As the sun begins to set against the coastal mountains, Petty gives his Zero flat-tracker the once-over in preparation for practice at Perris Raceway. He’s convinced it has a future in the framework of wheel-driven transportation. New ideas and out-of-the-box thinking can often be a hard sell, however, and Petty has plenty of life experience to back that up. It was this kind of forward thinking that actually got him banned from AMA competition for a time in the early 1960s.
“Sometimes it takes people a while to come around,” Petty says. “You know, in 1961 the AMA basically kicked me out of racing because I was riding some non-AMA events because they had rule against that, but the reason I was riding in them was because these other races, which were run by Bill France (Daytona International Speedway/NASCAR), had an FIM sanction, and my friend George French, who was involved with Honda at the time, got the okay to run some FIM-sanctioned races. The AMA had no interest in the FIM, and I thought that the US should be part of the World Championship. In the end, it was all about money for the AMA, and I was banned.”
Lo and behold, none other than Petty’s father, the same man who had discouraged his son’s motorcycling career, came to his son’s aid. Litigation ensued, and when all was said and done, Petty won the right to race both AMA and FIM events. It was a hollow victory, however, as the ugliness of the incident soured his taste for racing for a few years until the AMA finally saw the light, in the form of reigning 250cc Motocross World Champion Torsten Hallman, who ventured across the Atlantic to show the Americans just how advanced the Europeans were when it came to the sport of motocross.
Hallman’s visit attracted huge crowds and opened the AMA’s eyes to the sport’s potential, and Petty, once again in the AMA’s good graces, was on hand to try and challenge the World Champion. But, like the rest of his countrymen, he was schooled by the flying Swede at now legendary events such as the Hopetown Grand Prix.
“I was so disappointed,” Petty said. “Torsten just blew us all away. I was on a Greeves at the time, and while I could keep Torsten in sight, every time we got to the straightaways he would just pull away. His Husqvarna was fast, and I pretty much had given up on Greeves making any more power out of their old two-stroke engine. But then the next year Suzuki came over with their [RH-67] twin pipe motocross bike, and I got a one-year contract to race for Suzuki [on the RH-68] in 1968. It made good power, but the forks were terrible. I tried to fix things on the bike myself, but Suzuki very much had an ‘NIH, Not Invented Here’ mentality. I was a development rider, so that didn’t work out too well.”
Rather than fight the hard-headed Suzuki factory to make the changes he felt the bike needed to be competitive, Petty elected to move on and buy a Maico, and it was while riding this machine that he had a vision that revolutionize the motorcycle industry.
“In 1969, I went up to the Cal-Poly Enduro, and I was riding along on the Maico and dropped down into a rain rut when the dirt just grabbed the front fender and bent it all up,” Petty recalls. “I bent it back straight, but within a few miles it just broke off, and I had to ride the rest of the enduro with mud in my face. I thought, ‘There has to be a better way to do make a fender than that.’ So I remember looking around for better fender material, and a painter friend of mine had this plastic paint bucket that you could beat on with a baseball bat or a hammer, and it wouldn’t break. We knew the plastic was there, but it was just a matter of finding a way to mold the fenders. So, I bought an injection mold and started learning about plastics.”
Thus, Preston Petty Products was born. Success was not immediate, however. Petty recalls that he went through a lot of trial and error to perfect the right plastic formula for his new fenders.
“When I went to a plastic place and told the guy that I needed a plastic that was really tough,” he remembers. “The guy said, ‘Okay. We should make them out of high-impact polystyrene.’ I said, ‘Sure. Poly anything. Polly wants a cracker—I don’t know the difference.’ He made one, and I rode with it on my DKW, and it held up just fine. Then I went down to the quarter car wash to wash the bike, and I put Gunk all over it like I always did. So then I went and put my quarter in the machine, and when I turned around the front fender was laying on top of the tire. The Gunk had just dissolved it same as when you put gasoline in a Styrofoam cup. We went through a number of plastics before we got the right one. By the summer of 1970, we had selected polypropylene because it had good low-temperature impact resistance and good memory so it would go back to its original shape after an impact.”
Your Privacy Choices