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In the Groove!
Here's a truly classic shot of Kickstarters MC member Bill Hawryluk,
pretty well the last Kickstarter to leave rubber/leather on Westwood
Track, taken in the mid to late '60s. Here, Bill shows the classic
concentration of a born roadracer as he prepares to wind it back on,
once he gets up enough rpm after having just apexed the renowned 15mph
hairpin turn at the end of the ton-plus - and ending in a mild downhill!
- straightaway. If you can't smell the "R," and if your eardrums aren't
spazzing from the big single pulsations, you were never there!
Bill, or "Har," as he was known to his friends, was a consistent race winner in the 50s and 60s in the Greater Vancouver area. He rode trials, scrambles, hill climbs, enduros, and, as shown here, also roadraced.
The Bike
Bill's riding a classic Privateer Goldstar. Note the stock 8-in SLS front brake - the really serious (and well-heeled) guys had giant TLS Fontanas! (This was well before disk brakes had been adapted to motorcycles.) The bike is undoubtedly well-prepared to go the distance, and tuned as perfectly as an experienced racer and professional machinist can be expected to tune, but it is an essentially stock off-the-showroom floor DBD34 Goldstar - and one of many to be found on such tracks in The Day. The following weekend, many of them could be found equipped with knobbie tires and cheater sprocket, at a local scrambles. (Read a natural-terrain motocross.) Or hillclimb. Or flat track. Or even, God Help Us - a drag race!
The "Goldie" was the last of the general-purpose motocycles - and motorcyclists, come to that!
What doesn't show is worth remembering, too! Did I mention he
used to bring his junk to the track thrown against an old tire or two against
one side of a U-haul utility trailer - the kind people used to haul yard waste
and such to the dump? Har would usually show up about 10 min. before the first
heat, yank the thing off the trailer, get someone to hold the throttle for
a little warm-up while he got into his leathers, and roll out to the start
line for the beginning of the day's fun. Very rarely showed up for practice
- unless he'd made some major change to the bike (like a new piston or some
such); his attitude seemed to be, "ready or not, here we go." And
more often than not, he took home a trophy for his class. (Whatever that was
- did we still use Stock, Modified, and Racing for each engine size, and go
with that? I think so. Jr., Sr., and Expert? Jrs used stock bikes, by the time
they got much into Modified, they were about Srs, too, and by the time they
managed to finagle a Manx, G45, 7R, etc., they were about right to be called
Experts, no? But the Goldies were all Modifieds, I think.
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