Thad Wolff: 2015 TrailBlazers Hall of Fame Inductee

Mark you calendars! Tickets go on sale on the Trailblazers website January 1st! Most of you will recall how quickly the seats sold out last year. If you don’t want to get left out this time, set your alarm clocks New Year’s Eve and order as soon as possible on or after January 1st. The website is at: www.trailblazersmc.com and the form will be easy to find on the Home Page to order either individual tickets ($70 each), or a full table of ten for $700.00. CLICK HERE TO ORDER TICKETS!!

Note: if you are ordering multiple tickets, including a full table, it works best if you have the names of all those attending, and their email addresses. Included with every ticket is a Trailblazers membership -- which includes being added to the email list to receive our email blasts and bulletins. Until we get a name and email address we will not be able to add them.

At the banquet, we will as usual be honoring some deserving Trailblazers members. In addition to the new inductee Walt Axthelm that we posted recently, another inductee will be Thad Wolff.  

 Thad Wolff: 2015 TrailBlazers Hall of Fame Inductee

Thad Wolff was born in Los Angeles in 1959 and has lived in nearby Thousand Oaks his whole life. One day, a neighbor’s father offered to take Thad to a motorcycle race nearby and the event changed his life. The race was the Trans-Am and Thad climbed a tree to watch Torsten Hallman, Joel Robert and, Roger DeCoster dominate the American riders.

From that moment Thad wanted a motorcycle of his own. His hard-working family believed in earning things yourself, so Thad mowed lawns, washed windows and delivered newspapers until he had enough to purchase a Mini-Trail 50 in 1969.

Other bikes would follow for occasional trips to the desert and a chance to ride local Motocross every now and then. Even though he was only able to race a hand full of times, he still won a few junior Motocross events. When Thad turned 15-1/2 he got his drivers license and a street legal bike, a Honda SL100. Then, an article in Cycle Magazine inspired Thad to try Roadracing. He purchased a used Yamaha RD350 and went to Ontario Motor Speedway where he lined up against more than 50 other bikes in the production class. From that moment his full focus went to Roadracing and success came fast. In 1979 Thad won the 410 Production Class Championship in the California AFM Championship.

As his Roadracing career started to take off, another life-changing moment happened when Thad got a phone call from Cycle Magazine editor Phil Shilling. Shilling needed a rider for a magazine photo shoot and Thad had the skills to wheelie a Kawasaki 175 through the river at Indian Dunes. This was his chance to ride and get paid, so Thad accepted the additional role of photo model when he wasn’t racing.

With some modest sponsorship Thad went AMA Roadracing and won the Novice Championship in 1980. In 1981 he jumped from Novice 250cc Champion to Expert status and took a Superbike and Formula 1 support ride with the Yoshimura Suzuki Team as the number rider 2 behind Wes Cooley. He scored two F1 podiums that year in Superbike and F1 racing against Wes Cooley, Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson and Wayne Rainey.

All the while he was racing for Yoshimura Suzuki, Thad’s photo riding in the magazines got noticed by Honda, who hired him to ride their bikes for a series of television commercials and other advertising. Some might’ve called it a conflict, but Thad was able juggle and separate his racing life and his advertising life well enough that both companies were happy with his work.

In 1982, Thad finished 8th in the Daytona 200 riding a 500cc Suzuki RG500 two-stroke. Then, in 1983 the 1000cc Superbikes were replaced with 750s and Thad decided to concentrate on Formula 1. In the Daytona 200 he had fourth place wrapped up behind Roberts, Lawson and Spencer, but with just a few laps to go the big pink Suzuki F1 four-stroke he was riding blew sky high.

Later that season a crippling crash made Thad rethink his pro racing career. When he healed up, he decided to focus on his advertising career. Thad's last professional races were in the ABC wide world of sports Carlsbad Superbikers event with a best finish of seventh in 1982 on a Wheelsmith Maico.

With his SAG card in his wallet working for all four Japanese manufactures, he has been in over fifty TV commercials and countless brochures and ads, and more than one hundred magazine covers to his credit.


Now in his mid-50’s Thad’s passion for motorcycles continues. He has raced actively in the AHRMA Vintage series and won two National championships. He also built his own BSA Rocket Twin in 2010 to win the Premier Expert class at the Catalina Grand Prix off-road race. Thad is also an electric motorcycle pioneer and holds a world record, for travelling coast to coast on an electric motorcycle in 84.5 hours.

