This Thursday, December 4th will be our annual POG Family Night meeting. The meeting will begin at 7pm at the usual KTM meeting room, Amherst, Ohio. We usually have a slightly abbreviated business meeting followed by an interesting presentation by one of our own, a special guest, or a combination of those possibilities...
We always order in some pizza and have soft drinks along with some goodies that the POG gals bring along if they so desire. This is an evening of fellowship and we encourage everyone to feel free to bring their family members and friends along.
We may even get to sing few Christmas songs.
Hope to see you there.
Paul
Paul,
I'll be there with a good stock of 2009 Penton Calendars.
I wish this meeting was on a Saturday, or even a Friday. I'd have a much greater chance to attend.
I always love being with you folks.
Have a wonderful fun evening - and thanks to the executive Poggers for keeping this machine well oiled, and running up front.
If you care for any suggestions on future topics, for upcoming meetings (like Feb.'s). There's a great story behind the time Dane and the Penton bros went Endurance Road Racing at Nelsons Ledge (? was that the name of the track ?) Another good Penton story. :)
Bawb
I had forgotten about the Nelson Ledges (that was the name of the track)(Near Warren, Ohio) thing, but of all of the Penton stories on a multitude of topics that is one that we have never heard about. Trust Bob to jog the old memory banks and come up with it.
And, I know that it did happen, 'cause I was there. A bunch of us made the trek from Ottawa, Ontario every year for a number of years and enjoyed a fair amount of success in the end. It was in one of my first years there (1977?)that I was sort of aware that there some of the Penton guys were there. There was also a very fast team on a Can-Am as well. We were running a Yamaha DS7 250 - the level of the equipment escalated very quickly in the next few years - that was about the last time that you could run converted dirt bikes etc. and be half way competitive.
A couple of other off-topic memories related to that: I remember seeing Ed Hertfelder of Duct Tapes fame crashed out in the back of a cube van sleeping away among the noise of the generators and the general all-night activity. The next time I saw him was almost 30 years later, just out of the corner of my eye, somewhere up near the summit that we crossed over on Day 2 of the 2003 Reunion Ride!
Also, I remember that a crew from Motorcyclist Magazine - Art Friedman, Jeff Karr et al, showed up once with a totally trick Suzuki GS550. Some guy made the mistake of showing up to crew for them - on his Suzuki GS550 street bike. By the end of the 24 hours there was more of that street bike on the race bike than vice versa. They actually would have been further ahead to start on the street bike, which (kind of like the 6 Days) was one of the keys to doing well in that event: to finish 1st, 1st you have to finish.
Anyway, thanks Bob for stirring those memories and I look forward to hearing more from some of those who were there.
Mike
The Nelson Ledges 24 Hour event, was something that we had no idea about, but there were some friends that worked at Avon Suzuki, that did the race a few times. These friends also rode off road stuff most of the time, but they got interested in the road race too.
During some discussions with these guys, they said that we should give it a try. Basically, they said that if we didn't fall down, we'd probably win the race, at least our class. My thought about falling down on a road race track, is that you're going to be seriously hurt, compared to just falling down in the dirt.
So Jack decided that maybe we should give it a try, and so we took Jack's 1975 CB400F and got it ready to race it. The only thing that we did to the stock machine, was put a second headlight on it so we'd have better lighting, and better tires for the track. We took off the turn signals because we didn't need them. Otherwise, it was totally stock.
Tom Penton, Jack Penton, and I were on the team, and we got going when the race started. We'd ride about an hour per person and then change out the rider and just do the best we could.
One of my first thoughts about doing the race, was it was "boring", because you just rode around and around the same track, hour after hour.
During the race, I didn't have a clue of where we were in our class, but things seemed to be going OK. We didn't have any mechanical problems and since the bike was a stocker, there were other bikes that would blow by us because of the performance of their machines. The most noticeable machine to me, was the RD350's. They would be much faster than our CB400.
