Motorcycle racing has always been a dangerous enterprise. The sport's infancy featured primitive designs rattling around wooden board tracks reaching speeds up to 100 mph - both rider and spectator risking injury.
As the sound of thundering V-Twin engines rips through the smoke-filled air, it is joined by the rhythmic clatter of wooden boards and the shouts of a large crowd. Racers clad in leather caps and cloth riding suits crouch with steely determination behind bent handlebars as they jockey for position, banging elbows at over 100 miles per hour. With exposed valve gear chattering, drive chains lashing and flames shooting from the barely muffled engines, riders brave flying splinters and the risk of high-speed get offs without safety barriers. Racing purpose-built single-speed machines, with no clutch or brakes, it is 1914 and these board-track racers are the heroes of the day.
Ninety years later, the shriek from a pack of highly tuned multi-cylinder motorcycles screams through the air: Howling and wailing in the distance, there is an eerie stillness as the crowd holds a collective breath in anticipation of their arrival. Bursting into sight, a cacophony of sound and motion erupts as a blaze of brightly colored, leather clad warriors scorch past at close to 200 mph. Braking for the upcoming corner, one by one they flow through the turn in an effortless arc, knee pucks skimming the smooth asphalt, before ripping away into the distance: these are the heroes of the day.
Standing in the peaceful sanctuary of the Wheels Through Time museum in Maggie Valley, NC, on a bitterly cold winter day, I am lost in a time warp. In front of me is a perfectly restored 1908 Reading Standard board-track racing machine sitting on an antique walnut table. Examining the seamless joints of the tubular frame rails, now covered in mirror finished paint, I think of the alloy box-section frames we have come to accept as the norm, some European manufacturers excluded.
Representing a beautiful restoration of a machine that toiled during the board-track racing era is this 1908 Reading Standard.
The Reading's engine is held in the frame at the top, front and the bottom with exquisite mounting brackets. The cylinders only have fins at the top, the bottom of the barrels smooth like a Top Fuel Harley drag bike. Inside the polished motor, high-compression pistons rise and fall in time with large racing valves. Taking fuel and air in and passing burned gasses out through enlarge ports, the valves are opened and closed by external pushrods worked on by racing camshafts. Getting the fuel into the cylinders, a small carburetor feeds both cylinders through neat, straight-shot intake tube. An intricate oblong gauze air filter built into the body of the carburetor allows air to join the fuel.
There is no gearbox, the final drive being taken straight from the crankshaft to the rear wheel on the left-hand side of the motorcycle. On the right side, a pedal system attaches to the crankshaft and the rear wheel. The starting procedure begins by retarding the spark, then lifting the exhaust valves to release the compression in the cylinders with the right-hand twistgrip and start pedaling. When the engine had built enough momentum, the valves would be dropped and hopefully the machine would start.
Starting the Reading was a little more complicated than thumbing the electric start. It was a procedure which involved a lot more manual labor, including some pedaling.
The engine has no clutch or gears, and to start the bike, the rider had to pedal the motor to life, riding off as soon as it fired. The decompression lever or a kill switch slowed the motor, and the soles of boots were used for brakes - a far cry from the triple-disc, radial brake set ups used today that will have your brain hitting the front of your helmet under deceleration.
A certain amount of oil lived in the bottom of the crankcase, and a neat sight glass window showing the level. To add oil during a race, the rider would twist the left handlebar grip. Operated by a series of mechanical joints, a small pump would add oil from the back left-hand side of the tank. The valve gear would have been oiled from a can before riding and should have remained lubricated for the duration of the race. The throttle is set on the carburetor by hand. There are no cables anywhere on the bike.
Looking closely at the engine, the exhaust pipes are impossibly short, cut just a few inches from the heads, and I can only wonder what the bike must sound like when it fires to life. The Reading Standard rolls on 28-inch tires that are a scant 2 inches wide, and rough boards for the tracks help these skinny tires get suitable adhesion. Spoke rims attached to beautiful nickel hubs (chrome hadn't been invented in 1908) that look like they came from my first 10-speed. Did I mention there are no brakes?
Wheels Through Time museum owner Dale Walksler looks over the 230 historic American motorcycles that call the museum home. And it looks like at least one of them can still get on down the road.
The more I look, the more incredible the bike becomes with it's tidy minimalist approach, and standing gazing, lost in time and space, museum owner Dale Walksler joins me. Surrounded by 230 historic American motorcycles from across the last century, we discuss what might be said a hundred years from now, when Mat Mladin's GSX-R 1000 Superbike is sitting on a podium being viewed as a piece of motorcycle history: A time when motorcycles were still powered by fossil fuels.
Sitting under the Reading Standard is a 1914 Harley-Davidson, and Dale tells me that most of the bikes raced in this period were all purpose-built factory racers, ridden by the stars of the day. Much like today, privateers rode modified road bikes, and races were held all around the country at sanctioned events on the old board tracks from 1909 until 1928.
