Jeff Smith
Uncut and Uncensored
By Shawn McDonald
You have to watch out for sneaky reporters with tape machines hidden somewhere on their body because you never know what they will capture. It was at the September Chehalis Classic where a certain two time 500cc World Motocross Champion was the invited guest and speaker for the dinner that night inside a real barn. Appropriate venue for what was being flung that night. I did warn him that I was taping his speech and he still soldiered on. He couldn’t have done it by himself as his speech topics had to be illuminated by Dick Mann holding a flashlight, or in Smith’s vocabulary a torch. These are the unedited words of Jeff Smith with a full belly and at least a couple glasses of red wine inside him. The ## are to denote uproarious uncontrolled hysterics by the audience.
Moving on from there I guess I had some sort of point, but I forgot. ##. I guess that’s true, but Derek Belvoir was feeding me wine at the time. He said you won’t believe this but I sold a Greeves for $2,000 today. ##. No wonder he could afford wine. ##. And all evening I’ve been sitting across from a guy who’s got buyers remorse ##. Just by accident I moved my plate and underneath it was a picture of David Bickers. ##. David wouldn’t believe it that you could sell a Greeves for $2,000 in 2 double “O” 3. ##. Dick is shining the light on my notes so I know I can move on from there. ##. Those American feeder notes I don’t know what the hell they mean. ##. It says Passions of Youth. Passions of Youth? From about the ages of nine to sixteen, seventeen or eighteen I was very interested in Trials. Then I found out about Motocross. There were two beautiful things about Motocross. Number one is you know the result immediately and you know the reason why you’re where your at. ##. That’s a beautiful thing. In Trials you never know until they add up the score. In those days you didn’t get the score until the middle of the following week. ##. Then you’d go “Wow, I didn’t think I lost that many points” or occasionally you’d say “Oooh, they seemed to have missed a few.” ##. Mostly it was I didn’t think I dropped that many. So I discovered the delights of motocross. We called it Scrambling. Dick said correctly that it was called Scrambling in England for many, many years. Only after some 10 or 12 years after the end of the 39-45 war. ##. Now that was a WAR! ##. We didn’t piss around and get it over in three weeks. We took 4 years to get it over. ##. I hope nobody’s too offended by the fact that I used a little French there. ##. I don’t like the French much. ##. I’m not keeping it all to the script. ##.
This was an excellent Trial (today) and I absolutely compliment Mr. B, or Belvoir or whatever ##. He happened to be watching on a section where I rode like a centipede from the bottom to the top and naturally in his supercilious voice he said to me at the top of the section “That wasn’t very good.” ##.
I’m trying to think of what I called the guy who bought the Greeves now? Of yeah, Mark. Mark rides up this section and he does the most difficult thing you can imagine he rides a long right, then a right hander, then a left hander, then a right hand and then he dives down between two trees and then he makes it extremely difficult because he was supposed to go this side of another tree. Then Derek Belvoir is at the bottom giving the Adolf Hitler salute going “FIVE, FIVE, FIVE!” ## I said to him “Derek its five, not FIVE, FIVE, FIVE!” ##. I found out about Motocross and decided that’s the direction I should really go. I told you that the one good thing was that you knew the results at the end. The one thing I didn’t tell you was that you made money at it. Making money for a 16 year old kid is really important. Or a 60 year old kid. ##. So I got into Motocross.
