Larry Lawrence | October 24, 2021
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
This Cycle News Archives Column is reprinted from the October 24, 2007 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.
Loudon Lost
Every fall, when the AMA releases its road-racing schedule for next year’s season, I always hope against hope that the Classic road race in Loudon, New Hampshire, would somehow mysteriously reappear. Perhaps some top-secret agreement had been reached, track changes would be made, and we’d, once again, hear the roar of Superbikes echoing off the newly green New England hillsides as summer kicked off in earnest.
Alas, Loudon is lost, maybe forever.
The Loudon Classic (known until the 1960s as the Laconia Classic) was one of the oldest, most prestigious races in all of motorcycle racing. New England motorcycle clubs were early proponents of the AMA’s new Class C racing rules of the early 1930s. The Great Depression hit the motorcycling industry hard, and Indian was quick to get behind the new production racing class in hopes of jump-starting sluggish sales. It didn’t hurt that Indian, based not far away in Springfield, Massachusetts, made the Sport Scout, an excellent sporting machine in its day.
Motorcycle clubs all over the Northeast got together in June each year to celebrate the opening of summer in annual Gypsy Tours (so called because in those pre-motel days riders camped in large gatherings like gypsies). Riders from New York, Philadelphia, Montreal and Boston would converge on the Lakes Region starting as early as the late 1910s. Races were always part of the equation, but the AMA’s new Class C TT races that started in the 1930s became a major destination of the tours. The Classic started in Swanzey, New Hampshire, and temporarily moved to Old Orchard, Maine, before settling in Laconia and the Belknap Recreation Area in 1938. (Note: Belknap, now called Gunstock Mountain Resort, is actually located about seven miles east of Laconia in Gilford, New Hampshire.)
From the very beginning, Laconia was a race that attracted the best riders from across the country. New England racers emerged as national stars by running with and often beating the national stars. This would prove to be a reoccurring theme of Laconia and Loudon throughout the 60-plus-year history of the event.
Babe Tancrede, the greatest rider Rhode Island ever produced won the inaugural TT, held in Swanzey in 1934. Hometown hero Hanford Marshall won the race in ’36. Aggressive rider Lester Hillbis of Reading, Pennsylvania, won the TT held in Orchard Park in 1937. Early Class C races were primarily made up of riders from the region of the racetrack. That all changed beginning in the late 1930s, when the country began to recover from the Depression and factories began to pay riders to travel nationally to compete in the bigger events. The Classic went big-time when it moved to Laconia in 1938. To improve its chances of winning the growing-in-prestige event, Indian brought in Ed Kretz, Class C’s first big star, who hailed from Pomona, California.
Kretz was the first rider from outside the Northeast to win Laconia, beating out local up-and-comer Ben Campanale in the 1938 race. The event was changed forever. The Laconia TT was now a truly national happening, right up there with Daytona.
The Laconia Rally gradually became a weeklong event, with many motorcyclists arriving earlier in the week. After World War II, returning G.I.s were eager to get out and ride, and party. Local businesses dependent upon tourism became ardent supporters of the rally. It brought increased business during the early part of the relatively short tourist season, and residents and local governments embraced the event all the way to the bank through the mid-1960s, when the increasing rowdiness of the huge crowds, now numbering in the tens of thousands, started getting a bit out of hand.
The Harley-Davidson/Indian wars reached a fever pitch at Laconia in the late 1940s, with Harley coming in and winning Indian’s home National more often than not. Dick Klamfoth and Ed Fisher ushered in the Brit bikes with wins on Nortons and Triumphs in the early 1950s. Joe Leonard and Brad Andres had remarkable battles at Laconia in the mid-to-late 1950s.
A riot during race weekend at Weirs Beach on Lake Winnipesaukee in 1965 made national headlines. That year, the National was moved 20 miles south of Belknap to the new 1.6-mile Bryar Motorsports Park in Loudon, and the race gradually became known as the Loudon Classic.
Gary Nixon dominated the races at Loudon in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In 1972, Gary Fisher won the race his father had 19 years earlier.
Loudon hosted a slew of club races every summer, and the locals got very fast. Loudon club racing heroes such as Rich Schlachter, Nick Richichi, Mike Baldwin and John Bettencourt burst into national consciousness by winning at the Loudon Classic. Boston-area rider Dale Quarterley made one of the greatest passes in AMA Superbike history at Loudon in ’84 in the last turn on the last lap of a heat race when he stuffed his Kawasaki inside Fred Merkel, neither giving an inch as Quarterley nipped the factory Honda rider at the line.
The partying that went on at Loudon was legendary. It seemed that half the attendees at the old Bryar Motorsports Park barely knew there was a race going on. The crazies up on the hill on the back side of the track had impromptu hillclimbs on their street bikes. Who could forget the guy in the early 1980s on a new Honda CBX urged on by hundreds of shouting onlookers blasting up the hill in a drunken haze in the middle of the night and crashing through a bonfire well past the impromptu finish line? Or the bottle-rocket fights that escalated until combatants broke out actual commercial display fireworks—the kind you see in big Fourth of July shows—and fired them through the woods at one another. It looked like something out of the movie Apocalypse Now. And then, of course, there were the obligatory sticks of dynamite that would go off and shake the paddock at all hours—day and night.
It wasn’t just the spectators that partied hard at Loudon. The riders seem to get into the spirit of the place. Late-night rental-car races on the short track were almost as entertaining as the motorcycle races. Kenny Roberts, who raced for Goodyear at the time, once shot down a giant floating Michelin Man at Loudon with a 22-rifle shot from inside his motorhome.
Jamie James won the final race on the old Bryar Motorsports Park circuit in 1989. Bob Bahre bought the decaying track and built a big NASCAR speedway in its place with a unique road course that traveled outside the oval section of the track. Long-timers claim that Loudon was never the same, but the crowds still came, though they were slightly less rowdy. The locals, who honed their skills club racing there, also still gave the national riders a run for their money every June.
Unfortunately, things at Loudon ended ugly. Rider boycotts, track owners shouting threats at AMA officials, and too many career-ending injuries rang the death knell of the Loudon Classic.
In 2001, Eric Bostrom won the final AMA National at Loudon in front of nearly empty grandstands on a Monday after the race was rained out on Sunday.
The Loudon Classic lumbers on today, featuring a club race. A shadow of its former self, the money brought in by the once-enormous crowds that filled local businesses’ coffers during Loudon’s Bike Week has dwindled to chump change. The track makes too much money off its NASCAR dates to worry about making expensive changes for the motorcycles.
It’s a shame because, warts and all, you still felt the history, the excitement, the importance of the race every year when you went to New Hampshire in June.CN
