Dick Mann, Racer, Champion, Tuner, Legend, Dies at 86

“My goal was never to be the best racer, but to finish ahead of them.”

Dick Mann, two-time Daytona 200 winner and twice AMA Grand National Champion, has died aged 86.

A practical person, he learned moderation from the extremes of his mentor, the innovative but erratic Albert Gunter. Mann told me years ago about traveling and racing with Gunter: “I got a proper attitude toward racing—making a living with a motorcycle.”

Making it on your own.

Technology could open doors—Gunter and Mann showed the dirt-track paddock the value of rear suspension. Yet as Mann noted, “Albert was always working on something that was a deterrent to his career.”

Mann credited his own arrival in top-level competition to Albert’s seven-angle valve seats. With them, and not riding any harder than before, “I could all of a sudden make nationals and compete.” But Mann the moderate saw both sides of technology: “Tire technology drives all motorsport, but as tires get bigger and stickier, the show gets worse.”

Mann saw Albert “…get sucked into dynos like that whole LA bunch.”

“We never quit testing. I never had an engine on a dyno. Backroads were more in my price range.”

People in that time concentrated on making engines pull smoothly all the way from zero throttle—listening to everything the engine was saying. At Daytona, the favored place for this was “the jungle road,” two lanes seldom patrolled by police.

Mann won his first AMA National in 1959 and was Grand National Champion twice—in 1963 and 1971. His career bridged the transition of American motorcycle racing from the gypsy life of itinerant dirt-trackers, living by their wits, to the strange professional big-time created by the explosion of motorcycle sales after 1965. Rider contracts with real money. Factory bikes. Hotel rooms.