Kay Mann said to me “Why don’t you tell a few stories about Billy the Pig.” The Pig is not a name for children’s comics. This guy was a motocrosser! We called him the Billy the Pig for two reasons. I saw Victor LeLoux and Las Gustaffson and lots of you will have difficulty in identifying them. But Billy the Pig you’ll be able to recognize. He’s got a face like a pig. He’s a Swede. He has a flat face with two nostrils in the middle. ##. Does that describe a pig? (SQUEEAL! SQUEEAL!) Oh! Billy’s here! ##. Not only that but he rode in an extremely rough and porcine fashion. He had various theories about Motocross. One theory was he would say “Jeffery we do not play Ping Pong.” If you made the mistake of saying “Bill you’ve pushed me off the track and I’ve broken my leg” he’d say “We do not play Ping Pong. This is Motocross.” He had another theory as well and this one is quite an important one so you need to remember this. He’d said “I have a theory about Motocross. If were riding in a Grand Prix and there’s one lap to go and there’s one man in front of me I will drive straight across the nearest hairpin and knock him down.” I said “But Bill you might fall down?” and he said “That doesn’t matter. If we both fall down it’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll get up first and win.”##. So this is Billy the Pig. I now know him to be a very nice person. He was AHMRA’s guest two years ago in Daytona and he’s quite a nice guy. To some extent I resent calling him Billy the Pig, but not totally and I’ll tell you why. ##. We were racing in Italy at the Italian Grand Prix and Iforget the name of the place, but anyways it was the Italian Grand Prix. It was a two and a half minute track and as you came towards the finish line, it was in a park, and you jumped out of a beach and actually landed on tarmac that went around a huge island filled with flags and flowers beside them and down towards the finish line. I was leading this Grand Prix and absolutely couldn’t believe it. Here I was, quite a young kid riding a Gold Star leading the Italian Grand Prix and on the last lap I came to the beach and Billy the Pig is right there behind me. I went on the island and leaned it over and go around the island and Billy the Pig went straight through the bloody island flowers and all and went to the finish line and won. So I said to him after “Bill, that wasn’t fair” and he said “We do not play Ping Pong.” ####. The first time I was introduced to William. William the Pig. He’s becoming more of a person the older he gets. I might like you one day. ##. I find that people grow up. So the first time I saw Billy the Pig was traveling with my not yet brother in law John Draper in Sweden at the Swedish Grand Prix. It was a very sandy track and we set up the bike. I’m trying to cut this stuff short as I can because I’m sure like you I want to get back to some of Belvoir’s wine! ##. So John Draper is leading and William is in second place and I’m in third place. I had known something about Bill, but I had not met him. After several laps suddenly Bill pulls up alongside John and pushes him through the fence and John goes end over end. I’m about 70 to 80 yards behind and John does two tumbles and lands on his feet and points to Billy the Pig and shouts to me as I go past “Get him!” ## I can remember to this day what I thought “I’m not going to get anywhere near HIM!” ## So all of my riding career I stayed out of Billy the Pigs way. Regarding his other theory, the theory of it’s at the end of a Grand Prix and there’s only one person in front of me and I’m near enough, I’ll just drive across the hairpin or whatever is necessary and knock him down. If I fall down and its 50-50 who gets up and wins. This is serious stuff you know. We were at the famous Namur, Belgium track and Rene Barton was leading on a Manx. A Belgian guy leading in Belgium is unbelievably exciting to a Belgian crowd. Bill is in second place. This is a very unusual event because my Gold Star is blown up and so I’m standing by the side watching. Very unusual. Gold Stars don’t usually blow up. ## Namur is a mountain circuit and the change in elevation is probably four or five hundred feet. At Namur you’re either going steeply downhill or nearly vertical uphill and then you keep coming back into the Citadel. The Citadel is a fortress so you’re driving in and out of these medieval gates. All the way down these steep hills are these trees. Once the riders went past the starting area they went into the forested area where they were out of sight for quite a long time. Here comes the last lap and here goes Rene down the bank into the trees and right on his tail is Billy the Pig. ##. Everybody in the grandstand went “Wow! I wonder what’s going to happen?” ##. Suddenly up through the trees comes Rene and the crowd goes absolutely crazy. Then a long, long time afterwards comes Billy the Pig. Billy finishes 2nd and nobody cares because the 1st place guy is the most important. So I said to Bill afterwards “What happened in the woods?” and he said “Well. You know my theory. I knocked him down. You know there are 45,000 people watching us at the Citadel today. Well 10,000 people picked up Rene’s machine, put him back on it and pushed him off.” I said what about you? “10,000 people held my machine down and when they picked it up they picked it up by the throttle cable.” So I guess you could say that every Pig gets its comeuppance.
