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This Cycle News Archives Column is reprinted from the March 4, 2009, issue. CN has hundreds of past Archives columns in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road -Editor.
The Original Quartz Hill Flyer
Quartz Hill is a little burg in the California’s High Desert region of the Antelope Valley, some 60 miles to the north of Los Angeles, nestled up against the north face of the San Gabriel Mountains. Motocross great Bob Hannah grew up in Quartz Hill and honed his riding skills in the nearby desert and mountain valleys. Right down the street from the Hannahs lived a buddy of Bob’s dad, Larry Wilburn. Before Hurricane Hannah came along, Wilburn could very well lay claim to being the best-known racer from Quartz Hill.
Wilburn, who is best remembered for finishing second to Mark Brelsford at the famous Ascot TT Grand National in 1969, never became a big name nationally. A major crash in the Houston TT in 1970 put the clamps on him chasing the National series, but during his racing career Wilburn gained the reputation of being one of the best TT specialists of his era. That was a major accomplishment, especially considering Wilburn never rode a motorcycle until he was 20 years old.
Wilburn grew up on an alfalfa farm. Although motorcycle riding always looked like a fun thing to do, he was always too involved in other things to take it up. That changed around 1957 when he watched a neighbor jump on his bike and head off to the desert mountains nearly every morning on the weekends. That neighbor happened to be Bill Hannah, Bob’s dad.
“I went over one time to talk with him when he came back from one of his rides,” said Wilburn of his first meeting with the guy everyone called “Wild Bill.” “He told me he liked to go riding up in the hills and I thought that sounded like a lot of fun. So, I went out and bought a 21-inch [350cc] Velocette. I rode the Velocette for a while and it didn’t work out very well, so I sold it and bought a 500 Matchless.
“I still couldn’t keep up with [Bill] Hannah on his Triumph, so finally I ran across a ’57 Bonneville and bought that. Bill was a fantastic balance rider. He could ride up these narrow and crooked mountain trails, and the deal with him, was if you touched your foot down you hadn’t made it. So I got to be a pretty good rider just trying to keep up with him.”
Bob Hannah remembers going to see Wilburn race when he was a kid.
“Larry was a talented guy,” Bob Hannah said. “My dad thought he was great, and we’d go watch him race down at Ascot and other places. He was an innovative builder, too. After he quit racing, he made some really fast bikes for Tom Horton and helped out the Bevins boys, who raced out of the Yamaha shop in Lancaster.”
The elder Hannah and Wilburn traveled around the area and ran a couple “outlaw” hillclimbs. Another neighbor of Wilburn’s wanted to start racing, and he wanted Larry to come along and race, too.
“He told me, ‘Man, as good as you are, you ought to start racing.’ So the first race we went to was a quarter-mile short-track race out in Barstow. I took that old ’57 dirt bike out there with knobbies on it. I ran up against Steve Scott on a Bultaco and he ended up beating me, but I thought, ‘Man this is a lot of fun.’”
Feeling good about his first outing in Barstow, Wilburn decided to go up to Hart Park in Bakersfield. There he raced in the Novice class but was mesmerized by watching the “Bakersfield Bomb Squad” as Expert racers Sid Payne, Clark White, Dave Palmer and Digger Helm were called.
“We were watching those guys go around, and I thought, ‘Man, this is something else.’ I guess watching them really made me want to get more serious about racing.”
Wilburn worked his way up through the Novice and Amateur ranks and eventually became an Expert. Along the way, he became close friends with Jim Hunter, and those two ended up battling for the District 37 number-one plate in 1965. In fact, Wilburn’s friendship with Hunter might have ended up costing him the prestigious District title.
“We were running one and two in the battle for the championship,” Wilburn recalls. “Just before the start of a race down in Perris, Hunter’s BSA Goldstar wouldn’t start. I asked him what was wrong, and he said ‘I don’t know. It won’t start, it just won’t start!’ I took the mag cover off and found that the points had come loose. We tightened it up, put it back together and he won the race and beat me out for the championship by 11 points.”
Wilburn’s mom became an enthusiastic race fan of her son’s racing, so much so that at one event she tried to hit a rider who was blocking Larry with her purse. She missed and fell, breaking her wrist in the process.
As a Junior, Wilburn nearly got a major victory in the Ascot TT 10-lap Junior National. He’d won the pole, setting a track record, and led the race by a straightaway when his Triumph started running on one cylinder.
“I was running NGK sparkplugs in qualifying,” said Wilburn. “After I set fast time, the Champion Spark Plug guys came over and told me that if I ran their plugs, they’d give me 50 dollars. They ran pretty good for about five laps and then the bike went on one cylinder and Jimmy Odom and Mark Brelsford caught and passed me and I ended up third.”
Wilburn wanted to turn Pro since his increasing racing schedule was starting to get expensive. Triumph’s race manager Pete Coleman agreed to help, but after turning Expert in 1966, Wilburn mostly confined his racing to the West Coast. Being a family man and having a nine-to-five job as a rocket-motor builder on Edwards Air Force Base meant chasing the Grand Nationals wasn’t a realistic possibility.
He ran some short tracks, but TT racing was his specialty. He also gained a reputation as a great builder during this time. At a time when Skip Van Leeuwen was between rides, he rode Wilburn’s Triumphs and won with them.
When asked to compare the factory Triumphs to Wilburn’s machine, Van Leeuwen had good things to say. “Believe it or not, it was a step up riding Larry’s bike,” he says. “He was a racer and knew exactly how to set the bike up. The suspension was perfect and little things like the handlebars being in the right place, the shift lever set up just right so you could get your boot under it. To me he was one of the top three tuners in the business.”
Wilburn’s brightest moment as a racer came in July of 1969 in the Ascot TT Grand 50-lap National in which he rode his 650cc Triumph Twin TT Special. It was there that he finished second to Mark Brelsford (in Brelsford’s first National win).
“It was a pretty long race, and I didn’t know what position I was in,” Wilburn says. “I knew I was midpack or maybe better. I started driving harder and harder and remember passing some of the top guys. I passed Nixon, Markel and Romero. That really pumped me up, and I knew after passing those guys that I had to be running up front somewhere. I got to where I could see one guy way up there when I came on the front straightaway. Pretty soon the checkered flag came out and they came over and told me I got second to Mark Brelsford, who was riding what they called “Goliath”—the big factory Harley.
“It was big payday: I made $875,” Wilburn laughs.
After his stellar Ascot performance, everyone told Wilburn that he should ride the entire Grand National Championship. So that’s what he planned to do in 1970. But things went awry at the first race in the Houston Astrodome.
At the Houston TT National things started fine enough for Wilburn. He did well in qualifying and his heat race, earning a front-row start. In the National, Wilburn said he was keeping an eye on Dick Mann and Mert Lawwill, who were just ahead of him, when a rider crashed, giving Wilburn no place to go.
“I hit him and went down,” he said. “Then a rider behind me crashed into me and broke some ribs off my back. That ended my racing career.”
As Wilburn recuperated, Van Leeuwen rode his bike. That started Wilburn’s career as a race tuner—something he continues to this day. Tom Horton, who won Junior Nationals on Wilburn’s bike before getting a factory Yamaha ride in the early ’70s, is a leading AHRMA racer today on Wilburn-built Triumphs.
Wilburn continued to ride desert around his home in Rosamond, California well into his 70s. He remained loyal to Triumph and continued to be a go-to guy when it came to making the vintage British machines run like they should. CN
Wilburn was inducted into the Trailblazers Hall of Fame in 2010. Sadly, on March 4, 2013, Wilburn passed away in an off-road motorcycle accident in Arizona. – Editor.
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