Jimmy's Headstone

AHRMA race at Diamond Don's Jefferson, Texas - 2002 Brad Lackey, Ron Pomeroy, Dale Hyatt, Debbie (Pomeroy) Hyatt and Jimmy

To the McCookRacing Family:

The Pomeroy Family extends a deeply sincere "Thank You" to the wonderful people of motocross both near and abroad.

The global outpouring of kindness, prayers and support has filled our hearts with gratitude and chests with immeasurable pride. Your collective kindness has helped our family hold our heads high with pride as we try to come to terms with the tragic loss of Jimmy.

We are confident in our hearts that Jimmy would have wanted it no other way. Your kindness proves that Jimmy's loving personality, his generous heart and unforgettable laughter not only touched the lives throughout the MX world, but reached well beyond the fans, sponsors, riders and mechanics. He made friends throughout his life and travels. Young, old, rich or poor, you remind us of the lives Jimmy touched. He never forgot where he came from and we are immensely proud that the World will not forget him.

Many things may trigger the grief we feel when we are reminded of our loss.(Yours & ours) We are able to embrace it with such pride because of all of you throughout the World.

Forever he lives through all of us.

-Peace

The Pomeroy Family,
Lorene (Mom), Debbie (Sis), Ron (Bro)

In closing: If you have a "Jimmy" memory or a photo you would like to share, please do so. Some folks have already shared their story personally or through letters and email. We know there are many more out there that the family has never heard. We would love to hear from you.

New at McCookRacing.com!

MR Interviews AVDRA's
Dave Boydstun

by Michael McCook #41

MR: I've known you now for several years and have had the pleasure to compete in VMX events that you have coordinated. Always well run and I've had a blast. You have the knack of making it fun and safe. Let's start by having you tell us how you first got involved in competitive motorcycling... a bit of your personal history if you will.

DB: I got my first cycle magazine in 1965 while moving from Virginia to California. My sister got a dog for being good and I wanted a minibike. In 1966,when we arrived in California she got the dog and I got my Bonanza with a 3 hp Tecumseh. A little later met a guy in my neighborhood that worked at a shop and he raced flat track TT and road raced an early red and white Yamaha 250 twin. Ken Gardner was his name. He sold my Dad two 1967 Yamaha 100 trail bikes. We took them to the closest Yamaha shop for service and met Tom White. He was working there after school... anyway he was a racer that I had met riding around the Saddleback TT track one Sunday. He asked my Dad if I ever raced before ...he said my Mom would never let me do that. A few weeks later my Mom met Tom's Mom and she assured her that they were all good boys. My parents let me go to the cycle club meeting and I saw a room full of trophies. I knew that I just needed some of my own, so soon after I raced my 1st race which was a desert race in the Ponderosa Hare Scrambles. I Placed 19th out of 151. One week later I raced at Huntington Beach Cycle Park and won 1st place in the 100cc novice class. Within the 1st year I raced this new thing called Motocross held at Saddleback Park. The event was called the July 4th Firecracker Grand Prix and I got 11th out of 80 racers... Lars Larson won, Bailey was 2nd and me on my AT1 MX... yes I was hooked!

Read the entire interview here

Ticket Broker for Supercross Tickets, NASCAR Racing Tickets, Daytona 500, and Cheap Monster Jam Tickets

Rick Doughty's Top Ten

The Best and Worst

by Rick Doughty

Here are a couple of Top Ten lists that will no doubt be controversial.

Before I get into them let me start by stating for the record that these are my opinions and they are based on nearly twenty years of living this sport on a day-to-day basis. My experiences are not the same as everyone else’s so my inclusions and exclusions can really only be construed as my take on the world of vintage racing as I see it.

My picks also only include public or prominent figures that in one way or another have put themselves in the public eye.

There is no ranking from best to worst rather just a Top Ten in the order that they came to me.

Read the entire article here

A Dose of Reality!

by Charlie Oxford #20E

There is no doubt, riding or especially racing motorcycles, (yes even vintage machines) is somewhat dangerous. Most folks tend to see it as highly dangerous and lots have an example of injuries sustained from not staying on two wheels. I think that after a person has been on a motocross bike and really ridden for extended years, they can become sort of complacent. We tend to get faster and faster, having a blast!

