Larry Lawrence | September 12, 2021
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
This Cycle News Archives Column is reprinted from the October 10, 2007. CN has hundreds of past Archives columns in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road -Editor.
Remembering Cal
Cal Rayborn rode hard and made road racing look easy. In any discussion of the best road racer America ever produced, Rayborn’s name always comes up. Rayborn emerged from San Diego, California, in the mid-1960s and immediately became a contender on any road course in America.
In the first AMA National road race where his Harley KR made it to the checkered flag, he finished second. That was at the old Greenwood Road Way in Indianola, Iowa, in August of 1965.
During a three-year stretch, from 1967 to 1969, Rayborn won seven of the 13 AMA National road races held. He won the Daytona 200 back to back in 1968 and ’69, and his victory in ’69 was the last 200 won by Harley-Davidson. He also gave Harley-Davidson its final AMA National road-race victory. That came in 1972 on the new alloy XR750 at Laguna Seca, where he beat Gene Romero on a factory Triumph and then-rookie Kenny Roberts on a factory Yamaha.
But for all his accomplishments stateside, perhaps his most amazing feat was going to England for the Trans-Atlantic Match Races in 1972, where he rode one of the notoriously unreliable iron-barreled Harley-Davidson XRs.
“The DNF record of those cast-iron XRs was so bad that Harley didn’t want to send him over there,” said Match Race teammate and friend Don Emde. “He convinced them [that] with the cool weather it would be okay. What he did over there was incredible.”
Rayborn rode an iron-cylinder XR racer owned by Harley-Davidson employee and tuner Walt Faulk. It was Rayborn’s first appearance in England, so Emde showed him the way by drawing maps of the tracks they would race on a cocktail napkin. On the outdated bike and with no experience on the tracks, Rayborn went out and won three of the six rounds and tied Brit Ray Pickrell as the top scorer. That gave Rayborn instant hero status in Britain, and even more importantly it marked the beginning of recognition by the rest of the world that American riders, long thought only able to master oval dirt tracks, could be top contenders in international road racing.
“I remember being on the inside of the Esso hairpin at Oulton Park one filthy wet spring day,” said British journalist Frank Melling. “Sleet was falling miserably, and patchy fog finished off the picture. Out of the mist came a gaggle of triples led by Ray Pickerell, who was always hard on the brakes. Rayborn was about seventh. The surface was atrocious—beyond impossible for hard braking. Rayborn eased up the inside of the pack with the delicacy of a ballet dancer, squeezed the Harley through on the inside of Pickerell, and the booming twin accelerated away into first place, to the screams of the crowd. If I had just witnessed Moses parting the Red Sea, I couldn’t have been more impressed.”
Calvin Rayborn II was born on February 20, 1940, and raised in San Diego. He began riding motorcycles when he was just eight years old. One of Rayborn’s first jobs was working as a motorcycle delivery rider after school and during the summer. The teenage Rayborn built up thousands of miles of riding, as he put it, “as fast as I could, because that’s how you made money in that business.”
Rayborn met Don Vesco at a local drag race in the late 1950s, and the two became good friends. They would travel to the races together, and Vesco tuned some of the bikes Rayborn raced. Rayborn also picked up sponsorship from Lou Kaiser, who had also helped the early racing careers of Joe Leonard and Jimmy Phillips.
Vesco recalled that Rayborn would always cause him to be late to the races.
“Calvin was shagging blueprints and would be out there trying to make that last dime,” Vesco recalls. “We’d leave my place at five p.m. and have to climb the fence at Gardena Speedway to get someone to open the gates to let us in so we could race.”
By the early 1960s, Rayborn was a regular winner in local club scrambles and TT meets popular at the time in California. He also started club road racing with Vesco during this time, and it turned out that his hours of motorcycle delivery work had given him a great feel for the road courses.
Rayborn’s progress was slowed after he broke his back at a road race in Riverside, California. When he returned, he steadily moved up through the ranks and turned pro on the AMA Grand National Championship circuit in 1965. He was being backed by Leonard Andres, whose son Brad had been an AMA champion of the mid-1950s.
Rayborn was phenomenal on road courses, but while he was a solid dirt-track racer, his skills on the dirt didn’t come close to what he could do on pavement. Rayborn won only one dirt-track National in his career. That came on a hard-packed Mile in Livonia, Michigan, in 1971.
Still, Rayborn was often a contender on the dirt. He was runner-up to Dick Mann at the Peoria TT in 1969. He finished second to Dave Sehl on the crushed limestone of the Louisville (Kentucky) Half-Mile in 1970. He scored podiums on the half mile at Ascot Park (1965), Houston Short Track (’68), and on the Miles at Sedalia, Missouri (’68), Sacramento (’70) and Indianapolis (’72).
Rayborn’s best finishes in the AMA Grand National Championships standings came in 1968 and 1969, when he finished third.
“Had there been a road-racing championship back then, Cal would have won it every year,” said Emde. “And the funny thing is, everyone remembers him as a road-racing specialist because he was so good at that, but the fact is, he was always up there on the dirt tracks, qualifying for the mains and putting in good finishes. But that was in the days when 100 riders were trying to qualify for the main and the competition level was so deep. You had guys like Gene Romero, Dick Mann, Mert Lawwill and Gary Nixon, who were so tough.”
Rayborn’s style of racing revolutionized the sport in America. Harley-Davidson’s head of racing at the time was Dick O’Brien, and it was O’Brien who perhaps knew Rayborn’s racing prowess better than anyone.
“He was one of the best road racers in the world,” O’Brien said. “He had an advantage over anybody—other than maybe Mike Hailwood—on slow corners. Guys could stay with him in sweepers, but when it came to slow turns, Cal could do things with a bike no other rider could. I always wanted to see Hailwood and Rayborn on equal bikes on the same course.”
With the advent of the 500cc two-stroke road racers, it became tougher and tougher for Harley-Davidson to remain competitive with its 750cc air-cooled V-twin. Still, even on machinery that was less than competitive, Rayborn won. His road-race National wins in 1972 at Indianapolis Raceway Park and Laguna Seca Raceway were perhaps two of his greatest achievements.
Laguna proved to be Rayborn’s last victory.
By 1973, it became clear to Rayborn that his future was in the burgeoning sport of road racing. It was also clear that Harley-Davidson would be less and less competitive on the road courses against the rapidly improving Japanese machines. At the end of the year, he made the gut-wrenching decision to leave Harley-Davidson and accept an offer to race for Suzuki.
Unfortunately, Rayborn would never race in America again. In December of 1973, he died in a club event in New Zealand when the bike he was riding seized and threw him into a guardrail at well over 100 mph. At just 33 years of age, one of America’s brightest racing talents was no more. His death sent shock waves throughout the sport.
Years later, Rayborn’s son, Cal III, became a well-known racer in his own right and was a leading AMA 250 Grand Prix and Supersport rider of the mid-to-late 1980s.
Calvin Rayborn II will long be remembered as the rider who gave Harley-Davidson some of its greatest wins in the waning days of the company’s AMA Grand National road-racing competition. CN