A crew works on Rich Schlachter’s No. 48 race bike during the 1978 Victoria Day Sprints at Mosport. (Colin Fraser Collection)

We are very pleased for the new year to be able to begin a series of featured photographs from the collection of Colin Fraser. Most road racing fans know of Fraser as the founder of RACE, Canada’s national motorcycle road racing sanctioning body. Lesser known Is Fraser is an excellent road racer in his own rite. We watched him dominate some Singles class events on his Yamaha YZ400F-based machine in the early-2000s. Colin also happens to be a first-class photographer and for years provided great photos of Canadian road races to U.S. publications.

We are proud now to be able to feature some of Colin’s excellent catalog of racing images he took over the years.

We start with an image from Canada’s popular VDS event. VDS stands for Victoria Day Sprints, the spring long weekend (as in Queen Victoria) Bank Holiday that typically kicks off the racing season. 

“I remember racing at Mosport as a teen-ager on Victoria Day way back when and taking time to watch Villeneuve and Rosberg battle for the win in the old Player’s Formula Atlantic Series.  (as in Player’s tobacco),” Fraser recalls.

“Back in the 1970s, Mosport management would hire Americans to come and race the VDS, and that appearance money approach didn’t sit well with the top privateer Canadians.  In 1977 Jim Allen (in one of his last races) easily beat invited guests Gary Nixon (on the silver Kanemoto Yamaha TZ750 soon to be made famous by Spencer) and Gene Romero (on Don Vesco’s stars-and-stripes Yamaha TZ750) – the Americans were not too happy with the track run-off.

“The next year, organizers went for young guns like Mike Baldwin, Dale Singleton, Wes Cooley and Harry Klinzmann, and got a much better show.  Baldwin led and crashed in the terrifying turn two (where I was watching – later that year Baldwin would return to dominate both legs of the World F-750 round in the fall) and Singleton won, setting the stage for several sponsored rides in Canada over the years thanks to Castrol. Cooley also returned to Mosport a few times, later with a Yosh-F1 bike.”

This photo is from the 1978 VDS races and it shows a crew working on Rich Schlachter’s No. 48 machine (possibly a TZ750). Kent Peterson (not Kevin Cameron as previously speculated) is working on the left side. “Kent was a good friend who worked on my bikes and travelled with me to a bunch of races in the late 70’s,” Jim Allen said. “He was working at a shop in Toronto at the time they sponsored me, and later moved to Chicago.”  Schlachter is standing behind Kent in the t-shirt. Next to Schlachter pitching in is Jim Allen, who was one of Canada’s top racers at the time and later became well-known for heading up Dunlop’s racing effort here in the U.S. That’s Jim’s No. 1 bike in the background. Rich and Jim were good friends who worked construction together in the off-season to help pay for their racing.

Keep posted for future installments from the Colin Fraser Collection.