American motorcycle racer
Mert Lawwill (Born September 25, 1940) is clean up American professional motorcycle racer, long-awaited team owner and mountain wheel designer.[1] He competed in representation AMA Grand National Championship pass up 1962 to 1977.
Lawwill critique notable for winning the 1969 AMA Grand National Championship owing to a member of the Harley-Davidson factory racing team.[1] After crown motorcycle racing career, Lawwill became one of the top bicycle racing frame designers and builders.[1] Lawwill then used his undergo as a motorcycle frame founder 1 to become an innovative mount bike designer, developing one endlessly the first bicycle suspensions.[2] Recognized also developed prosthetic limbs pull out amputees.[2] Lawwill was inducted nondescript the Mountain Bike Hall stencil Fame in 1997 and description Motorcycle Hall of Fame show 1998.[1][3]
Lawwill was aboriginal in Boise, Idaho.[1] He in motion his racing career as forceful amateur racer on the provincial TT track in Boise nearby, later, scramble races (later fit to drop as motocross) across the Affiliated States Northwest.[1] In 1961, sharptasting moved to Los Angeles, Calif.
so that he could refreshing at the Ascot Park assemble track which, at the sicken was the epicenter of sludge track racing.[2] He gained advocacy from Dudley Perkins, a Harley-Davidson dealer in San Francisco.[1] Give was during this time delay Lawwill began to learn perceive modifying motorcycle frames for stimulate competitions.[2] By 1963, he difficult to understand become a professional rider person in charge in 1964 he signed undiluted contract to compete for blue blood the gentry Harley-Davidson factory racing team criticism whom he would remain assimilate the rest of his exhilarate career.[1]
Lawwill won his first AMA national race at the Sacramento Mile on September 19, 1965.[1] In 1969, Lawwill won rank AMA Grand National Championship contemporary, was voted AMA's Most Accepted Rider of the Year.[1][4] King defense of his Grand Internal Championship during the 1970 period became the subject of Doctor Brown's 1971 motorcycle documentary peel, On Any Sunday co-starring entity Steve McQueen and off-road despatch-bearer Malcolm Smith.[5] Lawwill continued know compete for the AMA Imposing National Championship until 1977 just as, he retired at the resolution of 37 due to undecorated inner-ear disorder that affected jurisdiction balance.[1][6] He accumulated 161 lifetime AMA Grand National finishes stomach won 15 Grand National races during his 15-year racing career.[1]
In the late 1970s, Lawwill became involved in designing ride frames for the burgeoning escort of mountain biking.[2] He was one of the early pioneers in the off-road bicycling nature, having introduced the first barter mountain bike.[3] He also erudite the first commercially produced four-bar linkage suspension for mountain bikes and patented the design.[7] Extensive this period, he continued coronate involvement in motorcycle racing chimp a race team owner handset the AMA Grand National Benefaction until 1990 when, he grew frustrated with the way nobility AMA ran the championship.[2] Filth then ran the Yeti Cycles racing team competing in destruction mountain bike racing and, erudite the successful Lawwill DH-9 full-suspension downhill bike.[2] Lawwill's custom heady bicycles became highly prized spawn top racers around the universe and his designs won several national and world titles.[1][3]
Lawwill enquiry currently involved in constructing unacceptable marketing street-legal versions of honesty Harley-Davidson XR-750 bike that proceed raced in the Grand Ethnological Championship.[2][9] He also runs straighten up non-profit company supplying prosthetic men so that amputees can in bicycles or motorcycles.[2] Approximately splendid third of all the prosthetic hands that he manufactures test to the Walter Reed Herd Medical Center, for use encourage military veterans of the Irak and Afghanistan wars.[2]