Where legends live on..

Dodging the concrete

The Concrete Canyon article brought back memories of my own Concrete Canyon experiences. I raced a Yamaha TZ250E in the last motorcycle race held on the streets of Long Beach. The track was very bumpy and appeared incredibly narrow at speed. The only previous street circuit experience I had was the Southern 100 in the Isle of Man.

Compared to that Long Beach was short, more bumpy, but a lot of fun.

We all shared garage space with the car guys. The car mechanics were as fascinated by our machines as we were theirs. We were amazed when we saw them fit magnesium Dymag wheels and new motorcycle slick tyres to the cars to push them to the grid!

This was to avoid picking up debris on the race tyres. We’d have killed to have new Dymag wheels and new slicks, yet to them, they were just a tool!

Practice went pretty well, with riders getting used to racing on a street circuit. Fred Merkel decided to use a couple of us as braking markers, luckily little damage was done.

Come race day the crowd was huge and very interested in the bikes.

The race went off pretty well with only one bad accident, a talented female rider, Karen White, crashed out and broke her thigh.

While lying midfield, I underestimated my race aggression and ran out of fuel on the last lap! The whole experience was really fun and gave spectators a chance to see motorcycle racing on a surface other than dirt!

Thanks for the great article and the superb magazine.

Mick Ofield
Tennessee
USA

Thanks for sharing those great memories Mick. Have you still got the long hair? Malc