THE WEEKLY FEED: HANNAH UNPLUGGED AND A LOOK BACK AT THE FIRST HONDA XR600R

FROZEN

Bob Hannah was always a wild card. His style was in no way fluid, but his attacking perseverance, mated to fitness made him nearly unstoppable in the stadiums. The tracks back then were randomly setup, the jumps lacked symmetry and because the racers had never practiced on indoor obstacles, their styles lacked polish. Hannah was flat berserk.

NEWS

How pumped was Eli with Musquin’s last lap nuke pass at Foxborough?

HQVs Thad Duvall has been giving Kaliub Russell nightmares. For half of the GNCC races this year Duvall has finished within a pool cues length of the KTM pilot after three solid hours of brutal racing.

HQV 2-STROKE INJECTED MACHINES

Take our word on this, you will be seeing more of the Transfer Port Injected 2-stroke from Husqvarna for 2019.

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SOCIAL DISTORTION

The late Marty Moates on his LOP Honda at the Superbowl of Motocross at the L.A.Coliseum.

Broc Glover came out to the Boise Vintage race, hopped on a vintage Honda Elsinore and rocked it hard, all with a bad knee. He was a crowd favorite!

A great shot of Rich Thorwaldson on his ‘works’ Suzuki.

DIRT BIKE CIRCA 1985

Back in 1985 the evolution of the Honda XR machines was in a full throttle mode. The suspension world was in a constant flux (remember that it was only four years earlier that the XR500 was a dual shocked machine) and 1985 was the first year that it was pushed to a 600. It had morphed from a progressively operated dual carb design with twin headers to a single carb and disc brakes were finding their way onto the front of the machines. While it was a heavy sucker to manhandle, it found a home as a brilliant desert machine.

Jim Holley was one of our main testers at DB and he man handled the big XR like it was a BMX bike. This shot by Fran Kuhn was taken at Gorman where we found a fifth gear wide open road and Holley would hit the roller with such speed that he’d get about a foot of air and launch for over 80 feet. Oh, back then we didn’t have digital cameras so he did this probably 50 times for Fran, where he hoped that both the exposure and the focus was on.

WOLF: BACK IN THE DAY

This was my first enduro on Can-Am’s new big bore 370 in 1979. I was coming off a good year racing a YZ400 in the western Enduros in ’78, but was happy to be back with Andy Kolbe on orange. I do remember that I had broken a finger on my left hand and raced by cutting off the glove finger and letting it dangle down. I was a UEA member at the time and one of the big dramas with the 370 was the small tank. I’m carrying a Torco bottle with fuel on my butt bag.

I found this Subscription ad in a 1986 Dirt Bike. I may have been running a little loose at the time!