| July 28, 2024
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
It was the best of times…
By Kent Taylor
Curse it, if you wish, the bland, disillusioning years of the 1970s. Five more years of Vietnam, the Watergate scandal, disco music and the invention of perhaps the greatest oxymoron of all time, the leisure suit. Toss in elephant bellbottom pants, stuff it all inside the AMC Gremlin, and it is fair game to wonder if anything good happened during this decade.
New Zealand’s Geoff Perry (right) chats with Cal Rayborn at the Road Atlanta National in 1973. By the end of the year, both riders had lost their lives.
Anything, that is, except AMA road racing, which, at least in the early to mid-’70s, was pretty darn groovy. From the Daytona 200 of 1973 to the running of the Daytona 200 in 1974, road racing in the USA. experienced perhaps its greatest era, a time when the world’s best riders and the motorcycle companies’ most sophisticated machinery would all be found at race paddocks in America. It was a time of metamorphosis, technologically and, sadly, tragically. To borrow from Charles Dickens, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.”
Right smack dab in the middle of it was an AMA National Road Race in Flowery Branch, Georgia. A winding course that one journalist brilliantly described as “sinewy,” Road Atlanta’s 1973 June event provided drama all weekend long. Watchful eyes looked to the skies, waiting for inclement weather that never arrived. Top racers and tuners, like Gary Nixon and Irv Kanemoto, battled with mechanical gremlins. And every rider took at least a moment to pause and reflect on a road racing crash three weeks earlier that had taken the lives of two of their fellow competitors, Jarno Saarinen and Renzo Pasolini. Both men had shared the racetrack with these AMA riders just months earlier at Daytona.
Every major team was on hand at Road Atlanta, along with several private entries that could give the factory-sponsored riders a good run for their money. The 1973 season was also a year when American-born riders weren’t winning America’s races. Outsiders from Finland, Australia and Canada were getting those wins. It would happen again this day at Road Atlanta, when a 23-year-old New Zealand rider named Geoff Perry would stand atop the victory podium.
“Geoff was a really good guy, who came from a motorcycling family,” said Don Emde, who was briefly a teammate with Perry for U.S. Suzuki. In 1972, Emde was a beneficiary of Perry’s misfortune at the Daytona 200. Leading with just one lap remaining, Perry’s Suzuki snapped its drive chain, handing the win over to Emde, who was riding a Yamaha 350. Both men would return to Daytona in 1973, this time as teammates on the bright blue Suzukis.
“It [racing] was in his blood,” Emde said. Indeed, Geoff Perry’s father, Len, was a well-known racer in their home country, and he had young Geoff on his own motorcycle by the time he was eight years old. As a young adult, Geoff worked briefly as an airplane mechanic, but the major companies were noticing his skills, and after winning three New Zealand road race championships, Suzuki brought Perry to America to race in the AMA series.
The 23-year-old Perry won his first and last AMA National at Road Atlanta in 1973.
The Road Atlanta National began in the same fashion as many of the road racing events of that era, with the biggest of the crackling two-strokes out in front as Kawasaki’s Yvon Duhamel and Suzuki’s Paul Smart battled early for the top position. Neither man would finish, however, with Smart crashing in a hairpin corner and Duhamel running so far off the track that Cycle News wrote, “Yvon did some riding in the fields that could’ve won money in Saturday’s motocross.”
The scrum for first place was now between Yamaha teammates Kenny Roberts and Kel Carruthers, but closing rapidly on the duo was Perry on his Suzuki. He would first displace Roberts, then take the lead from Carruthers on lap 11. The race, according to CN, “became a well-executed demonstration of the art of road racing with all the speed, skill, and savvy mixed into an explosive package that was pure dynamite.”
Farther back, Kawasaki’s Duhamel had gotten back on track, figuratively and literally, and was closing on the leaders, shaving off two seconds per lap. But there was not enough time to catch the Perry/Carruthers battle, who would exchange the lead twice on the white flag lap, setting up a fantastic finish.
Carruthers led into the final corner and had a “tremendous drive off the high line.” Unfortunately, the former World champ also had a tremendous wobble at the very same moment, giving Perry, who had cut in tight and inside, the break he needed. The big Suzuki crossed the finish line just inches ahead of Carruthers, making this Road Atlanta finish one of the closest ever in an AMA road race.
After three years of trying and coming oh-so-close, Perry had won his first AMA road race. He returned to New Zealand; one month later, on July 22, he boarded Pan Am flight 816 to return to the U.S. for a testing session at Laguna Seca. The flight departed Auckland before stopping in Tahiti to refuel. From there, the flight continued non-stop to San Francisco.
Shortly after takeoff from Tahiti’s Faa’a International Airport, the plane inexplicably veered hard left. A loud cracking sound was heard and the plane, a Boeing 707, plunged into the South Pacific Ocean. One man survived; the crew of 10, along with 79 passengers, perished. No official cause has ever been listed for the crash, and the flight data and cockpit recorder were never found. Geoff Perry’s body was never recovered.
One month after Perry’s death, a racing crash at the British Grand Prix claimed the life of another fellow New Zealand road racer, Kim Newcombe. And in December 1973, Cal Rayborn, a two-time Daytona 200 winner, lost his life in another racing crash at an event held, oddly enough, in New Zealand. Rayborn, a longtime Harley-Davidson rider, had just signed a deal with Suzuki, presumably to take Perry’s vacant seat.
Rayborn’s death took place on December 29, near the end of a year that had become a very dark season for motorcycle road racing. 1973 had delivered great competition and exciting finishes, but when the year ended, the grid was missing five of our greatest racers.
…It was the worst of times. CN
