usually ran the Winter series due to the fact most out door motocross fell off around October in our area and it gave you a way to keep riding all winter and stay in shape for the upcoming season.

We didn't run highly modified bikes in the woods. You wanted something that was easy to ride. Most cross country races lasted anywhere from one to two hours.

Found some pics of my "Woods" bike.



I think these pics were taken at Natches Trace State Park when you could still ride ATV's there. One of the stops was on the park.



Me, my brother and father.....

[Joseph Farrow]

Was that rm125 a kit or did you make that yourself?

It was custom built by Daryl Lamkin a friend of ours we used to work with and race with at our local shop Big Hatchie Honda-Suzuki.

His shop is Lamkin Performance..... https://www.facebook.com/LamkinPerfo...=page_internal

[Jmoozy27]

Yes we called them "Hare Scrambles". They would run a summer and a winter series. We usually ran the Winter series due to the fact most out door motocross fell off around October in our area and it gave you a way to keep riding all winter and stay in shape for the upcoming season.

We didn't run highly modified bikes in the woods. You wanted something that was easy to ride. Most cross country races lasted anywhere from one to two hours.

Found some pics of my "Woods" bike.



I think these pics were taken at Natches Trace State Park when you could still ride ATV's there. One of the stops was on the park.



Me, my brother and father.....

What kind of sprocket gearing would y'all run for CC? Stock, high, low?

[Joseph Farrow]

What kind of sprocket gearing would y'all run for CC? Stock, high, low?

I would say probably close to stock. You needed something pretty general since it could be all types of terrain and conditions.

[barnett468]

Okay I know more of you guys are out there.......Mike aka Shortline10, Keith S, Phantomracer....???

Hello Joseph;

This is a fun thread . . You already know a bit about me but I thought some of the info might be interesting to some of the Kawi riders at least . . My apologies for the long post . . I kept thinking of more things as I wrote it.

I started out racing motorcycles and rode in the 250 and open pro class at several local So Cal tracks for several years such as OCIR, Ascot, Corona, Perris TT, Elsinore TT, Saddleback, Carlsbad and De Anza . . I broke both bones in my leg around 1980 just below the knee when I was practicing at Saddleback on my YZ 400 . . That put me out for an entire year . . I started racing again after that, then one day, I saw an employment add from Kawasaki in a weekly magazine called Cycle News that an acquaintance of mine named Jody Weisel was editor of . . I applied for the job and was fortunate enough to get it after a few interviews including one with their hot looking personnel director named Bonnie, and it was only 4 miles from where I was living at the time so I was ecstatic.

I was hired to help develop all the off road bikes and vehicles that Kawi made which I did for around 3 months until one day, out of the blue, they put all 4 of us together and said, “ok, we are going to split the departments and have a separate one for everything except dirt bikes” . . This new department included all new projects, jet skis and boats, 3 wheelers and the infamous Mule . . Well I got sent to this new department which I wasn't happy about at all because I was the one with the most engineering and fabrication abilities out of all the others in our particular group . . I was also a motocross racer and had 0 interest in switching over to mainly testing 3 wheelers which from a motocross riders point of view was a bit beneath them, lol . . There was another engineer whose job was to engineer new projects but not ride because he was a bit older and Kawi couldn’t afford to kill him off . . He was also a fabricator . . We had another machinist whom also worked for my friend Gary Turner whom owned GT bicycles which were extremely popular back then.

Anyway, I had only ridden 3 wheelers a few times before that but picked it up pretty fast. The Tecate did not exist at the time . . One day they said they were going to build a 3 wheeler to compete with the Honda so they sent a motorcycle engineer over from Japan whom had never designed anything on a 3 wheeler in his life and he designed the Tecate by hand from the ground up without a computer . . I think it too him around a year after which time we had a prototype in our hands which I did all the development work on.

Jimmy White was the first guy Kawi hired . . He had been racing Hondas but was apparently low on the totem pole there and didn’t like the personnel so he was happy to sign with Kawi . . Not helping Jimmie out more than they did wasn’t really a mistake by Honda since they had 4 other guys that were just as fast including Dean Sundahl, whom was probably the very best 3 wheeled rider ever . . Even Jim Degain and Bruce Stjernstrom whom both managed Team Green at the time had great admiration for him and were laughing as they talked about him one night when he smoked everybody at a Mickey Thompson event in Pomona.