You can be cruising along thinking positive thoughts and all of a sudden, the front wheel washes out while rounding the turn, your brake lever pins your hand to the bars and you’re tossed over on your shoulder and you hear a “snap”! You’re not really in any pain, it actually felt good, you ride the rest of the afternoon, stiffening more and more until it is hard to breathe! Some painkillers, some stretching, exercising while several weeks go by and you are all right. Riding and racing again, never missing any races.

Read more here...

AHRMA

by Fred '900' Guidi

I am preparing for my 7th season of vintage racing, with most of it done under the AHRMA umbrella. During the 6 previous years I have had some of the best days of my life, met new people, bought a bike or two, lined up with the heroes of my youth, and subjected my family to long road trips filled with dust and dirt. To me AHRMA is the greatest thing going, and the overall best platform for a nationally recognized vintage- vet program. Sure there are some great regional programs out there; the ACR for example is a first class operation, with first class management (Tom France). There are other organizations as well, Dave Boydston runs a clean ship in the Southwest, and few people have the passion that Dave does. Dave has some great ideas about where the sport is headed, and I always enjoy our conversations. I agree with what Rick Doughty has said about new classes and how we must go about drawing future participants. There are a lot of good folks with some equally good ideas out there. But what about AHRMA?

Read the entire article here

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A View From Oz...

Changing Times

by FIRKO #53

A skinny little bloke from Minnesota once sang that “the times they are ‘a changing”. Although we know different, he could easily have been singing about the way we build our vintage bikes these days. In the twenty odd years that vintage motocross has been around nothing has changed the way we do things like the internet and eBay in particular.

I’m currently building a pretty unique Hindall framed Ducati 250 using a frame and core motor I bought via eBay from East Coast racer Brian O’Connor. The build has been a hoot because it has allowed me to don my Dr Frankenstein stethoscope and build the bike that’s been festering away in my head since I was a kid. eBay has allowed me to build a bike that prior to the internet would never have even been possible down here in my island paradise. As a teenager in sixties Australia I used to scour the American magazines drooling over the exotic frames made by companies like Champion, C&J, Trackmaster and Harry Hindall himself. Sure there were a few British Rickman Metisses, Cheneys and Sprites running around down here but it was the ‘Yank’ stuff that tooted my horn.

Read the entire article here

From our friends at VMX!

From Soup to all of you Nuts

by Steve Clark #309D

OVRADD or What’s the Matter With Me?

What the hell is the matter with me?

The answer to that depends on whom you ask, and the context it is asked in.

Ask my ex, and you’ll be there all day and leave convinced that I taught Charles Manson all he knows before she’s done. Ask my boss and you’ll get a very different description of what’s wrong with me. Ask my friends and you’ll get yet a different list.

I asked MYSELF this question recently, after I did a really bad thing.

On a whim, I made the mistake of listing all the vintage bikes I own in a spreadsheet, then totaling the values. WTF? And to make matters worse, when I ambled out to the shed to look at the collection I walked by a 78 Maico 440 I plum forgot to list!

How the hell does someone with no money accumulate such a mess, get so many projects halfway completed, and forget a Maico?

What’s the matter with me?

Read more here...

Mac's Killer Zunny Sprite

Sponsor Profile

MX Restorations

My name is Brian Fedigan, owner operator of MXR. This is a small shop and I want it to stay that way. I personally handle every aspect of each project. I try to limit the workload to one car or two bikes at a time.

I started working at a body shop after school when I was 14. I got into tool and die at 18 while doing some car and bike building on the side. I became involved with CNC, EDM and Laser machining. I also spent a couple of years at a race car fabrication shop which produced super modified and modified stock cars as well as working on a crew as a mechanic on the NASCAR Featherlite modified tour in the 1980s.

Read more here...

She's a bitch to start,
but once you get her fired up...

Vintage Enthusiast
Teardown Disease:
Or, How Not To Manage
Your Vintage Program

by Terry Frazier #71E

When I got into vintage racing a few years ago I sat around with my buddy and worked out in my head what I thought was the perfect VMX setup. I wanted both a 500 and a 250 to ride in AHRMA’s Sportsman (7”/4” or ’74) class, and I wanted a pair of longer travel bikes to ride in AHRMA’s Historic (’75-77) class. I just knew if I could ever manage to put together a quartet of clean, smooth running bikes like that I’d be happy.

I started off buying a 380 CZ that was setup with a Honda front-end for the Historic/GP-I class. It was a lot of fun to ride and I took some wood at Diamond Don’s the first year I raced there. I was happy. But I also got to watching the trials bikes at DD’s that year and I thought, “Man, that looks like fun. I should try that.”