In the early morning on Sunday, after the sun started to come up, Jack was on the bike, and he was going around the Carosel turn, and he saw a chain laying on the track in front of him. Since we had the stock exhaust on the bike, there was only so far that you could lay the bike over to the right side. If you went too far, the exhaust would drag on the ground, so rather than trying to cut inside of the chain laying on the track, Jack straightened up the bike, and rode off the track on the left side. Since there was dew on the grass, obviously, it was very slippery, and he got the bike slowed down quite a bit before he actually tipped over.
When he stopped, Jack picked up the bike, scrapped some much out from the exhaust, and then pushed it back onto the track, and rode back to the pits, to have things fixed up. The right side of the handle bars were bent a little and the extra headlight was almost knocked off.
Since we weren't road racers, we didn't know everything about the rules about road racing. When you fall down, you weren't supposed to have the bike back on the track. You were supposed to have the bike picked up on a trailer and hauled it back to the pits. But since we were off road guys and since the bike was still "working", he just rode it back to the pits so we could get it back on the track.
We took off the extra headlight and worked on the right side of the handlebars, to get them back straight. The bars were actually a three piece construction, and when we bent the right side back to straight, we cracked one of the joints. So we got out the torch and brazed things back together and then put the bike back together and then Jack hit the track again.
After Jack went out on the track, one of the people from the organization came over to our pits and asked us what happened to our team and the bike. We told the guy what happened and he then asked us if the bike had been inspected after the repairs were done. Since we were all at the pits, we didn't know if Jack had the bike inspected again. The guy said that they didn't have a reinspection, so they were going to "black flag" us to have the bike "quickly" inspected.
So they got Jack off the track to have the bike looked over and it only took about a few minutes to check things out and let Jack go back on the track again. Actually, I think Tom got back on the bike when the inspection was done.
A little later, the inspector came back to our pits and said that they needed to do a more complete inspection since the bike actually had been fallen off the track. So they black flagged Tom again, and did a more deeply inspection on the bike.
When the inspection was done, we got back out on the track and finished the race, in second place, in our class.
Now, there is a little more information. As I mentioned earlier, I had no idea of where we were in the class, during the race. Well, what we found out, was that we actually, were in the lead at one point, and actually were out front by quite a number of laps. Another team who was riding an RD350, had been in the lead, but their engine blew up, so they had to change out their engine, and that put them back in the class a way. When they got their bike back on the track, they were moving up quickly. But they couldn't catch us at that point.
When Jack went down and we had to do the quick repairs to the bike, we probably lost a number of laps during the repairs. And then when the first black flag happened, we probably lost another two or three laps and when the second black flag was done, we lost more laps. I have no idea of how many, but it put is in second place.......by 45 seconds!
After the race was all done and the trophies were passed out, I found out that the guys who were beating everybody up on that RD350, blew up their engine and had to change it and lost a bunch of laps, were the ones who got to the inspectors and had them get us inspected, according to the rules. And that is what got them back in front of us.
Recently I found some pictures of the race bike and the trophies that we got, and I still have mine. It was an interesting experience.
A number of years later, we decided to do the race again, I think in '81 and we rode a Kawasaki KZ550 with a performance exhaust, modified carburetor jetting, a set of different rear levers and pegs and of course race tires. That event didn't go nearly as well, because of a tip over that I did.
I was coming into turn 13, just before the pit entrance, and a guy had his hand up indicating that he was going to turn into the pits. Since he was tightly into the inside of the turn, I moved out about half way in the turn and started to go around the guy, but unfortunately, there was "stuff" on the track and it was slippery. The rear end of the bike slid out and flipped the bike from one side to the other side and slid off the track. I was actually on my feet before the bike stopped moving off the track. I picked it up and quickly went into the pits, which was right across the corner from where I fell, and we quickly fixed the bike up again and got back into the race.
Unfortunately, when the bike "flipped" from one side to the other, the frame got tweaked, and the bike wouldn't handle like it should have, and things were not very fun at high speed. As the tires wore down over the time of the race, the handling got worse and worse, so we had to slow down a little.
I think we ended up in 5th or 6th place in that year, but it was another interesting experience.
Well, that's my memory about the 24 Hour.
Dane