entries for a local race wasn’t uncommon either,” remembers Collins, “and guys didn’t ride multiple classes back in those days. You had one bike and rode one class so the pits were really packed.” Another great innovation that the folks at Hully Gully came up with was their house league motocross racing program. Every Saturday afternoon during the season, if you were so inclined, you could make the trip up to Hully Gully, sign up and actually race in a much more laid back atmosphere than during a CMA race day. It wasn’t unusual to run into future star Pro riders like Scott Wilson and Kevin Moore at house league Saturday along with a usual cast of local characters that included the late Rick Joseph and his family along with guys like Sean Van Dongen, Steve Luyks, Randy Ford and Kenny Gilmour to name but a few. Personally, I loved and actually preferred the house league motocross Saturdays. My friends and I would head north to Hully Gully and arrive at the track around lunch time. We would then get in a long practice session and race two
long motos before packing up our gear and then make the short trip over to the beach resort town of Grand Bend, located on the shores of beautiful Lake Huron where we would proceed to spend the rest of the afternoon and, more often than not, the evening, and what was left of our paychecks bench racing on the patio at the now long gone but not forgotten Sanders on the Beach. They said it was the best sunset viewing in the world and I can’t disagree. By sunsets, you know what I mean, right? Oh, to be young again. Those days just seemed to last forever. As the ‘70s gave way to the ‘80s, motocross in Canada became more professional and so too did the facility and dealership at Hully Gully. What had started out as a small snowmobile shop only a few years earlier had quickly morphed into a huge power sports dealership that carried a large line of products that included Kawasaki, Hodaka, CZ-Jawa, Honda and Suzuki in the two wheeled department, along with Chaparral, Roloflex, Artic Cat and Yamaha on the snow side of things. Heck, they even sold Misty River Aluminum boats and Yamaha outboards. Things had obviously progressed a great deal on the racing side of things as well. The Collins family had successfully transformed the former cow pasture into one of if not the premiere racing facilities in the country, and the list of prestigious events they hosted at the facility began to grow. In 1980, the Senior or Intermediate Nationals as they are now known came to Hully Gully. This was a particularly interesting event for me because one of our riding buddies from London named Tim Ming scored what could only be considered a huge upset victory as he knocked off the one and only Ross Rollerball (although he wasn’t known as Rollerball yet, I don’t think) Pederson to take the win. Truth be told, Ross crashed in the final moto handing the win over to Ming, but hey, a win is a win, right? In ‘81 the track played host to the Junior / Schoolboy Nationals, which saw a great battle take place between Sean Van Dongen, Robbie Hodgson and Steve Luyks. Local boy Luyks, from nearby Dorchester, Ontario, emerged victorious and took home the
trophy. “Probably the biggest thing we ever had, though,” recalls Collins, “was the CMA Expert National in 1983.” What made this event stand out from the rest was the fact that it was televised on CTV’s Wide World of Sports. “It was the first Canadian Outdoor National that was ever televised,” Collins goes on, “and it was a pretty big deal for us, for sure.” Although he doesn’t mention it himself, I’m sure another source of pride for the family was the fact that Chuck Collins himself was now competing at the highest level of the sport in Canada having progressed through the ranks to the Expert class by this point in his riding career. Of course Chuck was also in charge of track prep by this time, and I just had to ask about the infamous or perhaps more to the point infamous soil composition that Hully Gully was so well known for. “Well, it wasn’t really dirt,” laughs Collins, “It was clay so I would have to chisel plough the whole track and then rotovate it. I was friends through snowmobiling with some guys that worked for Ontario Hydro so they would always drop off wood chips for me to work into the track, but as anyone who ever rode there knows, by the hallway point of any race day it would be like riding on concrete. Heck, up in the s-corners there would be a blue groove from the tire rubber just like on a car racing track.” It certainly didn’t feel too good when you went down on it either, which I can say from experience. When it was wet that stuff would stick to your bike like crazy glue. Forget about trying to get it off. Of course
MOTOCROSS PERFORMANCE · MXPMAG.COM
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