After returning home I went to service the 380 and realized there was a *lot* of water in the tranny, and the oil smelled really bad. Worse, there were big chunks of metal sitting in the bottom of my oil drain pan. I had missed a few shifts at DD’s, and I did notice the bike was not staying cleanly in gear. So I figured it was time to pull the motor out and have a look. Over a few days time I got the motor disassembled and, sure enough, there was a lot of missing metal on the gears. I carefully cleaned everything up, packed it away, and made my parts list for Bertus Jawa-CZ.

Read more here...

Movie Reviews by Randy Smith & Mark Jarecki New! One Chance to Win

The Motorcycle as Art

by David Russell #832

Recently, while returning home from a business trip, I decided to take the long way home and visit my favorite art museum. One special exhibit at the museum were two collections of drawings and paintings —the first was an expansive collection of Andrew Wyeth watercolors, while the second consisted of a compilation of landscape paintings by a turn of the century painter whose name already escapes me. His art depicted scenes from his travels that included vast forests, rivers, deserts, and American mountains from 100 years ago. The paintings were gorgeous, magnificently-breathtaking pieces of work. Standing in front of a painting representing a hillside farm overlooking a river on a sunny day, I mentally caught my breath and listened to my subconscious exclaim, "This is beautiful. Just like a motorcycle is beautiful." This may sound slightly weird, I realize but at that moment this thought was a perfect, pristine truth. Both the painting and the motorcycle I had considered were beautiful works of art created by gifted mortals—one painted a century before, the other designed and assembled in Europe decades ago. Both are beautiful to behold, perfect in their design, form and execution.

Read more here...

Plastics Restoration

by Rich Fogel #45

What are the two most difficult and time consuming jobs to do on your restoration?... I will give you a hint, wheels and plastic restoration.

Today we will deal with plastic, the wheels I will look at in a future issue of MR.

Plastic can be tackled with more then one option. The easiest way, and one that can end this article right here is to go out and buy NOS parts if you can find them, $$$$$. Or you can buy for some bikes reproductions of varying degrees of quality. For a race bike, almost any repo part will work out OK if you are not that picky. But, for that garage queen, do some homework as there is more then one company producing repo plastic for certain bikes. Some bikes, you will have no choice other then one company. And if you do not like the finish or quality of their product, what can you do? Plastic restoration.

Read more here...

Round 1 of the RacerX Inter-Am Vintage Motocross Series Boise, Idaho March 29th & 30th 2008

Pre-Entry Form Race Information Flyer www.IdahoVintageMX.com - More Information

Everything Happens for a Reason

by Tom Long #20B

“And they say everything happens for a reason" I tend to agree. As time passes, and life seemingly gets harder, it never ceases to amaze me how valuable my escape of VMX is. I often wonder if other guys get this much return. Doubtful. This winter I have found myself going into the shop at least four times a day! Can't believe looking at golf clubs is as Zen as a garage full of CZ's' Buls and Ossa's.

And the there is the support cast. The people who are equally or more so into VMX. The people who gladly share their enthusiasm. This takes me to my story of how I met two individuals who make VMX a great thing. That would be Jim Diebert and Bruce Rounsaville.

It started at a Honda parts counter; I hadn't found a bike yet. So on a whim I decided to stop on the way home and ask the parts guy if he knew of any old MX bikes. He was untypically friendly, and said that he had just sold his Falta bike to a guy named Bruce. He also said that I should try to get in touch with this other guy who he couldn't think of his name. But that he was a Snap-On guy, into CZ's in a major way. That sounded like it shouldn't be to hard to find him.

Read more here...

VMX Club Profile

Hammer & Tongs

HAMMER & TONGS is the Pacific Northwest's Summer Vintage Motocross Scene. It is more of a scene than a club, which is its primary strength. The sole mission is to KEEP VINTAGE MOTOCROSS CHEAP, EASY AND FUN. And six years in it has become a series that draws very healthy numbers from a loyal base.

BEGINNINGS •
In speaking about Hammer & Tongs, you have to mention VDR, from which it all started. In the Pacific NW there were always two scenes. VDR, ran in the winter, and Ahrma in the summer. VDR was local, and quite unlike regular clubs. You were never required to join, there were minimal rules, no politics at all, and everyone was happy; no politics because it was a monarchy. Of course a democracy is a great for a country, but it is always a mess for a club. A single handed style depends on the man at the top being a reasonable person, and VDR's man Monty Price was just that; reasonable, shrewd, and a man of few words.

