Last year, I entered a couple of races in AHRMA with two bikes – a Kramer 690 and a Honda CB175. Things went well with the Kramer (including a podium finish in my second race weekend) but they went…less well with the Honda. I know I owe you more updates on that bike and I promise I will share more details on what happened but the new season is coming around soon so I’ve sold off the Honda and I’m moving on to a bigger bike that can actually go more than 60 miles per hour with 200 pounds of racer on it!
Goodbye, old friend! It went off to the east coast.
I knew I wanted something bigger but I didn’t have anything specific in mind. I just wanted a bike that would be able to enter classes that would have several entrants as opposed to something oddball stuff with only a bike or two to race against. A couple of months passed and I hadn’t gotten around to starting my search in earnest but a wonderful client in Florida (a total badass who was involved in the MotoGP medical tent for a few years) reached out saying that he wanted to sell two BMW racebikes on Iconic – one was a R27 and one was a R75/5. Thank you, Don!
The R27 was lovely but I wanted something a little faster.
The R75 caught my attention and the reserve was a reasonable (at least to me) $4,000. I seriously considered buying it before it went up for auction but over at Iconic we generally want more auction listings up. So I let the dream go and we auctioned it off and I figured that would be the end of it.
But it wasn’t. Iconic has a membership program that allows sneak previews for upcoming auctions, and a longtime client who has since become a friend reached out about the bike before it went live. I told him the story about it and I let it slip that I had thought about buying it myself before the auction was offered to the public. Well…said friend won the bike on the auction, and that same day he let me know that he would let me buy it from him to go racing with or he would keep it to do the same. I figured it was a sign, so I told him I would buy it with the promise that I would race it this season or I’d immediately ship it back to him. Thank you, Spencer!
Spencer signed my Kramer race bike earlier this year!
Unlike many old race bikes, this BMW actually has some known history: it was built and raced in AHRMA in the 1990s ago by a Floyd Crow of Texas. It had nothing to do with my purchase (I didn’t see this photo until weeks after I bought the bike) but I liked seeing that Floyd’s number was 714. Why? Well, my race number is 978 after the area code that I grew up in, and 714 happens to be the area code that Vy grew up in. Life’s full of little coincidences.
Floyd unfortunately passed away in 2009 and while I never met the gentleman, he sure sounded like someone I would have gotten along with:
“Floyd Allen Crow
3/10/1932 – 10/18/2009
Floyd Allen Crow, 77, of Beaumont, died Sunday, October 18, 2009, at Christus Hospital St. Elizabeth in Beaumont.
On March 10, 1932, during a rare snow storm in Corpus Christi, Texas, Floyd Allen Crow was born at home to Vivian Frances Crow and Floyd B. Crow. He was raised in Corpus and graduated from Corpus Christi High School in 1950. In 1951 he joined the Air Force where he served until 1955; this was the beginning of his lifelong love affair with flying.
Upon discharge from the Air Force he enrolled in Del Mar College where he met his lifelong love, the former Dessie Knoblauch. Floyd and Dessie married in 1956 and moved to Beaumont where he started his thirty-five year career with Gulf States Utilities; beginning as a line pilot and becoming chief pilot for the company in 1970.
A lover of planes, cars and motorcycles, Floyd flew Lear Jets, raced cars and motorcycles. He and Dessie loved to travel and enjoyed many years of riding with dear friends in the Houston BMW Motorcycle Club.
Floyd loved his family, his friends, traveling, good food and riding his motorcycle. He had a zest for life that was contagious and a sense of humor that never failed him even during the last weeks of his life.”
Floyd’s son had the bike for some time and then sold it to a gentleman in Texas who eventually put it up on eBay in 2021 – in a weird “small world” moment, it turns out that I actually shared this exact motorcycle for sale on Bike-urious when that happened. At the time I noted that it was raced in AHRMA in the 1990s and was later enjoyed on the street (I got the bike with a fairing, license plate mount, and a couple of other minor street-legal pieces). That’s when Don became the owner, he noted that he “purchased the machine in 2021 with the intention to race it at the upcoming AHRMA Daytona event. The event was deleted from the AHRMA calendar and therefore I have never had it on track. It is sitting here on a trickle charger on the Shorai battery and needs to be enjoyed.”
So there you go – I have a vintage bike to race in AHRMA this year alongside my Kramer! Next step? Get to know the bike and do a little bit of service work.