Ice racing

[Lotus54]

Anyone ready to go?

(Well, maybe a bit late. This was about 1977)

[ClineDesign]

Is that green car a Cortina?

[Lotus54]

Is that green car a Cortina?

Lotus Cortina.

Last one I saw for sale was over $35k now...
I think they made about 350 of them for 1966

[ClineDesign]

My brother had a 69 Cortina GT. We surprised a few BMW 2002s and V8 cars off the starting line.

[GUZZME]

I think the green car behind the hippie kid on the bike is a Studabaker Lark or a Rambler American. It was traded in on the the poop brown Datsun 210 in the Benelli picture.

[Lotus54]

I think the green car behind the hippie kid on the bike is a Studabaker Lark or a Rambler American. It was traded in on the the poop brown Datsun 210 in the Benelli picture.

HA!

It was very fast, even if it looked horrible.
I got the Benelli from the same dealer as the OSSA GPII.
(Before I was a dealer)

[GUZZME]

The Ossa looked pretty high-tech for it's time. Cool bike. Good picture. I thinks It's great that you still have so many pictures of your old bikes and cars. I think I have 1 or 2 pics of the Guzzi and maybe 1 of a beater 510. Did you ice race the Ossa?

[Lotus54]

Yes, I did a bit of ice racing with the OSSA.
More MX though. I did pretty well with it- took the holeshot most every time.
It weighed 200 lbs. and lots of power.

I have some of my first Phantom when I brought it home I'll post up.

Mark

[Dragonknee]

I remember how much I wanted a Ossa 250 Phantom. It was my dream bike at the time. I was moving up from a 1975 TM 125 Suzuki and it just wasn't fast enough. It was out of my reach so I ended up with a Yamaha 250 DT that was stripped. It was fun but lacked the euro cool factor....

[Lotus54]

I think the Euro bikes handled way better that the Japanese bikes.
Stuff where you would *almost* crash on the euro bike- you would crash on the Japanese bike.

But the ones I had to do with with real off road bikes, not street bikes that would go off road. I remember readong how the magazines raved about the mono shock Yamaha, but when I rode one I couldn't believe they were saying they were so great.
That's when I first started taking the magazine tests with a big grain of salt.

But, at is just my opinion of course. I'm probably full of it.

Original Phantom pic soon.

Mark