Larry Lawrence | October 17, 2021
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
This Cycle News Archives Column is reprinted from the November 21, 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.
Many of the most influential off-road racers of the 1960s are practically household names among motorcycle enthusiasts. Rider such as Bud Ekins, Malcolm Smith, John Penton and Preston Petty immediately come to mind when one thinks of big-name off-road riders of that era but ask the riders who raced during that time and many of them will mention Walt Axthelm as one of the best off-road racers of that period.
Axthelm was one of the first Americans to compete in the prestigious International Six Day Trials (now called the International Six Day Enduro). He won numerous off-road events in Southern California during his racing career, including a class in the popular Catalina Grand Prix. He rode with factory backing from BSA, Jawa, Suzuki and Kawasaki during his 30-year racing career.
Axthelm was born in Upland, Pennsylvania, in 1933. His family moved to Southern California when he was 14 years old, and he took up riding. He lived in Compton, and in the afternoons, he would go down to the Los Angeles riverbed and practice riding until dark. By the time he was 17, he’d begun racing his first true motorcycle, a rigid-framed Royal Enfield, which had no rear suspension and all of two inches of front fork travel.
“One of the first races I entered was the Big Bear Run in 1951, a big race they held annually in Southern California,” Axthelm said. “It was one of the two big events we looked forward to every year, the other one being Catalina Island. The Big Bear Run started in the desert and made a big loop from the Lucerne Valley out to Barstow and then up a canyon to Fawnskin up at Big Bear. It was about a 180-mile-long hare & hound.
“The race went across some dry-lake beds, but that first year I rode it, they weren’t dry,” he recounted. “It was so gooey that the muck built up in my back wheel and it locked up solid. I had to take my back fender off just so I could get out of there.”
Axthelm wasn’t discouraged by his racing debut. He began racing in scrambles events on an AJS in Palos Verdes, gradually working his way up to become one of the leading off-road racers in Southern California. His first sponsored ride came in 1954, when he was backed by Louie Thomas’ BSA shop in East L.A.
Riding a BSA Gold Star scrambler in 1955, Axthelm earned the District 37 (Southern California) number-one plate.
“They threw everything in together,” Axthelm said of the points chase. “Desert races, scrambles and everything to get your points.”
“Walt won the AMA District 37 high-point championship when there were a lot of great champions competing,” said fellow off-road legend Dave Ekins. “I always thought of myself as the king of the 250s, but Walt showed everyone how good he was on a 250 the year he won the 250 race at Catalina.”
The Catalina Grand Prix that Ekins spoke of was the high point of the racing season on the West Coast. In 1956, Axthelm won Saturday’s featured 50-mile race and then scored second, behind Chuck Minert, in Sunday’s 100-mile final.
Walt remembers Catalina as a great racing circuit. “It was unique in that we started in town [Avalon] and started on the road that went up to the airport,” he said. “It didn’t go far before it ran out of pavement and went to dirt. It went up on fire roads and then came back down to the golf course on what they call the hour trail. It then crossed the golf course and picked up pavement again coming back into town. They had a nice high-speed jump coming down on the pavement. “We had to find a nice combination tire that worked well on the fire roads as well as on the pavement in town,” he noted. “It was an interesting course. It was kind of a Grand Prix course that they later picked up doing again over at Elsinore.”
Walt went on to explain that the race bikes would be loaded en masse on a barge on Thursday to go to the island. Riders were not able to practice the course, but Walt and some of his buddies figured out a way around that.
“We would always try to get on the haybale crew so we could at least drive around the course setting hay bales so we could see what the course was like,” Axthelm said.
Looking back on his victory in Catalina’s 50-Miler, Walt remembered a run-in with Triumph flat-track rider Don Hawley.
“I knew how aggressive Don was from track racing,” Walt said. “He had a reputation for running into people. We came out of a corner heading up to the golf course, and Don got inside of me, and coming out, he reached over with one arm and gave me a big thump on the chest. I thought, ‘Whoa, what’s with this guy?’”
Off the track, Axthelm became a draftsman. He was involved early in computerized drafting, and he put his skills to work in the aviation industry. He worked on solid modeling and became a contract engineer for Boeing. He also had a Suzuki shop in Pomona that he ran with partners in the 1970s.
By the early 1960s, Walt had moved from riding the big four-strokes to the lighter, nimbler two-stroke off-road machines. He began riding Jawas and CZs, and that led to an opportunity to compete in the ISDT. The U.S. Jawa importer helped set up the trip to Austria for Axthelm.
“They supplied me with a motorcycle, put me up in a hotel, and took care of my expenses,” Axthelm said. “At the time, it was thought that I was the first American to compete in the ISDT, and that’s the way they advertised it.”
His bike seized on the first day, putting him out of the competition.
Axthelm went back to the ISDT as part of the American team at the Isle of Man in 1965. It was held in horrible conditions that year, and he said all the Americans were out of the competition by the third day.
As his career progressed, Axthelm specialized in the burgeoning long-distance off-road races of the late 1960s and 1970s such as the Baja 1000, the Parker 400, the Tecate GP, and other events of that type. Walt raced and tested some of Suzuki’s early TM250 off-road prototype bikes. He later worked with R&D for Kawasaki, racing for the factory in desert races.
By 1980, Axthelm was in his late 40s, and he decided to retire after getting hit by a big rock thrown up by a racing pickup truck in one of the long-distance desert races.
“I decided that it wasn’t fun anymore,” he said. “I had a small sailboat at Dana Point and just packed it up and went sailing, and that was it.”
Axthelm said that after growing old and fat drafting on a computer all day, he decided to take up mountain biking. He found his competitive spirit was still very much alive, and he became one of the nation’s top senior mountain-bike racers. In 2007, he won the overall cycling jersey in the National Senior Games. He’s now retired and lives in Durango, Colorado, and trains almost daily for bicycling competitions.CN
