Larry Lawrence | August 31, 2016
I’m certain there are enthusiasts out there who are passionate about the sports of cricket, badminton or handball. They spend all their lives spreading the gospel to try to popularize their activities in America with little progress beyond a small core of participants. In one way that might characterize the life of Doug Bingham. Bingham was a lifelong sidecar enthusiast, who for years promoted sidecar to the larger motorcycling community, racing and otherwise. To hear Bingham tell it, adding a sidecar to a motorcycle made the activity that much more fun because more people were involved. He had a point. Even though Bingham’s manufacture of sidecars with his company Side Strider, sparked a revival of sidecar interest in the 1970s, ultimately sidehacks never quite caught on the way Bingham thought they should have.
Being on the wrong side of the law was originally what got Bingham into sidecars.
“I lost my driver’s license back in the ‘60s,” Bingham said in a 1990 interview with Rider. “I met a friend at a Harley shop who raced sidecars, so we took my bike and his sidecar and we started racing together in desert events like the Greenhorn Enduro and up at the Jack Pine in Michigan.”
Bingham, first as passenger with partner Terry Hansford and later as driver, won a slew of prestigious off-road events in the sidecar class, including Greenhorn, Jack Pine, the Moose Run and the Shamrocks Annual European Scrambles.
Bingham joked that the big advantage riding as a team in desert events was “if you broke down in the middle of nowhere, at least you had someone to talk to.”
Not only was he leading sidecar driver in off-road events, but Bingham also won a slew of flat track and road racing events in sidecars, including capturing the inaugural AMA Sidecar Road Racing Championship in 1968 with co-pilot Ed Wade aboard a Harley-Davidson-powered, Bingham-designed racer. They took the title again in 1969.
In 1969, Bingham incorporated his sidecar business, Side Strider Inc., in Van Nuys, Calif. He then began production of the Bingham Mark I, which was the first new sidecar design in decades. The sidecar was featured in the December 1969 issue of Popular Science as being innovative, handsomely designed and reasonably priced.
Bingham was on the leading wave of a brief period in American motorcycle racing where sidecars became fairly popular, mostly in the decade of the 1970s and into the early 1980s.
One of the funniest stories Bingham use to tell was the time he and a friend named Pam Stone rode together in his street rig to spectate the AMA National Road Race at Laguna Seca. On a whim Bingham asked Stone and she was game, so they entered the sidecar race with Bingham’s street rig in a grid full of racing rigs. Amazingly they finished 10th out of 25 entries!
“I remember him doing that,” said Larry Coleman, three-time AMA National Sidecar Champion. “And yeah, there were probably some people pissed off about it, but I’m sure Doug thought, ‘Hey, I can pass tech inspection and who are you to tell me I can’t race?’ And you know he was talented enough of a rider he probably went faster on that street outfit than some of the teams did on their racing outfits.”
Through racing Bingham became friend with off-road legend Bud Ekins. Ekins was doing work in the movies and he asked Bingham to help him mount some sidecars to carry movie cameras. From there Bingham made a prototype sidecar from one of Ekins’ old Jawa-Velorex sidehack mold and that’s how his business got started. Movie and television work continued and that led to Bingham building a special electric sidecar rig for filming the 1984 Olympics.
Perhaps the best movie scene Bingham had a big part in was the sidecar chase scene with Harrison Ford and Sean Connery in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Bingham not only secured the World War II vintage sidehack for the scene, but he rode a Honda Goldwing-based sidecar carrying Steven Spielberg onboard alongside a cameraman watching a monitor. Bingham side it was one of his most harrowing rides ever.
“All I see is dust and occasionally this German on the bike in front of me,” he said of filming the scene. “There’s a cliff on one side and a mountain on the other and I’m going into the corners with this Goldwing sideways! I had visions of having to live with the burden of killing the man who brought us E.T.!”
Bingham reputation as perhaps the foremost sidecar expert in the country grew due to his racing success and being a sidecar maker. By the early 1970s he began promoting an annual sidecar enthusiast gathers in Los Angeles that eventually grew to become one of the largest meetings of its kind in the world. Sidecar riders from across the globe would come to the gathering at Griffith Park in LA. One year’s rally attracted some 12,000 fans and spectators who marveled at the unique bike/sidecar combinations and their equally colorful riders.
Bingham touted safety as a big reason for favoring three-wheelers versus two.
“If you hit oil or gravel you usually just slide a little bit with a sidecar,” Bingham explained in a 1980s interview. “Also car drivers see you a better with a sidecar.”
Plus, sidehacks were always a great conversation starter. ““It was his way of getting to know people,” his wife Liz Gibbons told the Los Angeles Daily News. “He had a pretty dry personality. He could see people very clearly and really enjoyed them. But when he’d talk about sidecars, he was just so enthusiastic.”
Bingham was a 50-year AMA member and Charter Life Member. He received the 1998 AMA MVP Award for advancing the cause of motorcycling and was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2003. In 2014, he donated more than 600 motorcycle-themed toys, which are currently on display at the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum.
Bingham passed away in January of this year. He was 76. In 1989 Dealernews named Bingham one of the 25 most significant people in motorcycling over the previous 25 years. For all of his racing exploits and accomplishments, Bingham’s lasting legacy was reigniting the interest of sidecars in America in the 1970s.