David Aldana
He was yet another member of the California wrecking crew that took the world of motorcycle racing by storm from 1971 through 1993. Aldana was also one of the most versatile racers of his, or any era.
Quiet, unassuming... Oh, hang on, no, this is Californian race ace David Aldana, and as people say, they were ‘different times’. Kick back, grab your coffee, be happy to be isolated, this is one heck of a read and one heck of a ride.
rowing up in Orange County, California, David Aldana found himself right in the middle of cycle-mad Southern California in the late 1960s. David’s interests were entirely focused on the off-road side of the sport, with a pressed frame Suzuki 80 scrambler.
David: “I never did ride on the street. At Elsinore they had a Saturday night deal, I went maybe once or twice a year, my father would take me whenever I could go. When I got to be 16, I got a van and then I could drive myself, so I started going more with the Suzuki.”
There were also flat track races at his closest track, a dirt oval called El Toro. “Wes Cooley Sr put the races on. Gary Bailey (American motocross legend) would race there too.” For 1968, David was still racing novice class on the little Suzuki. Working as a part-time mechanic at the local Suzuki shop helped the bottom line.
“That got me a discount on all the parts that I needed, because I was bending a lot of handlebars and other stuff. I crashed a lot, and the first thing to break off would be the levers.”
Regardless of the abuse that Aldana regularly dished out, the little Suzuki 80s were mechanically almost impossible to break. Your author spent a summer riding a black and chrome Suzuki 80 Scrambler on the horse trails of Lake Tahoe in the late 1960s, when such adventures were still allowed, and the reliability was uncanny.
Getting bigger
Aldana however, was ready to move up to faster equipment. “Then I got the next Suzuki that came out with the rotary valve, the Suzuki 90. When I got that, all of a sudden I started winning. That motorcycle really made a difference. The standard 80 wouldn’t win, but the 90 did.”
David’s mentor at the Suzuki shop was Dallas Baker. “He got me in the tuning frame of mind, we would forge stuff, put gaskets under the barrel to raise and lower the ports. I was able to help myself that way, and suspension was one of the things I learned to set up back then.”
Soon, Aldana was racing a 250 BSA at Ascot Park, but it was a gutless wonder. “On a TT track I could beat them, but on the half mile I couldn’t even make the main events, it wasn’t fast enough. It wouldn’t take the slack out of the chain when you gave it the throttle, it was pitiful.”
While struggling with the BSA, David got an opportunity from the Ossa importer, Kenny Clark, and he was soon a factor everywhere. “I was riding in the desert, racing across the desert keeping up with these other guys who were riding on a fire road. We were going 80 or 90mph when I hit a manhole and went end over end. I had to go back to see for myself, I couldn’t believe it. It was a manhole cover that was sticking out of the ground about three or four inches, and I went flying the distance of two telephone poles, and seriously wadded this thing up. I had a concussion with tunnel vision, my tongue went numb, my fingers were tingling, and I had bad headaches for two days.
“When my head cleared, I went to the Ossa distributorship in Long Beach and said ‘I need some parts for my motorcycle’. So they said, ‘Yeah, no problem… whatever you need.’ ‘Well, I might need a whole bunch of stuff, you might want to look at this and see what I need.”
Coming under the category of ‘picking up the gas cap and sliding the new bike under it’, David continues… “It had a 57 inch wheelbase when I started. The front wheel was under the engine, the back wheel/ swingarm was over the top of the carburettor, you needed a wheelbarrow, it was just lunched. I opened the back door of the van to show him, and he almost fell on the ground laughing. He just brought over a crate and gave me another one. He was getting some good publicity out of the deal, and I was getting a bike to ride for free”.
One supposes that looking at the remains of the Ossa, Kenny could tell that Aldana was trying.
