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By Kent Taylor

Organized, professional motocross racing came of age in the U.S. just a few years too late for some of America’s most skilled off-road riders. It was 1970, and traveling across the country in Chevy vans, sharing hotel rooms, and racing motorcycles for tiny purses was a gig for teenagers. Though Greg Smith had won some races on the National stage, he was also 25 years old, with a wife and a steady job in the aerospace industry. Hitting the road to chase motocross stardom just wasn’t going to happen.

It turned out to be the best move that he never made, along with being a very fortuitous non-event for anybody who rode a Maico in the 1970s!

Greg put the “Smith” in Wheelsmith Engineering, and Wheelsmith helped put the German marque on the podium in races around the world. In the early days of MX, serious riders rode Maico, and the best Maico riders rode Wheelsmith Maicos. A good motorcycle was made even better, thanks to Greg.

Greg Smith’s racing career began on four wheels. “I was racing go-karts,” Smith says, “and my buddy, Tim Hart, who was a few years younger than me, would help out, carrying my tools and such. Later, I started racing motocross on a CZ. I won my class at the Hopetown GP and won some support class races in the Trans-AMA series.

“I met Walt Axthelm, who had represented the USA in the International Six Days Trials. Maico had given Walt a test bike, and he let me ride it. I thought it was a cobby-looking bike with a geometrically challenged gas tank, but when I rode it, I couldn’t believe how well that bike steered. It was an epiphany.”

The Maico offered more than just great handling; its unique primary chain drive, coupled with a heavy flywheel and a long-stroke engine, gave the bike just what the doctor ordered for healthy motocross power.

“My first ride on that Maico was on a hard-packed track. I came into an off-camber section, and it just stuck. Coming off my CZ, it was like a different world.”

Career-wise, Smith briefly studied psychology at UCLA but had also become a certified welder, and he put his trade skills to work making folding footpegs for his race bikes. “While I was riding the CZs and Maicos, I would bug the machinists in the aerospace prototype shop, where I worked as a production engineer, to help me improve on various bits and pieces that did not measure up to the rest of the package,” Smith recalls. “When other riders noticed the new parts, they would ask where they could get them, and I ended up working nights in the shop doing a bunch of one-offs. When the aerospace industry hit some hard times, I made the decision to see if I could make a living off dirt bikes.

“I partnered up with a fellow unemployed aerospace engineer named Sam Wheeler, and together we founded Wheelsmith Engineering. Our first location was in Santa Ana. Good news, bad news: the good news was that I had a job. The bad news was that as the business grew, there was little time to pursue my passion for racing. During that period, I’d get away from it all every so often by going out to Saddleback and riding with Hart, who had also won a lot of races on Maicos and eventually earned a factory ride with Yamaha.”

Although Sam would leave the partnership not long after it was formed (he was more of a land speed records guy and had even built a twin-engined Triumph for Bonneville), the “Wheelsmith” name remained, eventually becoming the shop to know if you wanted to make your Maico better.

“It was a great bike,” Smith says, “and a lot of the negative stories that people have repeated about them are just based on folklore. There were basically two items that you really needed to watch: the top motor mount brackets and the primary chain. The brackets would break easily, so we would gusset those up.”

“The primary chain, which by the way, was much more efficient than straight-cut gears, would wear out. But the Maico had a magnetic oil drain plug, and if there was a piece of shrapnel sticking to the plug, it was a signal that it was time to replace the chain.”

“Maicos were head and shoulders above everything else at that time,” Smith says, “and other companies were always trying to understand why. I was close to Kawasaki’s race shop in SoCal, and they always had Maicos sitting around!”

Wheelsmith offered everything from footpegs to cylinder porting to expansion chambers, the latter of which he believed “put the two-stroke engine on the map. I found the harmonic interaction that is taking place inside the expansion chamber fascinating. I studied the words of [former Cycle magazine writer] Gordon Jennings and learned a lot about scavenging, pressure, and so on.”

Smith’s expertise in building the pipes caught the eye of the Maisch family; one year, his shop built and shipped 250 pipes to be installed on new Maicos.

He also began to explore the marketing end of the business. In the 1972 Trans AMA series, he approached factory Maico rider Ake Jonsson. They hammered out a deal: Jonsson would use some Wheelsmith items on his race bikes and allow the use of his name in Wheelsmith advertising. In turn, Smith would pay the Swedish rider $200 for each victory.

“There were a lot of great riders in that series that season,” Smith recalls. “I remember thinking that maybe he would win one or two races, tops. Instead, he went on a streak and won the last nine races! That was a pretty big check for our little business to write!”

He soon began sponsoring other riders on both the local and national circuits. Morris Malone, Jeff Jennings, and Darrell Shultz would all ride Maicos that had come through Wheelsmith’s race shop. The most famous Wheelsmith rider, however, was discovered by Smith by accident—literally.

“I was competing in a local race and crashed into another rider—just took him out! After the moto ended, the guy and his brother came over to my pit area and threatened to beat me up!”

The angry rider was an up-and-coming racer named Gaylon Mosier. The looming fisticuffs melted into a long-lasting friendship, and the two formed a partnership that would endure until Mosier was signed to Team Kawasaki in the late ’70s.

“He was just a natural rider and a strong competitor. And he became a very good friend.” When Mosier lost his life in a bicycle accident, Smith was called on to serve as a pallbearer.

By the late ’70s, the company had expanded, with Smith even becoming a full-fledged Maico dealer. A racer could buy a new Maico for around $2000 or a fully tricked-out Wheelsmith Maico for a whopping $6000!

“We would sell and ship those to riders around the world,” he says.

But he saw the Japanese manufacturers moving at a pace that Maico couldn’t (or perhaps wouldn’t) match. Family infighting began to plague production, and Smith began to explore other life options.

“By 1980, I was burned out and decided to move on. I sold Wheelsmith Engineering in 1980. A guy bought it for his kid to run, and, well, he eventually ran it out of business—just tubed it!”

After a career in the auto finance industry, Smith retired. He returned to the world of shifter kart racing and even brought Tim Hart along with him. Hart passed away in 2017, and Greg went back to two wheels and still relies on a primary chain drive, as he now pedals his mountain bike along trails throughout Southern California!

“I loved being in the sport,” he says today. “I still have friends and relationships that I made in motocross. I wouldn’t trade the experience for anything.” CN