I mentioned to someone that some of the more serious racing I did was with Rolf Tibblin. Joel Robert was absolutely the best natural rider that I have ever seen. I’ve seen Carmichael and he’s good but I tell you the best natural rider is Joel Robert, but he didn’t have a brain in his head. As far as I know he still doesn’t. ##. Joel thought that when the green flag drops you go as fast as you can until you see the checkered flag. That’s not true. That’s not a good approach. Particularly in those days when we were riding motorcycles that which weren’t as reliable as those of today. So Joel lost as many races as he won because he insisted on going as fast as he could all of the time. (Jim Pomeroy: I know how that feels) I’m going to leave that one alone. Joel was blazingly fast and if you could stay with him which was very, very difficult, but if you could stay with him there would be a moment during the race when you could get alongside him and sometimes you could get past him. The moment you got past Joel he collapsed like a bag of bones. He immediately had back problems or some sort of a problem that caused him to not be there at the end, but that was the rare moment. Tibblin on the other hand you could pass and he never gave up. Absolutely never, never gave up. Tibblin was not a natural rider. He worked at it and he planned hard and then he tried very hard. I spent a lot of time with Tibblin in the early 60's and he was TOUGH. He was tough because he was mentally tough. He helped me because we did train together on the road so I stayed with Rolf quite often. Rolf was not a Billy the Pig although he shared somewhat certain traits. One time he tried very hard to push me off the track and afterwards he came to me and said “Jeffery I’m very sorry about what happened today, but I had to do it so I could be second.” It made sense so I said “Rolf. I forgive you.” Rolf was a very tough racer and we had one or two moments, but one time he said to me “How do you get on with the Russians?” and I said “Not very well.” He said “I don’t either.” The Russian team came to riding the Grand Prixs in the mid 60's and they had their orders and it was clear that the orders were that no matter who passes you or crosses you up, you have to wreck them. We come up on the Russians riding in a red line as were lapping them and they were so hard to get by. Tibblin says to me one day “We should teach the Russians a lesson” and I said “What do you think we should do Rolf?”Rolf said “Today I will take out one Russian.” ##. This is the 1964 Dutch Grand Prix and Rolf won the first race and I won the second race. In the third race Rolf was leading and we come around this corner and there are the Russians on the outside of the apex. Rolf was running his Hedlund which was an unmoveable object and once he started on his trajectory in this corner nothing was going to deflect it. Rolf gets under the Russian and with an imperceptible motion of his shoulder and arm puts the Russian and his bike over the crowd, and they’re standing ten deep. At the end of the race Rolf comes up to me and says “Did you see the Russian?” ##. I said “Yes Rolf and I was very impressed, but I hope you never do that to me.” “No. No. You are my friend.” he said. I thought, I wonder about that time he said he was sorry. Then he told me “You know, it is your turn to get the Russian Bear.” ##. So we go to the French Grand Prix which is in a chalk pit and a monster of a track. Chalk is not the most reliable of rock. It was so steep up and down that they imported cement to put on the huge hills. I came around a hairpin and there’s a Russian just about 10 yards before popping over the bank. I’m in the hairpin and I just went in front of him and I could feel his front wheel rubbing against my back wheel. Its going “bded, bdeb, bdeb, bdeb.” ##. So I pointed down the hill still hearing “bdeb, bdeb, bdeb, bdeb” It’s all quiet and I hear a bit of a crunch behind me. I go around a whole lap to see what damage I’ve done.
Half way down the hill his CZed is embedded in the concrete by the footrest. He was there for five laps because they couldn’t pull it out. In the pits after the race I say to Tibblin “Did you see my Russian?” ##. And Rolf said “No. Where was it?”
Tibblin wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, but he wasn’t as dumb as Joel. One night at 3 O’ clock in the morning were driving from some race in East Germany to someplace in Italy. We come through East Germany and it’s 8 O’ clock in the evening, now were through West Germany and were on the frontier where we have to go into Switzerland. In those days it wasn’t the common market like it is today. You had to stop at every border, jump through hoops and showed that you really owned the machines. Now its three in the morning and we arrive someplace on the German Swiss frontier and the Germans don’t care and waive you through, but the Swiss they’re really concerned cause now you’re about to come into their country. We get out and show them our paper work and they shine torches on the machines and see that the numbers are correct with the paper work. One of the customs guys notices that Tibblin has got a drum of something on the back of his trailer. The customs guy says “What is this?” is Swiss. So Tibblin says “Brandy!” Then the customs guy pulls out a little whistle and goes “tweeet, tweeet, tweeet” and six guys in overalls come running out of the shed and were there for the three hours. Well it was diesel fuel that he had in the drum. ##. Tibblin was bit of a humorist, but I didn’t think it was very funny at 3 O’ clock in the morning.