Multi-discipline
David: “I never rode the Ossa Stiletto professionally until I went back east to ride it at a couple of short tracks. I also did motocross at Hangtown, the Elsinore Grand Prix, Saddleback Park. I did the Trans-ama series race at Saddleback, and every time I fell down, it didn’t matter where I was on the race track, Kenny Clark was there saying ‘get up, let’s go, let’s go…’ I’d be stuck in the snow fence with the front wheel shoved up between the wood slats…. and there would be Kenny Clark.” Which begs the question… so whenever you saw Kenny Clark alongside the course, you knew he was a crash magnet?
Aldana: “For me almost, yeah… no matter where I was, if I fell down, boom, there he was. He thought it was hilarious, I don’t know how many motorcycles I went through with all the parts and all, but he was very instrumental in me keeping my attitude up, and my mind set in the right area. Having Saddleback and the other tracks in my
backyard, enabled me to do well in all facets of racing.”
David was also finding success as an Amateur in 1969, racing the 650 BSA twin. He was soon brought under contract to riding BSA exclusively.
Don Castro: “In 1969 we were juniors, both trying to get number 1. At the San Jose half-mile, at the end of the straightaway I was leading it and he came underneath me and used me as a cushion, hit me in turn four in the middle of the corner. I fell down on top of him, which knocked him down. We both managed to get upright again, we had a drag race to the finish and I beat him. Obviously we had a big lead. He might remember it differently, but he used me for a cushion a lot.
“David was a blast to hang around with and we were all buddies. We would all try to beat each other on the race track but we were friends off the track. Aldana and Romero, myself, and Palmgren, we used to all travel together and it was entertaining all the time.”
For 1970 Aldana was also on the BSA MX team, racing what the following year became known as the B50MX single in the Trans-am against Jeff Smith and John Banks on the factory titanium wonders (with a predictable lack of results). David was also racing the underpowered 250 in the support class. “I was getting sixth or seventh in the races, so it wasn’t too bad. Chuck ‘Feets’ Minert was a truck driver/rider who was also on the team. Brad Lackey was showing up on his CZ with the peace dove on the handlebars and the long black hair, all that stuff that helped to put him on the map.”
Going expert
Where Aldana truly put himself on the map as well, was as a first year expert in the grand national championship. Imagine being brought onto the BSA factory team, to race the new Rob North framed Rocket III, for your first professional road race as the team-mate to Mike Hailwood.
Aldana finished 12th in the Daytona 200, the highest finishing BSA that year. Victory had gone to Dick Mann’s Honda 750-4. BSA team-mate Jim Rice describes the learning experience: “The BSAS are pretty heavy with a wide three cylinder motor. When you’ve got good traction and you lean it over, the case or fairing drags and if it drags enough you unload the tyres and then you’ve got even more problems.”
At the second road race of the season, the winner was Ron Grant on the Suzuki. In only the third road race of the 1970 season, David Aldana emerged from a classic battle with Gary Nixon to take victory, taking the maiden grand national win for both himself and the Rocket III. The bike was well suited to the compact Aldana.
Rice: “I finished third in that race. They set the road racers up for the shorter guys like Castro or Aldana. I was like a giant on it, and you’d think they’d be able to move the seat back or do something like that, but I was pretty far down their list for getting things done on my bike. It was really hot and 200 miles of road racing… my right leg started cramping up so bad I took it off the footpeg and hung it out the side at 160mph. When I came in to get off the bike, I couldn’t stand up straight and was dehydrated. I think everybody was wondering what had happened to me.”
Aldana followed up Talladega with a win at the Terre Haute half-mile and the Indianapolis Mile, putting himself firmly in the championship chase. BSA decided that instead of the somewhat underpowered 650 twins that they would to try and run the Rob North-framed Rocket III on the dirt miles, changing little but the bars and pulling off the fairings. It did not work well, with huge crashes the rule of the day.
The rider reaction when the road racing Rocket III showed up at the dirt tracks, was one of disbelief. Rice: “I was on a three cylinder that still had the high boy frame so the centre of gravity was high. The thing had plenty of horsepower but it was a lot heavier. I knew it wasn’t going to work, but I was thinking if I can just give it a shot and get through two laps without killing myself, I’ll be happy.