There is a myth circulating that the sport of board-track racing ended because it was too dangerous and too many people got killed. It most certainly is a fact that a lot of people did get killed, and on one particularly tragic day in 1912, eight people lost their lives at the Motordrome in Newark, New Jersey: Two racers and six spectators, with a good number of others suffering injury. The real reason for the disappearance of board-track racing, though, was the tracks began to rot out and it was much cheaper to build and maintain dirt tracks. And so America's fascination with going sideways in the dirt developed further with emergence of class C racing, and as many fans of this exciting sport will attest, it is still certainly still very alive and well today.
While the machinery has made some drastic leaps in technology, the board-track racing era from 1909 to 1928 had much the same structure as modern racing today, with factory built racers like this 1914 Harley-Davidson being piloted by established stars running next to privateers on modified road bike
As dangerous as it was back then, board-track racing was still the most exciting spectacle the motorcycle enthusiast could enjoy, much like modern Superbike. And, delving back into the archives I came across an amusing account of an incident from a race after D. O. Kinnie's clothes were shredded from his body in a high-speed tumble. "With the crowd of onlookers who rushed to Kinnie's assistance were a large number of the fair sex, but these soon beat a hasty retreat when it was seen that he was not properly dressed to receive company."
Heading toward the back of the Wheels Through Time museum, I find Dale's board-track racer exhibit. Overshadowed by a huge mural of a board-track race in progress, there is a mixture of fully restored to actual condition race bikes on display, along with accompanying memorabilia and artifacts from the period. One of the prominently featured bikes in fully restored condition is a 1924 Harley-Davidson with a twin-cam racing engine in a Keystone racing frame. Raced by the Domnyan brothers, it uses a factory racing 61-cubic-inch engine (1,000cc) whose 40 horsepower powered the featherweight machine to speeds in excess of 100 mph. This example was fastidiously restored by one of America's top vintage restoration experts, Steve Hungtzinger. The bike is one of about six in existence and has a value of around $150,000.
Back in the early part of the 20th century there was a plethora of American motorcycle manufacturers competing in the fledgling industry, including Thor the maker of this battered 1913 design.
Sitting below the restored bikes is a row of original-condition equipment. Immediately drawing my eye to its battle-weary form, the 1913 Thor provokes a few questions. According to Dale, there were many American manufacturers around at this time, with such wonderful names as Cyclone, Pope, Jefferson, Excelsior, Henderson, Lightning-Bradly, Ace, and Emblem joining the still famous names of Harley-Davidson and Indian.
In the corner, a race bike with a leaning sidecar stands alone on a sloping display. A 61-cubic-inch Indian Daytona, it was built in 1920 and raced by the legendary Pop Dryer. With its flexible sidecar attached, it was regularly raced both on the boards and in the dirt. Behind the unit on the wall, an old poster informed me that Pop held 10-mile and a 25-mile speed records with this very machine. Completing a 25-mile race at Toledo, Ohio, back in 1921 in 21 minutes and 47 seconds (more than 60 mph average), he lapped nearly as quickly as the solo motorcycles of the day.
Right below it, Dale pointed out an original-condition 1921 single-cylinder Harley-Davidson SCA (single cylinder alcohol). As half a 61-cubic-inch Twin, the 500cc single is the only one left in the world out of six originally built and is valued at around $200,000.
This 1920 Indian Daytona saw action on the boards and the dirt, with racing legend Pop Dryer riding it to 10-mile and 25-mile speed records.
As we meander back through time, Dale tells me tales of past legends, such as E.G. "Cannonball" Baker, Jim Davis, Maldwin Jones and more, and shines a bright light back in modern motorcycling's glorious past.
Stopping to pause at beautifully restored 1924 JDCA 74-cubic-inch Harley-Davidson, I am fascinated to learn it is what was known as an "Outlaw" bike and is one of around 20 or 30 left. Raced in non-sanctioned events around the country, this particular bike was ridden by a gentleman by the name of Carl Doran, from Minneapolis. According to Dale there were never more than a few hundred bikes built for this type of racing, so a fully restored example is extremely rare.
As we walk back to Dale's office so I can take home some reference material, he tells me a little more about the emergence of class "C" racing at the end of the board track era. As a result of the depression, the class dictated that racers could only used stripped road models.
Passing decades of modern motorcycle history as we walk, the bridge to current AMA Superbike racing could not be clearer as we stop at Brad Andres' three-time Daytona 200 winner. Sitting proudly on the upper floor on the museum, it now lives amongst the 'new' generation of road racers that appeared in 1961, when Roger Reiman won the first Daytona 200 to be run on asphalt.
When it was time to go, leaving all the now-silent heroes behind, it feels good to know that a place like
Wheels Through Time exists to honor their memory and maintain this historical link to the motorcycles we currently ride.
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