My first 3 wheeler race was a short track in the pro class at a Corona night race on our Tecate test bike . . The swing arm was only extended around 1” . . I had given up motorcycle racing altogether by then but still did a lot of testing on the dirt bikes and some on the police bikes . . After the Suzuki quad came out, I started racing one of those also . . We had seen them testing the prototype at Saddleback one day which they didn’t seem too happy about and had a meeting the next day about it at which time Kawi said they were going to build one . . Kawi was aware the dreaded 3 wheel “ban“ was coming so they asked me to build a 4 wheeler from a Tecate using as many of the original parts that I could so they could still get some use out of them which I did and fortunately it worked really well but they eventually scrapped the idea because they planned on making an all new model anyway and thought it would not be practical to have two similar models . . Bruce from Team Green called the 3 wheelers chairs, and the 4 wheelers couches.

We had 3 wheeler races at Saddleback, Carlsbad and Corona and they were all fairly smooth tracks, and nothing like a real motocross track and I did fairly well on them . . The rougher the track was, the better I did . . I hated the short track but was fortunate enough to beat Jimmie White, Donnie Luce and I think Marty Hart along with all the other local riders at one of the big Saddleback races . . When the announcer tried to pronounce my name after the race, he kept messing it up and Jimmy said something to him like “Hey, he doesn’t care what you call him. He just wants his money.”, lol.

They also had a 3 wheeler race at the LA Coliseum that I rode and got second in . . They used to hold motocross races and concerts there too . . I was also fortunate enough to see Joe Namath play there once.

James from Team Green asked me to race with Jimmie and Donnie at a 3 hour long Grand Prix in Perris California where the riders would take turns on the same bike and I jumped at the offer but I actually had little choice in the matter because I would have kind of looked like an a hole if I turned him down . . This is not to imply that I was as fast as either of them but I was plenty fast enough and I had been testing on the Perris track for maybe 20 hours just before that race . . I also, rode on and off all day long when I was testing and would run wide open for an hour at a time when endurance testing the bikes so I was used to the long races.

Anyway, it rained the entire time and was a total mud fest . . Team Honda came out with their fancy trucks and huge awnings and buffet lunch and dancing girls and all we had was one box van and a tiny 10 x 10 canopy that we all sat under and we left the bike out in the rain after practice, lol . . I think we all rode Donnie’s bike and Jimmie started the race and got the hole shot and we never saw Team Honda again . . I will confess that those guys did the majority of the work because I got hurt near the very end of my first round which really p'd me off because that track suited me well and I knew I was was definitely going fast because I never got passed and Honda never caught up to me . . I also didn't want to let anyone down so that's a testament to Donnie's and Jimmie's ability.

I had an incredibly good time with lot's of wild adventures doing incredibly stupid but harmless stuff when we were on the road including getting banned from the golf course at Hurricane Mills Tennessee when we were at Loretta Lynns for the amateur nationals . . Her groundskeeper also brought me some fine moonshine, lol . . I was there to work on Eddie Warrens bike and one of the mini kids bikes . . I also worked on Eddies hot looking neighbor that came along . . Harry Klemm flew up with us but they didn't want to let him on with his tool bag at first . . After we arrived there, he proceeded to try and blow up the rental car that I and two others were also in by holding the gas on the floor until it started missing.

[Joseph Farrow]

Good stuff Barnett. Glad to know you're still alive. lol
Haven't heard from you in a while. I saw you over on the Yenko site a little while back.

[barnett468]

Good stuff Barnett. Glad to know you're still alive. lol
Haven't heard from you in a while. I saw you over on the Yenko site a little while back.

Lol, thank you very much Joseph and yes, I’m still alive.

I am on that site and a few Mustang sites because I restore and buy and sell muscle cars . . This includes building performance engines so I help people out with info on these things . . I even sold the studios 5 fastbacks which they built into Eleanors for the remake of Gone In Sixty Seconds and our shop worked on the blue Boss 302 build that Chip Foose built for his Overhaulin show.

Brad Lackey told us a story at Kawi one about racing cars at night on an MX track after the race . . Then he drove one on the beach and kinda sank it and had to call the rental agency to rescue it.

Anyway, my apologies again for the lengthy post and I hope it didn't sound too self serving because that wasn't my intent, but I’m sure you know how it is, you get to thinking about one event that happened then that leads to another and another, lol . . Plus, I was lucky to be in a few of the right places at the right time and I appreciate any of the good things that have come my way . . I never take anything for granted.