Some of the time we would go by train from Czechoslovakia to Russia to ride in the Russian Grand Prix. We loaded the bikes on the train in Prague and we came to the frontier station with Russia. At this time there was lights, barb wire and Russians walking about with fur hats and machine guns. This was definitely a bad place. Now the Russian railway gauge is smaller than the Czechoslovakian railway gauge and everything has to be transferred over to a new train. The Russians paid you out (prize money) in Rubles, and Rubles were supposed to be worth a dollar. We exchanged for 75 or 150 Rubles for a three day train trip which wasn’t very much money. Then they would say you’ve now got your 150 Rubles, but you can’t take them to the west. They must be spent in Russia. There were lots of good things to buy in Russia. ##. Spring onions were big that year. ##. And yogurt was also big that year. Sometimes you could buy a track suit, but it was not America. We spent what we had to but not Tibblin. Tibblin arrives at the Czechoslovakian frontier on the way out and the Russians are still there with the bright lights and the fur hats with machine guns. The guards go on the train and go into Tibblins cabin and say “PAPERS!” Tibblin gets his papers and out falls a Ruble. They said “You’re not allowed to have this” and Tibblin says “Well, what about these?” and he pulls out a big handful. They go absolutely crazy searching up and down the train and all of the riders. They finally say to Tibblin “Were going to confiscate all your Rubles” and he said “My Rubles?” “No” they said “Mother Russia’s owns those Rubles.” Tibblin answers “No. No. I’m not giving them up.” We’ll give you a choice” they said “Either you can stay here and the train leaves so you can spend the Rubles or you can give up the Rubles. You can catch the train maybe tomorrow or next week when it comes through again.” Tibblin said “Why don’t you keep the Rubles.”##.
Uncut and Uncensored
By Shawn McDonald
You have to watch out for sneaky reporters with tape machines hidden somewhere on their body because you never know what they will capture. It was at the September Chehalis Classic where a certain two time 500cc World Motocross Champion was the invited guest and speaker for the dinner that night inside a real barn. Appropriate venue for what was being flung that night. I did warn him that I was taping his speech and he still soldiered on. He couldn’t have done it by himself as his speech topics had to be illuminated by Dick Mann holding a flashlight, or in Smith’s vocabulary a torch. These are the unedited words of Jeff Smith with a full belly and at least a couple glasses of red wine inside him. The ## are to denote uproarious uncontrolled hysterics by the audience.
Moving on from there I guess I had some sort of point, but I forgot. ##. I guess that’s true, but Derek Belvoir was feeding me wine at the time. He said you won’t believe this but I sold a Greeves for $2,000 today. ##. No wonder he could afford wine. ##. And all evening I’ve been sitting across from a guy who’s got buyers remorse ##. Just by accident I moved my plate and underneath it was a picture of David Bickers. ##. David wouldn’t believe it that you could sell a Greeves for $2,000 in 2 double “O” 3. ##. Dick is shining the light on my notes so I know I can move on from there. ##. Those American feeder notes I don’t know what the hell they mean. ##. It says Passions of Youth. Passions of Youth? From about the ages of nine to sixteen, seventeen or eighteen I was very interested in Trials. Then I found out about Motocross. There were two beautiful things about Motocross. Number one is you know the result immediately and you know the reason why you’re where your at. ##. That’s a beautiful thing. In Trials you never know until they add up the score. In those days you didn’t get the score until the middle of the following week. ##. Then you’d go “Wow, I didn’t think I lost that many points” or occasionally you’d say “Oooh, they seemed to have missed a few.” ##. Mostly it was I didn’t think I dropped that many. So I discovered the delights of motocross. We called it Scrambling. Dick said correctly that it was called Scrambling in England for many, many years. Only after some 10 or 12 years after the end of the 39-45 war. ##. Now that was a WAR! ##. We didn’t piss around and get it over in three weeks. We took 4 years to get it over. ##. I hope nobody’s too offended by the fact that I used a little French there. ##. I don’t like the French much. ##. I’m not keeping it all to the script. ##.
