Robin Tuluie updates for those who know or raced with him.

This is from an older issue of RRW and searching his name will give you his latest doings. To think I knew him when he was racing his Commando. He was a very dedicated Norton racer and very fast! This man has and will change the world for the better.

Rob Tuluie rebuilt the top end on my Norton back in the day. The payment for the rebuild got him to the Daytona Vintage races

Extremely interesting articles. Thanks for posting them.

Here is another, Rob has been busy changing teams and making them Champions.


I remember the first time he showed up at Loudon, NH. The track was being remodeled, and it was like pitting in a sand pit and hard to find level ground. He was having trouble shredding belt drives and I was being cocky and told him if Henning was ruining belts , he shouldn't be. Next time we met he told me one of his hubs was mis-machined. Then once in Daytona, his Commando was not handling and he was working on the folks and said, ""I got to do something drastic" so, he cut the springs shorter. He also got in trouble with AHRMA and was banned from the club over some bogus S--T for a year, and came back the next season and won the #1 Sportsman plate as his revenge, which to me was so freaking cool.

Rob is one of the many heroes and legends that once populated the infields of racetracks in the "Good old Days." Think of what he could make a Commando do now a days.

I met Rob at Laguna Seca around 1986. We were racing in different classes. This was Robs very 1st race, It was an AMA BOTT National and he won which is impossible. He was so overcome with emotion on the podium that he couldn't speak. Another time he rode his race Commando from San Franciso all the way to New Mexico (or somewhere like that). Raced. Then rode it all the way back. Rob would call me late at night asking for advice and we'd talk for hours working through one crazy idea after another. He would often work all night long on his Norton in his effort to win races. Later Ken Canage built a 920 race engine, dropped it into my monoshock racing frame and Rob placed 3rd against a field of monoshock Ducatis at the Willow Springs AMA BOTT national in 1990. That was the last time Norton made it to an AMA podium. The JS monoshock Norton racing frame with Ken's 920 shown below.



With all those efforts and experiments came success and also failures. For example Rob took a class at a UC Berkeley machine shop so he could make a Norton racing crank from scratch out of billet. We talked about it and I told him to be sure the crank grinder got the radius right on the crank journals. Rob finished the crank and then sent it to the crank grinder to finish the journals. Rob laid it out for them but being an Auto crank machine shop they neglected the journal radius and the crank promptly broke. Win some lose some.

We could tell stories for days about Rob.

Those were the glory cays.

This is one of my favorite pictures of Rob. It's right after he got the 3rd place Jim mentioned above. Three really happy people. That's Rob on the left, with the trophy in hand, his girlfriend Denise in the middle, and me on the right.



The same three people at Daytona in 1990, showing the bike with fairing installed.



This video chronicles Rob's later activities. It's a fascinating story. This video goes into great detail about his last race bike build, the TULARIS. It starts with a good intro giving a lot of Rob's history. Worth watching. Even has a section with me briefly visible.



This is a picture of Rob with his Commando race bike at a bike meet. He had taken the numbers off to ride there and back without drawing any police notice. I think this is the final evolution of the bike Carl H mentioned at the start of this thread.




Ken

I split time in my time in the pits, taking photos of all my friends that I rubbed shoulders with. I could post pictures for years!
But here is one of my portraits of Rob and "The Way We Were" So confident, so young and so bold and in Rob's case " He had only just begun."