Well, before I go off to bed at this phenomenally late hour, I'm going to post something from Monkey Butt to illustrate just what kind of men these modern kids would be up against. In this case, we're talking Bob Hannah. This tale starts on page 528, for those following along at home (and those who own the book will know that re-locating a section is practically impossible!)
Once he had the bike set up to his liking, Bob fired the Yamaha up, rolled down teh huge hill, and started putting laps on his course.
Ah, yes. His course. Earlier in the day, I took some laps around his course on the stock YZ250. It was a virtual nightmare for a novice rider. In fact, you had to be at least an intermediate level rider to complete a lap without falling down, or blowing a turn.
Bob designed the course to flow with the terrain. It would run down a terrifying hill, then drop off into an arroyo via a sheer six-foot ledge. After a tight turn, you'd have to clamber up another six-foot ledge, force the bike into a tight turn, then climb up a 200-foot off-camber hill.
The course had ugly turns on baked-dry adobe surfaces, long straights on whooped-out sand washes, ultra-tight turns in deep sand, sharp-lipped jumps, cross-grained ruts and nasty little off-camber sections that tried to force the bike off the course if any mistake in weight transfer was made.
It took me a half dozen laps before I was able to make a clean circuit around that tricky course. Naturally, as more and more laps were put on the course, it became easier to ride, as grooves developed. However, because the course was based on desert sand, it got rougher and rougher.
Whoops developed everywhere. You couldn't find a flat straight of any length without a section of wheel-chattering ripples. And on the long, fast straights, the whoops turned into wheel-swallowing, frame stretching trenches.
After a half dozen laps on Bob's course, my forearms were pumped-out and burning, my legs aching, and sweat was beading up inside my goggles.
Later, with cameras in hand, Paul and I watched Hannah dart around the course at speeds that dazzled us! Those tight turns at the bottom of the hills were nothing more than a quick blur, as Bob would whip the bike around like a snake on steroids, then literally blast up the next hill!
When he crested the long uphills, the Yamaha would sail into the air and Bob would pitch the bike sideways to set it up for the turn right after the landing.
He'd take the downhills so fast that it looked like he was out of control. But somehow, he'd brake the bike brutally hard and scrub off enough speed to make the turn at the bottom of the hill. And he wasn't content to just make the turn. Instead, the micro-second he got off the brakes and leaned the bike over, he'd hammer the throttle hard and dart through the turn like a roller-coaster car on rails!
During the test day, the mechanics swapped motors in the works 125, trying to find the right combination. Some of the motors had identical powerbands, but had different ratios in the gearbox. Some were healthy mid-range motors; you could hear it when Bob rode it, shifting early and letting the engine bark. Others were RPM monsters that barely made any power at all until 6,000rpm, then exploded like someone throwing on a light switch.
[At this point, Super Hunky gets Hannah to test the '82 YZ, which he thinks is worse than the '81, which was worse than the '80. Then they have him do some daredevil stunts to get some cool pictures. I don't feel like all that's relevant enough to type out, this shit takes forever. Then Bob goes back to testing his works bikes.]
Bob went back and did some more testing on the race 125. Paul and I kicked back and watched him ride. Hannah flowed with the bike like it was an extension of his body. He rode lightly poised on the bike, and never seemed to fight it, even though, every once in a while, the bike would take a wild hop. Then, Bob would make some sort of body gyration that would save the bike, and the microsecond the rear wheel touched the ground, the power would be back on and the knobby would be throwing a healthy rooster tail!
About ten minutes into a late afternoon testing session on the factory YZ125, we watched Bob come screaming down a long hill under power, only to hear the bike pop into neutral. A heartbeat later, the YZ hit a bump and the rear end blasted up into the air. Bob's feet came off the pegs and he did a classic handstand on the bars, while careening down the hill at what surely must have been 50 miles per hour!
Bob flopped down on the tank with his chest, feet dangling out behind him like streamers. He got his leg down on the left side and stabbed at the shift lever, caught a gear, then hit the throttle hard. A rooster tail shot out from the rear wheel and the YZ straightened out.
A few car lengths ahead, was an arroyo, with perhaps a ten foot drop-off. We figured Bob was dead meat and would flop into the arroyo, trying to save the YZ. There was no way in the world he had enough room to stop the Yamaha in that short distance.
He then did something that stunned both of us. Hannah grabbed a fistful of throttle and speeded up as he approached the lip of the arroyo, instead of trying to stop the bike. Right before the lip, he punched the brakes hard, making the front end depress. As the front end rebounded, Bob hit the throttle hard and the YZ125 popped up into the air, gaining enough height to let the front end clear the opposite side.
Still, the rear wheel slammed hard into the opposite bank. With this maneuver, Bob was able to get the front end of the bike higher than the top of the landing bank. When the rear wheel hit, the YZ took yet another lurid hop and the saddle slammed bob in the ass again, ripping his feet off the pegs.
The rear end of the bike lurched to the right side, and Bob was hanging off to the left side, with only his hands on the bars as contact points with the bike. Before his ass hit the saddle, he nailed the throttle again, and lo and behold!, the goddamn Yamaha actually straightened out and bob flopped back on the saddle.
Without missing a beat, Bob made a quick turn and headed right back onto the course he had laid out, and resumed his hot laps. Paul and I just looked at each other in utter amazement. Here was Hannah, somehow pulling off a minor miracle by saving that YZ, and he got right back on the course and kept putting in testing laps!
Bob was really pissed when he got back to the pits. Yamahas have never been great shifters, and Hannah had been bitching about it long and hard for years. He cornered one of the Japanese engineers and gave him the riot act. "You fuck-heads! When are you gonna learn how to make a bike shift? I nearly killed my ass out there on this piece of shit! You call this a bike?"
Meanwhile, the [engineer] would just smile a whole lot and nod his head up and down, hoping Bob would get out of his face. Hannah would then slip into a sing-song imitation of a Japanese accent: "Lookee here, fish-head-san. This bikee no shiftee worth a fuckee."
