JETZcorp - Man you are a young guy!! Not that it's a bad thing but.. I have fillings that are older than you! LOL
The first race I attended was in 1970 at a track called Fishkill. It was a scrambles (the stuff before motocross) and it was the tie when there were both two strokes and four strokes competing. At the time it was the fastest I'd ever seen anything go in my life!
The first race I competed in was in 1975 on a Honda CR125 and I promptly finished dead last! I had no idea what the hell I was doing. Although I did get better years later....
My first professional race was in 1976 at Unadilla. To say it was amazing would be an understatement. At first glance I was unable to see the track!! When the track was opened for practice I found out why. The grass was almst three feet deep around the entire track!! The grass was mixed into the dirt and turned the dirt into the most amazing loam I had ever seen.
The other surprise was that under that grass the track still had all the bumps, ruts and whoops from the races before. If the used a machine any where on the track I would be surprised.
This was the first time that I got to see all my heroes race. Roger DeCoster, Jim Pomeroy, Brad Lackey, Marty Smith, Bob Hannah and so many others. It was the best day ever!
As a strange side story, before practice there was a guy on a Maico doing the most amazing slow wheelies. I found out later that the guys name was Doug DeMokous (sp?) and he raced the support class that day.
As you can see I've been around for a little while.
In 2009 I attended the Unadilla Pro National. The bikes are so much better in so many ways than back then. The speeds are higher, although they changed the track significantly to make it flow differently which means there were no slow speed sections like back in the 70's. And they groomed the track smooth! It was almost ready to be paved... but I digress..
The new bikes and riders go much faster. But there are a few caveats. The length of the races now are 30 minutes plus two laps, back then it was 40 minutes plus two laps. Those extra 10 minutes really made a difference, because a great deal of passing occured by the top riders in those last 10 minutes. It truly separated the men from the boys.
In no way was it a sprint race like today. You could see that the racers had heart. They battled their bikes, the tracks and their competitors. When someone passed someone, usually the racer they passed did not give up and let them go. They raced with them and passed them back.
The point of all this? While the past was amazing and the racers were tough, attempting to compare the racers from the past to the racers of today would be difficult if not impossible. Although the depth of really good riders today is no where near what it was back then.
The bikes are better, I know that for a fact. Having been there, ridden so many bikes, attending and competing in many years of racing and from bein a real fan of the sport.
The old days were fun, but time changes and you move forward. Some things change for the better and some change for the worse. I'd much rather ride/race a new bike than an old one, no matter how good the old ones were.
For those that are interested I found this video. It's from a race at Unadilla, the guy that posted it thinks that it's from 1975 but from looking at it I would say that it's from 1977 or possibly 1978.If you watch closely you will notice that the track has remained similar, but there were much tighter sections. In which I believe made racing much more interesting.
Later in the video there are some local races, these are some of the tracks that I raced on when first starting out. There is no sound, because it was shot using a film camera and at that time having sound was very rare for the amateur.
This is the perfect example of the differences between "back in the day" and today. In the 1970's if you wanted to record moving pictures, you used 8mm or 16mm film. On the 8mm film cameras, the film cartridge was 50 feet long, good for approximately 3 minutes of footage. You had to send the film out to be processed.
A week or two later you got it back. Then you had to set up a screen and projector to watch your master piece. If you wanted to edit it into a longer film you had to splice the actual film together onto a larger reel.
Today almost everyone has something to record video and sound. In fact it's in many cell phones!
I know which one I prefer!
Sorry for the rant!!
Enjoy!
1970's Motocross - District 34 