“Aldana was really on the gas with his triple, and he went into the first turn and
he crashed. The thing went flying up in the air about 20-25 feet doing a cartwheel and I thought ‘ Oh my God, I’ve never seen a bike go that high before.’ It comes down, hits the ground and goes back up just about the same height.
“Pretty soon, a hand truck arrives back in the pits. And here’s the BSA triple, strapped in, standing vertically. It was compressed down to about the length of the hand truck, maybe to the height of your chest. About three or four minutes later they brought Aldana back into the pits, moving really slow. He broke his fingers and I don’t know what else and he was looking like he’d been run over by a truck. If I remember right, Bugs (Dick Mann) bailed off in the third turn on a triple in Santa Rosa. Those things were just evil in the dirt.”
Emde’s go
Don Emde soon had his turn in the bucket, having to ride the unruly dirt triple which ended with similar results. “Since David and the other riders of the 1970 BSA team (Aldana, Rice, Mann and Ken Pressgrove) did not like the Rocket IIIS, at the Nazareth, Pennsylvania Mile National, BSA asked me if I would ride one of the triples in the amateur class. I agreed and then proceeded to collide with another rider in practice and crashed David’s bike big time. A year later when I made the BSA team, David always joked that BSA should have assigned that bike to me, but instead they patched it up for him, and I got the ex-mike Hailwood BSA to ride.”
As we’ve all seen in the movie On Any Sunday, it was a four-way championship battle in 1970, between Romero, Rice, Aldana, and Mann. In the end, the champion was Gene Romero on the Triumph, having won two of the final three races.
1971 saw the new low-boy Rob North racer debut at Daytona. Aldana did not get to ride the new machine, instead given his older, taller BSA Rocket III. It wasn’t much different for David in the flat track races that season.
Don Emde: “BSA riders were under a bit of a disadvantage in 1971 as we still had 650cc bikes to ride in flat track until very late in the season, when BSA finally came up with a 750 kit for our bikes, bringing us up to the limit like Harley-davidson and Triumphs were. By then I think David was looking forward to the next season like I was.” Despite the diffifificulties due to the equipment capacity, the winless but consistent Aldana finished fourth in the national points.
That season also saw the debut of the Trans-atlantic Match Races, initially a BSATriumph publicity series of races at Brands Hatch, Mallory Park, and Oulton Park.
Of the Americans, only Dick Mann, the winner of the Daytona 200, put in a very competitive performance with two third place finishes, and one second. One of the things that was to help Aldana, was that he was a quick study.
David: “I always learned to pick up a race track pretty fast. In dirt track racing, we’d have to learn the track in about six laps, at the match races we had to learn quickly as well. My first time at Suzuka (for the 8 Hours), I had the fast time until the last two minutes of practice, when Graeme Crosby got me by a little bit. I was always able to pick things up pretty quick.”
BSA team-mate Jim Rice: “When we were over in England for that match race series, they had a limousine for each team, one for BSA and one for Triumph. When we got in to go practice at some race track a few days prior to the race, we were goading the driver to make sure the Triumph car didn’t beat us. Little did we know that these two guys were going to duke it out on the road, with us as hostages. It got pretty hairy and got to the point where we were saying ‘forget what we said, just take your time.’ Here we are, for us, flying along on the wrong side of the road.
“Another day we were in a limousine on a freezing day at Mallory Park and Aldana climbed in the front. The driver had left it running so that the heater would keep us warm in the back seat. Well, Aldana just floors the thing with no load and the engine sounds
like it’s going about 10,000rpm and the driver is trying to pull Aldana’s foot off the throttle, while we are back there laughing really hard. The driver was pretty pissed off, it’s a moment I’ll never forget.”
