Joe Leonard
JOE LEONARD
National Number 98
GREATEST ALL-AROUND RIDER of the last decade, Joe Leonard has been plagued by ill fortune in every national championship race he’s entered this year. This will be the first season in the last nine that he has not finished third or better in point standings, and he carried the Grand National Champion’s Number One plate for three of those years — 1954, 1956 and 1957 — winding up in second in 1958, 1960 and 1961.
His career was launched in 1950 when he began competing around San Diego, California as a novice. The following year, in the San Francisco area, he raced as an amateur and gained considerable experience on the quarter-mile track at Belmont, California, winning the Northern California Championship and also picking up the amateur events at five national race meets throughout the country.
In 1952, as a first year expert, he again won the Northern California Championship but not until 1953 did he rocket into national prominence, taking four National Championship race victories — two flattrack, one T.T. and one road race. This versatility is the reason why Leonard has been the outstanding motorcycle racer in the country in recent years. He has won every type of major race, including the Daytona Beach 200-Mile Classic (twice), the 100-Mile road race at Laconia, New Hampshire (three times) and every National Championship race held on flat tracks, 5 to 75 miles in length, at least once in his career, for an unparalleled record. He has also won both the 45 and 80-inch Peoria T.T.’s, and is a 6-time National T.T. champ, in addition to being an accomplished hillclimber, though his racing schedule has not allowed much time for that phase of the sport.
Married and the father of two children, a boy and a girl, Leonard lives in San Jose, California. Whatever his plans for the future, and they may include car racing, for which he has shown a natural ability much like his aptitude for motorcycles, Joe Leonard is a true champion and a “real racer” in every sense of the word. •