This was an excellent Trial (today) and I absolutely compliment Mr. B, or Belvoir or whatever ##. He happened to be watching on a section where I rode like a centipede from the bottom to the top and naturally in his supercilious voice he said to me at the top of the section “That wasn’t very good.” ##.
I’m trying to think of what I called the guy who bought the Greeves now? Of yeah, Mark. Mark rides up this section and he does the most difficult thing you can imagine he rides a long right, then a right hander, then a left hander, then a right hand and then he dives down between two trees and then he makes it extremely difficult because he was supposed to go this side of another tree. Then Derek Belvoir is at the bottom giving the Adolf Hitler salute going “FIVE, FIVE, FIVE!” ## I said to him “Derek its five, not FIVE, FIVE, FIVE!” ##. I found out about Motocross and decided that’s the direction I should really go. I told you that the one good thing was that you knew the results at the end. The one thing I didn’t tell you was that you made money at it. Making money for a 16 year old kid is really important. Or a 60 year old kid. ##. So I got into Motocross.
Kay Mann said to me “Why don’t you tell a few stories about Billy the Pig.” The Pig is not a name for children’s comics. This guy was a motocrosser! We called him the Billy the Pig for two reasons. I saw Victor LeLoux and Las Gustaffson and lots of you will have difficulty in identifying them. But Billy the Pig you’ll be able to recognize. He’s got a face like a pig. He’s a Swede. He has a flat face with two nostrils in the middle. ##. Does that describe a pig? (SQUEEAL! SQUEEAL!) Oh! Billy’s here! ##. Not only that but he rode in an extremely rough and porcine fashion. He had various theories about Motocross. One theory was he would say “Jeffery we do not play Ping Pong.” If you made the mistake of saying “Bill you’ve pushed me off the track and I’ve broken my leg” he’d say “We do not play Ping Pong. This is Motocross.” He had another theory as well and this one is quite an important one so you need to remember this. He’d said “I have a theory about Motocross. If were riding in a Grand Prix and there’s one lap to go and there’s one man in front of me I will drive straight across the nearest hairpin and knock him down.” I said “But Bill you might fall down?” and he said “That doesn’t matter. If we both fall down it’s a 50-50 chance that I’ll get up first and win.”##. So this is Billy the Pig. I now know him to be a very nice person. He was AHMRA’s guest two years ago in Daytona and he’s quite a nice guy. To some extent I resent calling him Billy the Pig, but not totally and I’ll tell you why. ##. We were racing in Italy at the Italian Grand Prix and Iforget the name of the place, but anyways it was the Italian Grand Prix. It was a two and a half minute track and as you came towards the finish line, it was in a park, and you jumped out of a beach and actually landed on tarmac that went around a huge island filled with flags and flowers beside them and down towards the finish line. I was leading this Grand Prix and absolutely couldn’t believe it. Here I was, quite a young kid riding a Gold Star leading the Italian Grand Prix and on the last lap I came to the beach and Billy the Pig is right there behind me. I went on the island and leaned it over and go around the island and Billy the Pig went straight through the bloody island flowers and all and went to the finish line and won. So I said to him after “Bill, that wasn’t fair” and he said “We do not play Ping Pong.” ####. The first time I was introduced to William. William the Pig. He’s becoming more of a person the older he gets. I might like you one day. ##. I find that people grow up. So the first time I saw Billy the Pig was traveling with my not yet brother in law John Draper in Sweden at the Swedish Grand Prix. It was a very sandy track and we set up the bike. I’m trying to cut this stuff short as I can because I’m sure like you I want to get back to some of Belvoir’s wine! ##. So John Draper is leading and William is in second place and I’m in third place. I had known something about Bill, but I had not met him. After several laps suddenly Bill pulls up alongside John and pushes him through the fence and John goes end over end. I’m about 70 to 80 yards behind and John does two tumbles and lands on his feet and points to Billy the Pig and shouts to me as I go past “Get him!” ## I can remember to this day what I thought “I’m not going to get anywhere near HIM!” ## So all of my riding career I stayed out of Billy the Pigs way. Regarding his other theory, the theory of it’s at the end of a Grand Prix and there’s only one person in front of me and I’m near enough, I’ll just drive across the hairpin or whatever is necessary and knock him down. If I fall down and its 50-50 who gets up and wins. This is serious stuff you know. We were at the famous Namur, Belgium track and Rene Barton was leading on a Manx. A Belgian guy leading in Belgium is unbelievably exciting to a Belgian crowd. Bill is in second place. This is a very unusual event because my Gold Star is blown up and so I’m standing by the side watching. Very unusual. Gold Stars don’t usually blow up. ## Namur is a mountain circuit and the change in elevation