For the last 10 years Thad has been involved with Dan Gurney’s All American Racers testing and promoting the innovative Alligator motorcycles. He gives back to the Roadrace community by teaching the New Racer Program at Willow Springs Raceway and is also the west coast Chairman of the Daytona 200 monument founded by Dick Klamfoth. His greatest passion is as a member of the Antique Motorcycle Club of America, personally collecting, restoring and riding many classic and antique bikes to help preserve motorcycling’s past.

The TrailBlazers proudly welcome Thad Wollf to the 2015 Hall of Fame.

Walt Axthelm: 2015 TrailBlazers Hall of Fame Inductee

SAVE THE DATE! The 71st Trailblazers banquet will be held at the Carson Center in Carson, CA on Saturday, April 11th. Tickets will go on sale online at www.trailblazersmc.com beginning January 1st. The banquet sold out quickly last year, so don’t get left out.

As always, there will some notable motorcyclists being honored and in the coming weeks and months we will be featuring them here. Our first honoree is Walt Axthelm.

Walt Axthelm: 2015 TrailBlazers Hall of Fame Inductee

Walt Axthelm was born in Upland, Pennsylvania, in 1933. His family moved to Southern California when he was 14 years old and Walt soon got a junior motor license and his first motorbike, a Schwinn-bicycle-framed Whizzer. His first races were against his buddies who had Whizzers and scooters of their own. He loved to ride and in the afternoons he would go down to the L.A. riverbed and practice until dark. When Walt was 17 he began racing his first true motorcycle, a rigid-framed Royal Enfield.

One of his first races was the 1951 Big Bear Grand Prix. It was a wet year and the mud built up so thick under the rear fender it locked up Walt’s rear wheel. So, he removed the fender and finished the 180-mile race.

He continued to ride Scrambles and other off-road events and quickly became one of the leading off-road racers in Southern California. His first sponsored ride came in 1954 when he was backed by Louie Thomas’ BSA shop in Los Angeles. Riding a BSA Gold Star Scrambler in 1955, Walt earned the District 37 number 1 plate.

For off-road racers like Walt, the Catalina Grand Prix was the high point of the racing season on the West Coast. In 1956, Axthelm won Saturday’s featured 50-mile race and then scored second to Chuck Minert in Sunday’s 100-mile final. No one was allowed to practice on the once-a-year Catalina course, but Walt was a smart racer. He volunteered to be on the hay bale crew so he could drive around the course (setting hay bales) and at the same time plan his races for the weekend.

By the early 1960s, Walt moved from riding the big four-strokes to the lighter, more nimble two-strokes. He began riding Jawas and CZs and that led to an opportunity to compete in the ISDT. The U.S. Jawa importer helped set up the trip to Austria for Axthelm. He was only the third American to ever compete in the Six Days. Walt went back to the ISDT with the American team several times in the 1960’s, pioneering the way for the successful USA teams of the present.

Walt was also one of the pioneering motocross riders in Southern California in the 1960s. He’d had direct exposure to European motocross, having ridden on some of the tracks as a guest of Jawa when he went over to Europe. As a result he became one of the early proponents of motocross racing in the USA and participated in many of the earliest motocross events in America, including the Inter-Am races put on by Edison Dye.

As his career progressed, Axthelm specialized in the long-distance off-road races of the late 1960’s and 1970’s, such as the Baja 1000, the Parker 400, and the Tecate GP. Walt also raced and tested some of Suzuki’s early TM250 off-road prototypes. He later worked with R&D for Kawasaki, racing for the factory in desert races.

By 1980, Axthelm was in his late-40s and decided to retire from off-road racing and focus on his engineering career.  He had done enough for the sport to be inducted in the AMA Hall of Fame in 2001.

But his career on two-wheels wasn’t over. After gaining a lot of weight in his job as a contract engineer for Boeing, Walt bought a mountain bike to “get back in shape.” The racer inside Walt was still alive and the skills he’d earned with thousands of hours of off-road racing transferred well to mountain bike racing. He soon became one of the nation’s top senior mountain bike racers. In 2007, he won the overall cycling jersey in the National Senior Games. In 2014 he won the overall jersey in the Huntsman World Senior Games in the 80-84 age division.

Walt’s now retired and lives in Durango, Colorado and trains almost daily for his bicycling competitions.

The TrailBlazers welcome Walt Axthelm to the 2015 Hall of Fame.