Car vs Oulton Park
It got worse. Rice continues: “We had practice at the three tracks and at Oulton Park we were switching off in the car, and took turns getting the speed up until finally we were right on the edge of just throwing it away. I was driving into a rolling switchback and Aldana grabs the wheel and turns it to the right. I ended up losing it there and the car went off the pavement and had some damage. Another time, there was a hairpin at Mallory, and I turned it over and ended up on the roof.”
Don Emde: “Luckily no one was hurt and once we knew that, we were all laughing and cracking up, and I recall everyone else was looking at us like it was a plane crash scene.” These experiences summarise the inherent dangers of turning a bunch of California flat trackers loose in England with cars, motorcycles, and an unlimited expense account.
The madness continued when the team was back at The Dorchester in London. David Aldana: “We were looking out the window
at the girls at Hyde Park, and we decided somebody had to pursue things with one. Whoever got the short straw had to go for it. Well, the guy who ‘won’ wouldn’t, so I went down there and got some gal from India. We got into the elevator with Kirk Douglas. As Kirk looked at me, and then at the girl, I told him ‘Get your own’.”
At some point, David added the exclamation point to that year, by mooning the world out the rear side window of Barry Sheene’s Rolls-royce while the merry entourage of Merv Wright, Barry Sheene, and Gene Romero were driving down the motorway to one of the English tracks.
For the upcoming 1972 season, things started on a bad footing when Bsa/triumph pulled the plug on all their American riders except for 1971 Grand National champion Dick Mann (BSA) and 1970 champion Gene Romero (Triumph). The Rob North triples were collected from the released riders in the offseason.
Aldana: “Still, we got to keep most of our stuff.” Working on your own equipment always could have its downside. Don Castro: “Everybody on the team maintained their dirt racers and for the road races, the factory would take care of it all. One time David was racing at the mile and at Nazareth,
Pennsylvania, he blew up his engine. He forgot to take the paper towels out of the bottom end from when he was cleaning it. Rice and I were giving him a hard time.”
Norton's call-up
Aldana focused mostly upon racing flat tracks with the equipment he still retained, but for 1973, a great deal changed as he was signed by Norton. David was to score one GN win at Ascot TT, in this last gasp for Norton in American racing. He was to finish eighth in the GN Championship. The highlight for David that year, was racing the monocoque John Player Norton in the Match Races. Aldana had very positive impressions of riding the machine. The frustration lay elsewhere.
David: “It was a nice handling motorcycle and all, but it was just too hard to get to anything. Nice to ride, but difficult to maintain, everything was built around the motor and you just couldn’t get to it.”
In fairness to designer and team rider Peter Williams, he informed me that a mechanic
only needed the correct tools and to follow the correct techniques for maintenance to be enormously simplified. One assumes that Aldana did not get the memo. Regardless, the John Player monocoque Norton was the most memorable machine of 1973.
David continued with Norton for 1974, finishing 10th in Grand National points, but for 1975, he was to be signed by Suzuki. The unreliable Suzukis were known for a variety of maladies, but somehow managed to hold together for David in England. In 1975, the teams arrived at Brands Hatch, to find a foot of snow on the ground. Racing in these conditions was simply not possible, and the match race format was reduced to four races at Mallory and Oulton as a result.
The next races at Mallory Park started dry but the weather quickly turned it into a fiasco with the riders limping around on slicks in a hailstorm. Kenny Roberts: “I went to the clerk of the course and asked him, ‘Why didn’t you stop that race?’ He says, ‘we don’t stop races in England for a little hail.’ I said “You call that a f#*#ing race?”
Regardless, the first three races that year were all won by Kenny Roberts on the Yamaha, with strong 2nd and 3rd place finishes by Dave Aldana. It was close to being a sweep, but Roberts fell while leading race four. Despite Kenny’s domination, the individual high point scorer was Dave
Aldana, consistently finishing in the top three had secured him the individual crown. Overshadowing their individual performances, for the first time the team championship went to the Americans, 278 to 243.
