80 / CYCLE WORLD
“News of Rob”—it was always that,
like pings from a satellite gone
out of our orbit, sending snaps
from other planets. The first news
of Robin Tuluie reached our San
Francisco café racer club—the
Roadholders—in 1986, before we’d
actually met him: some German kid
with a Norton Commando, studying
physics at the University of Cali-
fornia, Berkeley, keeping secret his
weekend vintage racing on his daily
rider so Dad wouldn’t cut off his
allowance.
We were sufficiently amused
to dub him Rob the Roadholder,
because of the Norton. I had a 1965
Atlas, other members had ’62 Atlas-
es, and one had an 850 Commando
in stylish white John Player body-
work. The club was proud of our
egghead racer, even when he didn’t
win, and sometimes crashed. He
soon graduated, moved to the Uni-
versity of Texas at Austin, to earn
his doctorate in astrophysics, and
carried on racing with less crashing
and more winning.
News of Rob included his fantasti-
cally successful home-built specials,
and wins at Daytona. After finishing
his doctorate and postdoctoral stud-
ies, news in the mid-1990s was that
he’d taken a job at Polaris, develop-
ing the chassis for a new motorcycle
to be called Victory.
Tuluie has had a spectacular
career arc involving four Formula
One car championships using lat-
er-banned systems, ongoing consul-
tation with Ducati’s MotoGP effort
and development work at Bentley—
and it defies easy explanation. His
family arrived in the United States
from Stuttgart in 1982. (His father
is Persian, if you’re puzzling over
Tuluie.) He was a two-wheeled teen-
age hooligan in Germany, regularly
busted for illegally hot-rodding his
moped, and itched to ride a mo-torcycle. A summer tour of the UC
Berkeley campus included a stop
at TT Motors, the legendary shop
owned by John Gallivan.
Having grown up with Germa-
ny’s strict TUV-motor-vehicle laws,
he was amazed at the home-built
cafe racers, bob-jobs, and choppers
parked at this former gas station,
and marveled: “You can ride these
on the road? I’m moving here!”
Gallivan’s shop was where Tuluie
bought his Norton Commando,
once he’d started university. “I used
to sneak out from my parents’ place
early in the morning, ride my bicy-
cle to Udo’s Auto Repair where my
Norton was parked, and head up to
Sears Point to race, taking off the
license plate and lights,” he says. “I
tried not to crash. My father didn’t
like me riding a motorcycle but
didn’t know about the racing—he
didn’t find out until years later.
“Sears Point is the best and
worst track to learn racing, because
every corner is so difficult,” Tuluie
continues. “When I raced at Laguna
Seca, all the Roadholders came; I
managed to get on the podium, and/ The BUILDER /
DR. ROBIN TULUIE
Actually, it is rocket science
By PAUL D’ORLEANS / Photography by AMY SHORE
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