DR. ROBIN TULUIE

“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 California, 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 Atlases, and one had an 850 Commando in stylish white John Player bodywork. The club was proud of our egghead racer, even when he didn’t win, and sometimes crashed. He soon graduated, movedto the University 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 fantastically successful home-built specials, and wins at Daytona. After finishing his doctorate and postdoctoral studies, news in the mid-1990s was that he’d taken a job at Polaris, developing the chassis for a new motorcycle to be called Victory.

Tuluie has had a spectacular career