Think flat-tracker and you invariably think four-stroke. Big V-twin Harleys, thumping great old air-cooled singles, or high revving modern MX motors blasting down the straights, tipping left, then sliding full lock in a graceful 180-degree arc. With the exception of one bike - Yamaha’s fearsome TZ750 made famous by ‘King’ Kenny Roberts - you don’t really associate strokers with flat-tracker racing. But when they’re lightweight, and pound-for-pound (both physically and financially) more powerful than a four-stroke, you’ve really got to wonder why not. John Roeder did…
Different Strokes
Originally hailing from Florida, flat-track has been in John’s blood from a very early age. Now aged 50, he’s been riding ‘roundy-roundy’ racers since the age of ten, when he piloted a 60cc Yamaha JT1. Moving up to a 100cc Kawasaki, John was soon riding three race meetings a week and at the age of 16 he was racing at AMA (American Motorcyclist Association) Pro level aboard 250 and 360cc machines. Unfortunately, this success was something of a double-edged sword, as the costs were becoming extraordinary. To really be competitive you had to be on a Harley (not something you’ll often hear outside of flat-track!) and, as John explained, ‘just one of their motors cost ten grand. And that was in 1979!’ At the time, John was racing a Yamaha against the Milwaukee machines and without serious sponsorship it proved hard staying on the pace. Top class racing proved prohibitively pricey, so John opted to give up on chasing a career in flat-track and instead joined the military.
A decade away from bikes ended when John was posted to Japan, where he rekindled his interest with an NSR250, and then Italy where he ‘got well into Ducatis’. But the flat-track bug only returned when John moved to Lakenheath in Norfolk in early 2005…
Spotting a poster for an oval track close to the airbase was the catalyst, and John was soon thinking about how he could build himself a bike. As the UK tracks are far shorter than those in the States he wouldn’t need huge reserves of power and John’s first idea was to base his racer around a Suzuki DR350 - reasonably plentiful, cheap, air-cooled and grunty - and rely on his flat-track race experience to get around the bike’s ‘straightline shortcomings’ compared to modern high-revving four-strokes. However, having acquired a DR it soon became apparent that the old trailie simply wasn’t going to cut it and even large amounts of tuning wouldn’t see it on par with a modern MXer. An old air-cooled Kawasaki KX two-stroke was considered before John set his sights on something a little more accessible - a CR500.
It took a year for John to find a CR5 motor that was both running and for sale at a reasonable price - he wasn’t looking to throw large sums of money at the project. On a trip to Qatar, one of the guys working for John happened to mention that he had a CR500-powered ATV for sale, so John acquired the engine and shipped it back to the UK. The bike then grew from the engine out…
A 1987 CR5 frame was bought from a bloke in Worcester though other than the fact that 500s are now commanding strong money, I wondered why John didn’t simply start by buying a complete bike? ‘A lot of the standard CR parts wouldn’t have worked for what I wanted,’ he explained. Whilst there are a lot of converted MXers in the UK flat-track scene, they look very much like lowered dirtbikes. And that wasn’t the style John was after.