The Rider Files

Keith Mashburn got paid just $20 per race by Yamaha, yet he loved it. He was a factory rider.

Yamaha recognized the talent of a young Keith Mashburn and hired him to race its new DT-1 in TT races at Ascot Park, where he may have earned the dubious distinction of becoming the lowest paid factory rider of all time.

“I was paid $20 per race and they would match the purse up to 20 dollars,” Mashburn says with a laugh. “So the maximum I could get from Yamaha was $40 per race. But I was 18 years old and I had factory leathers and all I had to do was show up at the track. They give me the best tuner in the world in Dennis Mahan.”

The Mahan and Mashburn relationship didn’t get off on the right foot.

“In retrospect, as good of a tuner as Dennis was, he was probably a little put off by the fact that he was building bikes for a novice,” Mashburn says. “I told him I wanted a pillion pad put on the rear fender and he said no. I told him that I was the rider, he was the mechanic and I wanted a pillion pad. He said the bike was designed for the rider to stay in one place. I told him I wanted a pillion pad and he said, ‘Well then you aren’t going to ride this bike.’ So I didn’t get a pillion pad.”

Riding Mahan-tuned bikes, Mashburn was nearly unbeatable as a novice. He even beat the experts at the short track program in Daytona.

Yamaha hired Mashburn as an R&D test rider where he worked with Don Dudek. He tested prototype Yamaha’s in the vast desert around Las Vegas to keep things top secret. “We’d get back to hotel in the evenings and the Japanese engineers would head off to the Casinos and leave the under-age guys like myself behind,” Mashburn recalls.

One of the bikes Mashburn tested was Yamaha’s first four-stroke, the XS-1, a 650cc vertical twin. In 1970 he rode the XS-1 to its debut victory in a Yamaha Gold Cup race at Ascot Park.

“That first race bike was actually built from top to bottom by Ray Hensley of Trackmaster,” Keith said. “I never rode the bike until it was delivered to the track by Ray the night of the event. Shell (Thuet) later built a road racing version of the 650, and being Mr. Loyal, I agreed to ride it at Daytona. The bike tore its self apart after just a few laps.”

Mashburn discovered early on that road racing was never going to be his forte.

“I used how quick I could get through the fast left-hand kink in the infield at Daytona as a guide to how well I was catching on to road racing,” he says. “One day in practice I went through there and thought I was really hauling ass. ‘Now I’m starting to get this,’ I thought to myself. Just then Dave Smith went around me on the outside and tapped me on the shoulder.”

Mashburn scored six top-10 AMA Grand National finishes his rookie season, including a podium on the Terre Haute (Ind.) Half-Mile.

At another race a chain broke on his bike in one practice session and he ran hard into the back of Bart Markel as he was free-wheeling into a turn.

Mashburn racing one of Yamaha's vertical twins.

“I’d heard all the stories about Black Bart and his boxing career and what he’d done to people,” Mashburn said. “I decided walking back to my pits to keep my helmet on in case he came over to punch me. I walked around with the helmet on for the longest time. I finally took it off and worked up the courage to go over to his pits to explain to him what happened. He was sitting there and looked up at me and said, ‘If I was going fast enough you wouldn’t have been able to run into me.”

Ultimately racing many of Yamaha’s prototype machines often hurt Mashburn’s results in the following two seasons. “Whenever Yamaha wanted to test something I was the first one to raise my hand,” he said. The result was a lot of DNFs as Yamaha tried to perfect its new four-stroke against the more established Harley-Davidsons.

After being dropped by Yamaha, Mashburn made a half-hearted attempt to stay in racing in 1973, but when someone offered him decent money for his Triumph race bike he jumped on it. It was tough for Keith to race as a privateer after four years as factory rider.

Mashburn went on to become a fire investigator and totally walked away from motorcycling for over a decade. It was Skip Van Leeuwen who encouraged him to come back and be a part of the sport that had been such a big part of his life.

Today Mashburn is the president of the famous Trailblazers Motorcycle Club and he loves attending vintage meets and gatherings of racers.