There's something fishy in Whitewater. These look like regular track? bikes with a longer fork to keep the top tube parallel to the ground and the pedals from being to close to the track. If you just pull a 700 wheel out and put a 24" into a regular track bike you'll drop the front end at least an inch. As you see the head tube on my motor pace machine is very long to compensate. Not so on the English bikes. I wonder if the English builders, clever as they were didn't make a hybrid type fork to use in human pace races at the time, like they did at the turn of the century. Note the chainwheel size is also standard size, as speeds would not have been much more than about 45 mph, top end compared to around 65 in an actual motor pace event. 10 mile pacing is quite an endurance speed event, not for the faint of heart. We need some English illumination here, on racing not done today. It's similar to Derny Racing, and much longer than Keirin. At higher average speeds the reverse fork and the resulting trail gives a slower less erratic control ability. This was figured out around the turn of the century and gave a greater margin of safety to the riders in addition to better wind protection. Nice bikes and great racing, wish the photo was a little more detail clear so we could study the bikes somewhat better. Ted Ernst Palos Verdes Estates, CA
TRACKRACING??!!
> Greetings, All--
>
> Okay, so I'm doing like I always do, catching up on
> the latest news in Cycling, albeit fifty years after
> the fact. And the Sept. 14, 1955 issue, summing up the
> Herne Hill track championships, has a photo of the
> tandem-paced 10-mile event (see link, below). It is of
> the massed-start champion Bernard King of the Coventry
> C.C. trailing Jerry Waters of the Kentish Wheelmen.
> With half-a-lap to go, King would come "cleanly round
> both Waters and his tandem in the home straight" to
> snatch victory.
>
> What is truly amazing to me is that both King and
> Waters seem as if they're riding standard ROAD BIKES
> whose brakes have been removed and whose FRONT FORKS
> have been SPUN AROUND 180-DEGREES, I suppose to create
> a shorter wheelbase. These are not Bates bikes with
> Diadrant forks (which technically don't curve
> backwards, anyway). No, they're standard road issue,
> or so I believe. So, my questions are---
>
> 1. Are these in fact road bikes both chaps are riding,
> with the forks spun round?
>
> 2. If not, was there some kind of British (or other
> marque) track bike built with reverse-curve forks?
>
> 3. If they are road bikes, was it a common practice
> for clubmen to spin their forks round like this when
> racing on the track?
>
> 4. Have any of you ever seen, heard of, or attempted
> such a thing before?
>
> 5. On the practical level of physics and
> bio-mechanics, does reversing a fork absolutely help a
> track rider, or is there a trade-off in the area of
> stability, steering, etc.?
>
> In retrospect it certainly is conceivable to me that
> many an amateur clubman would not be wealthy enough to
> afford separate road and track mounts, and that the
> idea of fork reversal might be appealing to them, but
> I'd never considered it before and this practice is,
> to me, anyway, a revelation.
>
> http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/
>
> Cheerio to all,
>
> Peter Jourdain
> Wondering in Whitewater, Wisconsin