is probably four or five hundred feet. At Namur you’re either going steeply downhill or nearly vertical uphill and then you keep coming back into the Citadel. The Citadel is a fortress so you’re driving in and out of these medieval gates. All the way down these steep hills are these trees. Once the riders went past the starting area they went into the forested area where they were out of sight for quite a long time. Here comes the last lap and here goes Rene down the bank into the trees and right on his tail is Billy the Pig. ##. Everybody in the grandstand went “Wow! I wonder what’s going to happen?” ##. Suddenly up through the trees comes Rene and the crowd goes absolutely crazy. Then a long, long time afterwards comes Billy the Pig. Billy finishes 2nd and nobody cares because the 1st place guy is the most important. So I said to Bill afterwards “What happened in the woods?” and he said “Well. You know my theory. I knocked him down. You know there are 45,000 people watching us at the Citadel today. Well 10,000 people picked up Rene’s machine, put him back on it and pushed him off.” I said what about you? “10,000 people held my machine down and when they picked it up they picked it up by the throttle cable.” So I guess you could say that every Pig gets its comeuppance.
I mentioned to someone that some of the more serious racing I did was with Rolf Tibblin. Joel Robert was absolutely the best natural rider that I have ever seen. I’ve seen Carmichael and he’s good but I tell you the best natural rider is Joel Robert, but he didn’t have a brain in his head. As far as I know he still doesn’t. ##. Joel thought that when the green flag drops you go as fast as you can until you see the checkered flag. That’s not true. That’s not a good approach. Particularly in those days when we were riding motorcycles that which weren’t as reliable as those of today. So Joel lost as many races as he won because he insisted on going as fast as he could all of the time. (Jim Pomeroy: I know how that feels) I’m going to leave that one alone. Joel was blazingly fast and if you could stay with him which was very, very difficult, but if you could stay with him there would be a moment during the race when you could get alongside him and sometimes you could get past him. The moment you got past Joel he collapsed like a bag of bones. He immediately had back problems or some sort of a problem that caused him to not be there at the end, but that was the rare moment. Tibblin on the other hand you could pass and he never gave up. Absolutely never, never gave up. Tibblin was not a natural rider. He worked at it and he planned hard and then he tried very hard. I spent a lot of time with Tibblin in the early 60's and he was TOUGH. He was tough because he was mentally tough. He helped me because we did train together on the road so I stayed with Rolf quite often. Rolf was not a Billy the Pig although he shared somewhat certain traits. One time he tried very hard to push me off the track and afterwards he came to me and said “Jeffery I’m very sorry about what happened today, but I had to do it so I could be second.” It made sense so I said “Rolf. I forgive you.” Rolf was a very tough racer and we had one or two moments, but one time he said to me “How do you get on with the Russians?” and I said “Not very well.” He said “I don’t either.” The Russian team came to riding the Grand Prixs in the mid 60's and they had their orders and it was clear that the orders were that no matter who passes you or crosses you up, you have to wreck them. We come up on the Russians riding in a red line as were lapping them and they were so hard to get by. Tibblin says to me one day “We should teach the Russians a lesson” and I said “What do you think we should do Rolf?”Rolf said “Today I will take out one Russian.” ##. This is the 1964 Dutch Grand Prix and Rolf won the first race and I won the second race. In the third race Rolf was leading and we come around this corner and there are the Russians on the outside of the apex. Rolf was running his Hedlund which was an unmoveable object and once he started on his trajectory in this corner nothing was going to deflect it. Rolf gets under the Russian and with an imperceptible motion of his shoulder and arm puts the Russian and his bike over the crowd, and they’re standing ten deep. At the end of the race Rolf comes up to me and says “Did you see the Russian?” ##. I said “Yes Rolf and I was very impressed, but I hope you never do that to me.” “No. No. You are my friend.” he said. I thought, I wonder about that time he said he was sorry. Then he told me “You know, it is your turn to get the Russian Bear.” ##. So we go to the French Grand Prix which is in a chalk pit and a monster of a track. Chalk is not the most reliable of rock. It was so steep up and down that they imported cement to put on the huge hills. I came around a hairpin and there’s a Russian just about 10 yards before popping over the bank. I’m in the hairpin and I just went in front of him and I could feel his front wheel rubbing against my back wheel. Its going “bded, bdeb, bdeb, bdeb.” ##. So I pointed down the hill still hearing “bdeb, bdeb, bdeb, bdeb” It’s all quiet and I hear a bit of a crunch behind me. I go around a whole lap to see what damage I’ve done.