Read more here...

A Super Photo of Super Hunky
taking a Super Photo!

Husky Hooker Headers Mystery

by Robert Haag #74Y

I rode Huskys for a few years in the early '70's and got a lot of help with bikes and parts, and a little training with Rolf Tibblin. Husky West also gave me the opportunity of a lifetime and let me tag along with the Team on the summer Inner Am series in '72 though I was only 15 and could only ride a few Sat support races.

Happened to see an add for Hooker Headers expansion chambers from '72 in Cycle Guide as I was going through a box of old magazines, and I finally resolved a puzzle over 35 years old now.

To lay the groundwork, my dad Dave was really into the racing and a great supporter with no pressure but a lot of enthusiasm. He was involved in an accessories company called Pacer, making hop up accessories for early Yamaha Dt'1s, At'1s, and Ct'1s. Also involved were the Jones Family as they were developing the YZ prototypes. I was just a shy quiet squid and couldn't really appreciate Gary's work ethic and speed, as no one could have lived up to the European heroes of the time, but I loved hanging around Don, Gary and Dewayne with all their tall tailed bench racing stories and down home sense of humor. It was really a gift knowing the Jones and through them we met a lot of influential people in the exploding MX scene. A friend of the Jones, Gary Bryson was involved in Pacer and introduced us to the legend ‘50’s Dirt tracker Everett Brashear who was running Husky West, and was instrumental in my later getting Husky's support.

Read more here...

McCookRacing Caption Contest

Submit Your Caption and win some cool swag! Click here for details & Entry Form

Caption Contest Winner Gary Davis is the winner of the Cool Maico Racing Jersey!

* -This photo was taken near Woodstock the week of the concert- 1)The Rock Stars name is: Bob Dylan 2)The winning caption is: The answer my friend--is blowin' in the wind

Congrats Gary! Send us an email with your addy and we'll get you this Cool Shirt!

Vintage Engine & Suspension Experts!

I've Lost My Bearings
Part 1 of 2

by Fritz Guenther #22T

Is it time to replace the engine bearings in that trusty old steed? If so I hope you were the one that scheduled the repairs and not your engine. When your engine does the maintenance scheduling, it’s usually bad news and much more expensive! The goal of this short article is to give you an idea what’s been going on in the bearing world for the last few years, most of its good or even great news but some not so good. Hopefully the information contained here will assist you in choosing the best bearings when it comes time to rebuild your engine.

Technology in every part of our lives has been moving at breakneck speeds, which can be good or bad depending on whom you ask. The good news is it’s been doing the same in the rolling element bearing world as well. The big buzz word in bearings these days seems to be ceramics, pure ceramic bearings, hybrid bearings and bearings that require no lubrication. For most of us in the vintage motocross scene these are nothing more than conversation starters around the garage or over a beer.

Read more here...

Your Momma's Next XT500

Chinese Takeout

by P.J. Read #357

With the benefit of hindsight I must now admit that my first foray into Asian business back in the early days of 1969 was an ill advised disaster. My then financial advisor and motocross team manager for the very defunct Team Ariel, Trent Farlowe had managed to persuade me to investigate the possibility of setting up our own motocross bike production company in the Queens colony of Taiwan. Farlowe had been having sordid affair with Lily, the sultry daughter of Shin San Tong founder Ah Fong Tip and being a man who has made a living using sexual dalliances to his advantage, couldn’t let the opportunity slip by.

Read more here...

The VMX Art of Rob Kinsey!

Click here for Details!

RestoNuts

Jesse McCrea, Bill McCrea and Michael McCook

McCookRacing.com, Vintage Iron, MCMX Racing and MX Restoration's are collaborating on the Race Restoration of a 1979 YZ250F. Follow us along as we document the restoration and choose performance modifications and ergonomic components. Any comments and Ideas are welcome and can be sent to the-

We look forward to your input as we build a reliable rocket to terrorize the North Atlantic Region.

Back

The Can Am Enthusiast Group

Brent Steward's Vintage Motocross Enthusiast Group

The Vintage Yamaha YZ Forum!

Rick Salazar's 'Team Bultaco' Discussion Group!

Steve Clark's Vintage Husqvarna Owners Group

Cousin Weedy's CZ Discussion Group!

The Vintage Suzuki Discussion Group

The Hodaka Owners Group on Yahoo

The
Maico Motorcycle Discussion Group