Recently, we wandered in a state of rapture into the Meadow Brook concours in Michigan, and found out that one of the feature categories encompassed motorcycles with sidecars. Good thing, because we’d have never been able to figure this thing out otherwise.
It’s called the Cat III, dates back to 1976, and lends real gravitas to the notion that while some of us are born with some loose screws, others deliberately get that way by racing sidehacks. In terms of pure technical innovation, the Cat III and its predecessors rank right up there with anything ever created by Jim Hall or Smokey Yunick. This is a moncocque-chassis racing sidecar motorcycle designed by the wildly creative Rudi Kurth, who could have given Henrik Ibsen some lessons in being a freethinker. The naked version shows its welded aluminum center spine, which also functioned as a fuel tank. The engine was a three-cylinder Crescent maritime unit. Its wheels were sized to use the mini-Goodyears originally molded to shoe the six-wheel Tyrrell P34 in Formula 1. Note that the whole rig, including the sidecar, is suspended by wishbones.
Absolutely nuts. The Cat III was hugely fast but fragile and very unpredictable. Kurth, who once designed a microbe-weight Formula Junior car with  Alfa Romeo power, and a stainless-frame racing bike for Yamaha, crashed his way into retirement not very long after debuting the III. Kurth had experimented with monococque sidehacks as far back as 1967. He carried them to Europe’s road courses atop a series of Citroen wagons and Citroen-based haulers, from Clermont-Ferrand to the Isle of Man, with the comely Dane Rowe Kurth hanging onto the “monkey’s” platform. Don Ludewig presented this crazy, crafty creation at Meadow Brook.
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