82 / CYCLE WORLD
we had one hell of a party! I was the
only racer sleeping in a tent on the
infield. I was a student, working at a
parking garage. I loved that time—it
was simple and fun. Vintage car
racing is still like that.”
It should be no surprise that he
later built his own vintage racecar—
which he calls the Menasco Pirate—
using a 1920s aero engine of that
name mounted to a Riley chassis
with 1920s-style GP bodywork. It’s
fantastic.
After Berkeley came masters
and doctoral degrees at UT Aus-
tin, where he continued racing his
Norton, until he built the Tul-Da
Eccentric 500 in 1993. The Tul-Da
was built around a Honda CR500
water-cooled two-stroke motocross
engine, in a “tiny chrome-mo-
ly frame” that Tuluie built “with
straight tubes from the headstock
to the swingarm.” It was called the
Eccentric “because it had lots of
eccentric adjustments, from the
steering-head angle to the swingarm
pivot location because I didn’t know
what I was doing.”
The geometry could be quickly
modified for rake and squat, and he
tuned the CR500 motor to road-racespecs, its ports welded up and recut,
with a nickel-carbide cylinder bore.
He experimented with “the biggest
carbs I could find—44 mm Lectrons”
and handmade expansion cham-
bers (running vertically between
the swingarm and wheel) until the
motor put out 75 hp. He laid up
the carbon-fiber tank and seat by
hand, which took a month but keptBELOW: Dr. Tuluie is a keeper: his wicked
Tul-Aris racer lives in the stairwell of his
18th Century manor house outside Oxford.