Half way down the hill his CZed is embedded in the concrete by the footrest. He was there for five laps because they couldn’t pull it out. In the pits after the race I say to Tibblin “Did you see my Russian?” ##. And Rolf said “No. Where was it?”
Tibblin wasn’t the smartest guy in the world, but he wasn’t as dumb as Joel. One night at 3 O’ clock in the morning were driving from some race in East Germany to someplace in Italy. We come through East Germany and it’s 8 O’ clock in the evening, now were through West Germany and were on the frontier where we have to go into Switzerland. In those days it wasn’t the common market like it is today. You had to stop at every border, jump through hoops and showed that you really owned the machines. Now its three in the morning and we arrive someplace on the German Swiss frontier and the Germans don’t care and waive you through, but the Swiss they’re really concerned cause now you’re about to come into their country. We get out and show them our paper work and they shine torches on the machines and see that the numbers are correct with the paper work. One of the customs guys notices that Tibblin has got a drum of something on the back of his trailer. The customs guy says “What is this?” is Swiss. So Tibblin says “Brandy!” Then the customs guy pulls out a little whistle and goes “tweeet, tweeet, tweeet” and six guys in overalls come running out of the shed and were there for the three hours. Well it was diesel fuel that he had in the drum. ##. Tibblin was bit of a humorist, but I didn’t think it was very funny at 3 O’ clock in the morning.
Some of the time we would go by train from Czechoslovakia to Russia to ride in the Russian Grand Prix. We loaded the bikes on the train in Prague and we came to the frontier station with Russia. At this time there was lights, barb wire and Russians walking about with fur hats and machine guns. This was definitely a bad place. Now the Russian railway gauge is smaller than the Czechoslovakian railway gauge and everything has to be transferred over to a new train. The Russians paid you out (prize money) in Rubles, and Rubles were supposed to be worth a dollar. We exchanged for 75 or 150 Rubles for a three day train trip which wasn’t very much money. Then they would say you’ve now got your 150 Rubles, but you can’t take them to the west. They must be spent in Russia. There were lots of good things to buy in Russia. ##. Spring onions were big that year. ##. And yogurt was also big that year. Sometimes you could buy a track suit, but it was not America. We spent what we had to but not Tibblin. Tibblin arrives at the Czechoslovakian frontier on the way out and the Russians are still there with the bright lights and the fur hats with machine guns. The guards go on the train and go into Tibblins cabin and say “PAPERS!” Tibblin gets his papers and out falls a Ruble. They said “You’re not allowed to have this” and Tibblin says “Well, what about these?” and he pulls out a big handful. They go absolutely crazy searching up and down the train and all of the riders. They finally say to Tibblin “Were going to confiscate all your Rubles” and he said “My Rubles?” “No” they said “Mother Russia’s owns those Rubles.” Tibblin answers “No. No. I’m not giving them up.” We’ll give you a choice” they said “Either you can stay here and the train leaves so you can spend the Rubles or you can give up the Rubles. You can catch the train maybe tomorrow or next week when it comes through again.” Tibblin said “Why don’t you keep the Rubles.”##.