1976 at the Trans-atlantic Match Races showed that nothing much had changed. At the hotel, Steve Baker’s mechanic, Bob Work, and Dave Aldana had gotten into fistfights with English journalists who had rubbished the team in the press. Nothing much had changed in how the American team continued their annual assault upon their hosts and hotels. Gavin Trippe summed up the experience of the American riders at the match races. “We were staying at the notorious Kensington Close hotel. It became notorious after we had been there.”
By the late 1970s, Aldana had little in the way of factory rides, but he got some support from Yamaha due to an old friend in a position to help. David: “Kenny Clark had moved from Ossa to Yamaha, he would get me stuff for mytz750 that I was running with Don Vesco, and also help for the Superbikers races.”
The Superbikers
The Superbikers races started in 1979, meant to combine disciplines into a single track at Carlsbad. The event was virtually tailor-made for a rider of diverse experience like Aldana. The ABC Wide World of Sports coverage team included an incredulous Sir Jackie Stewart. Event organiser Gavin Trippe: “They’d haul ass down the hill and up over a rise onto a flat piece of asphalt. Jackie Stewart was standing there absolutely marvelling at Dave Aldana, because he was coming in all sideways, look over and then go down the big drop off… it got really scary. He was the first guy that we’d seen backing a bike in, on the asphalt like they do now.” David: “Jackie Stewart was so dazzled by me being able to do that, they set up some cameras to make it look even more impressive. It was easy to do because it was very much like the right-hand turn after the jump at Ascot Park in Gardena. I’d use the back brake to get the back end to hang out a little bit, and although it may have looked impressive, it was a move I’d already done before.” Always the innovator, Dave’s unique cross discipline riding techniques were now dazzling an ever larger audience. In those first few years of the Superbikers competition, the two televised episodes had ratings equal to the Daytona 500 and Indianapolis 500 combined.
1979 also saw Aldana’s best chance at Daytona 200 glory. Don Emde: “David was in a big battle with Dale Singleton for the win in the Daytona 200 but his Don Vesco Yamaha TZ750 broke and he was out. I felt really bad for David as a win in that race was really possible.” David never was to win the Daytona 200, although he was certainly one of the most talented American road racers of the era.
For 1980, David was brought onto the Kawasaki AMA Superbike team alongside the up-and-coming Eddie Lawson. The challenge was great, given the abilities of Honda’s Freddie Spencer, and Yoshimura Suzuki’s Wes Cooley. In the end, Aldana finished fourth in the championship, behind Cooley, Lawson, and Spencer.
In 1981, following his fourth place in the Daytona 200 riding a Yamaha, Honda brought Aldana over to Japan to partner Mike Baldwin at the Suzuka 8-Hours, which they won. David’s other achievements in riding for the Honda Endurance team included a stunning performance at the Nurburgring.
Aldana: “I broke the track record at the Nurburgring, 9 minutes 58 seconds and we were on the pole. I was leading the race by 10 minutes, but the back brake failed and they wouldn’t let us back on the track holding us for a while in the pits.” David continued in Endurance racing with the French ELF team for two years. In 1983, he was also to finish 5th in the Daytona 200.
The continued focus upon Endurance racing paid off in the 1985 WERA National Endurance Championship, riding with John Kocinski on the GSX-R750 Suzuki. David mentored the teenager who would eventually become both a 250cc world champion and World Superbike champion. David: “It was an education for him on how you slide the bike and how to set the bike up.”
When BMW decided to have their Battle of the Legends series from 1992 to 1997, David Aldana was often the dominant rider. Although he had officially retired from racing, he was teaching riding at the Suzuki school.
“I was on a motorcycle that would go 170mph, a modern bike. I was riding quite a lot, and I still had my hand in it. I think I won the first six races I was in.” Aldana was to be the dominant racer in the series that year, and his passion continues today. In 2016, David
was racing in his trademark Skeleton leathers at the Circuit of the Americas’ AMA flat track races, competing with an Indian twin in the Superhooligan class. Consider for a moment that this race was held 46 years after his first Grand National win at Talladega.
Timeless… the word that best describes the man in the skeleton leathers, David Aldana.