Larry Lawrence | May 15, 2022
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
Brelsford’s Grand National Debut
Mark Brelsford looked up and gazed at the vastness of the Houston Astrodome, wide-eyed and quite frankly, amazed at his luck. He was 19 years old, a rookie expert about to compete in his first AMA Grand National weekend and, oh yeah, he was a factory Harley-Davidson rider.
It was 1969 and the teenaged Californian was about to step off into uncharted territory. Not only would he now be racing against the top pros in the country, but it was also the first year an AMA TT National was held in the Astrodome, so it was new to everyone, and finally Brelsford would be racing a new production motorcycle built by Harley, totally unproven in Grand National racing. Brelsford had about a half-hour of informal testing on the bike before the national weekend. Such was the stage facing the rookie pro. Perhaps it was better he was just 19, kids tend not to grasp the gravity of the moment.
At the 1969 Houston TT, rookie Mark Brelsford (No. 87) had a tall task trying to match TT specialist Skip Van Leeuwen (No. 59) with Skip’s experience and the power advantage of his 650cc Triumph.
The very fact that Brelsford was riding a factory Harley-Davidson was in itself a fluke. The year before he was traveling with Jimmy Odom, racing as an amateur on a BSA Gold Star out of Sonny Kenyon’s motorcycle shop in Mountain View, California. Brelsford was doing well on the BSA, especially on TT tracks, but then came Brelsford’s first Mile. It was at the Portland Meadows Horse Track and the BSA just didn’t have the power to run competitively on the big horsepower-hungry track. When Brelsford first took to the track he thought everything was fine.
“It was great getting out on that big track and running the Gold Star wide open,” Brelsford recalled. “It felt great at first, but then I noticed I was getting passed a lot on the straights. Jimmy [Odom] was watching and knew I was in trouble. So unbeknownst to me, Jimmy went over and talked to Dudley Perkins and told him, ‘Mark’s not going to be able to do crap out there, because that BSA is too slow.’ Dudley told Jimmy that he’d allow me to ride Mert’s [Lawwill] spare KR.”
Jimmy told Brelsford’s sponsor Sonny Kenyon about the opportunity for Brelsford to ride one of Lawwill’s spare factory bikes.
“Now, Sonny was such a good guy, and he knew just how to handle it,” Brelsford explained. “Sonny knew I was loyal and wouldn’t want to jump ship and abandon his team, even with Dudley’s Harley offer. So, to make it an easy decision for me, he came up to me and said, ‘Bad news kid, we found some metal in the oil of your bike.’ Now I found out later there was never any shavings in the oil, but Sonny wanted me to have the opportunity to ride the factory Harley, and he knew that way I wouldn’t feel bad for doing it.”
Brelsford had never ridden a Harley before, much less on a Mile. Perkins was the head of the AMA’s Northern California district and as Brelsford says, “He had pull, to put it lightly.” So, after all the practice sessions were over, Perkins arranged for Brelsford to have three practice laps, all by himself on a freshly groomed track.
Runner up Mark Brelsford (No. 87) and winner Skip Van Leeuwen (No. 59) share a laugh at the trophy presentation. The two were good friends. When Brelsford was an amateur, Van Leeuwen would let him ride his spare bike at the weekly Ascot Park racing program in Gardena, California.
“I’ll never forget it, I got on that Harley, and it felt like it was turning zero RPMs. I thought it was a dog,” Brelsford said. “I couldn’t believe it was a factory bike. But then I came across the finish line at the end of that practice and before I shut off, I realized ‘Oh shit, I am flying into this corner!’”
Luckily before Brelsford went out for his special practice session, Lawwill had given him an important pointer. “He told me if I get a little sideways in the corner to just whack the throttle wide open,” Brelsford said. “I got into that turn and thought I was going to put it into the fence. Then I remembered what Mert told me, so I flicked it over, twisted the throttle wide open and the thing somehow made the turn.”
Brelsford went on to dominate the amateur national that day kicking off a great new relationship with Harley-Davidson. Brelsford rode the Harley the rest of the year and went on to become AMA Amateur National Champion. After the final race at Ascot that season, Harley’s racing boss Dick O’Brien asked if Brelsford could meet him before he was to fly out the next day. After the meeting Brelsford was a freshly signed factory rider.
“Then I remembered what Mert told me, so I flicked it over, twisted the throttle wide open and the thing somehow made the turn.”
So, everything was set for Brelsford’s rookie pro campaign. He’d be traveling and teaming with Lawwill. Mert would work on his bikes out of Dudley Perkins’ Harley shop in San Francisco. They were getting fairly close to the Houston season opener when a surprise showed up at the shop. Brand new Harley-Davidson/Aermacchi 350cc ERS Sprint Scramblers. But they weren’t the factory specials Brelsford was hoping for.
“They were just showroom stock bikes, just like the old Sprints but with a little bigger engine,” Brelsford remembers. “Mert was busy, so he told me, ‘This is it, I guess. Just strip the bike down and put a big sprocket on it.’”
After the bikes were prepped, Lawwill and Brelsford loaded up the Sprints and headed to a spot in Daly City where Brelsford had been riding for years.
“It was an area they’d graded for development, and I had a flat track set up there, and we did a few laps on the bikes. We stopped and Mert said, ‘Not much power, huh?’ ” Brelsford recalls. “And he was right, I think they only had 29 horsepower, but the bike felt good, and I thought I might be able to do well at the TT on it.”
O’Brien figured the TT course in the Astrodome would be so tight, that the 350s would be the way to go instead of the 750s. They arrived only to find the track actually was better suited to the big twins. Qualifying was mostly dominated by 650cc BSA and Triumphs. For the first time it was the British bikes that held a displacement advantage over the Harleys. In fact, of all the Harley riders only Brelsford and Lawwill qualified for the national. The other factory Harley riders, Bart Markel, Fred Nix, Dan Haaby and Walt Fulton all watched from the sidelines.
In the main, TT master Skip Van Leeuwen took the lead at the start but got out of shape over the jump and yielded to another big Triumph of Dusty Coppage. A couple of turns later 20,000 fans collectively cheered with delight when the rookie Brelsford, on the underdog Harley, took over the lead.
Did Brelsford get nervous when he realized he was leading his first national in front of a screaming throng?
“I wasn’t focused on that,” Brelsford explained. “I was just riding like a wild man going as fast as I possibly could. Pretty soon I see a tire edging up on me.”
Mark Brelsford was a 19-year-old rookie and factory Harley-Davidson rider when he scored a podium in his pro debut weekend.
It was Van Leeuwen, who had recovered, passed Coppage and was now laying some black rubber down on the leg of the Brelsford’s leathers.
“Skip and I were really good friends because he’d let me race his spare [Triumph] 650 the year before at the weekly Ascot races,” Brelsford said. “He was going a little faster than I was, and he was rubbing my leg, honking the horn, more or less letting, me know, ‘Hey let me by, or I’m going to have to knock you down.’ He was nice enough to give me a warning, so I let him by and followed him to the checkered flag. I was happy as can be to get second.”
As well he should have been. A rookie in his first AMA Grand National main event, on a new track, a new untested and underpowered motorcycle, and he nails down a runner-up finish? It goes down as one of the all-time great debuts in the history of the series.
Brelsford would later win the AMA Grand National Championship in 1972, and he tells me there’s another great Houston Astrodome story to go along with that, “That’ll be one for another day,” he says.CN
