Where to park a Winnie-Wasto?

Have you ever seen one? Do you even know what a Winnie Wasto is? Well, set right down and let me tell you. A Winnie Wasto was the preferred mode of race transportation for one of the biggest stars in Motocross racing. Every week, legions of fans would follow this star’s exploits on the track in the nations favorite weekly motorcycle newspaper, Cycle News. This racer wasn’t a legend because of his success on the race track, quite the opposite, he was legendary for his perseverance in the face of absolute disaster. Broken bones, broken motorcycle, dead motorhome…it didn’t matter, this racer was at the track every week racing as if he stood a chance of winning. Who is this legend of motocross? It could only be Motocross Cat himself.

I started reading Cycle News in 1967 or ’68 when I started racing. My step dad got us a subscription when I got into racing and from then on I kept renewing that subscription for the next twenty years. Each week when Cycle News would show up Michael (my step dad) and I would fight over who got to read it first, he would always pull the old “I paid for the magazine so I’m first”, or “if it wasn’t for me you wouldn’t be looking for your name in there” and of course there was, ” I’m faster than you, that’s why I get it first”…that one only worked for about a year, maybe. We finally came up with a plan that was fair and it made reading Cycle News more interesting.

Instead of reading it all at one time and then having to wait a whole week for the next one to arrive, we picked certain segments to read each day…kind of like those people who read one bible passage a day? Hey, Cycle News was our bible. The first day was to skim the paper for two things, a story about the race you were in last weekend and then any other stories you might want to read later. The second days passage was ‘The Latest Poop’ by Papa Wheelie. Day three was Motocross Cat. The rest of the week was reading the other stories, feature articles and looking at all the ads for stuff that you knew would make you go faster. Every real racer knew everything in Cycle News every week.

Cycle News was one of the pillars of Moto Journalism for nearly five decades. There are a great many racers and journalists who owe the Clayton family (founders of Cycle News) a debt of gratitude for being instrumental in their careers. The list is long, loaded with names that are legendary both behind the handlebars and the typewriter. Cycle News truly was the window into the motorcycle racing world that we all looked through.

As I was thinking of how to write this story, I decided I wasn’t going to head down the path of why Cycle News succumbed, plenty of others have already done that. I want to remember Cycle News as something I looked forward to every week and while I would sit there in my garage staring at a broken Bultaco or a beat up Honda I could always read Motocross Cat, get a smile on my face and be thankful I didn’t have to work on his bike.

Thank you Cycle News, I will miss you.