Racer David Molitor, of Imperial Beach, California, lost his fight with liver cancer and died December 7, 2015, according to a posting by the Southern California Flat Track Association (SCFTA). He was 70 years old.
Molitor was a regular road racer in the Formula 50 class at Willow Spring Motorcycle Club (WSMC), often earning podium finishes and occasionally winning.
When WSMC shut down in early 2012, Molitor switched over to flat track racing, which he had done earlier in his life, according to his friend Jeremy Toye.
“He would show up every weekend and share the garage with me and Frank [Aragaki] and the other guys we’d have in that garage,” said Toye. “He was the gnarliest guy. He would show up with a R1 and a FZR1000 and both of them were the cleanest bikes out there, hands down. That FZR1000 looked like it rolled off a showroom floor. He was super into the bike thing, rode good and just loved going out there. When the club started going down he was over it.”
Molitor then started racing regularly with the SCFTA and was active with that club as late as 2015, in spite of undergoing treatments for his cancer, according to friend, fellow racer and custom bike builder Richard Pollock.
“I raced against him,” said Pollock. “First he was doing the 50+ [class], then he was doing the 60+, then in 2015 early in the year he went to the 70+. I guess he started having [health] problems at the end of 2014. Then in January-February [of 2015] they had a three-race series over a month and a half at Del Mar on the short track. He came out and did one of those. I asked him if he was racing the next one, and he said ‘no, I’ve got another procedure and it took a long time to schedule and he didn’t want to take a chance on getting hurt.’ Then the next race he was there racing again. I saw him race one time after that up at Perris Raceway.
“He was pretty quiet. He didn’t talk a lot. If you went and talked to him he would yack it up, but he wasn’t super outgoing. I wouldn’t say he was secretive about his bikes, but he didn’t like to give away what he was up. His stuff was always super nice. And when he got done with a bike and built another one he would park the old one in his house. So he had all his bikes in his house. He put so much work into them he wouldn’t sell them.”
Molitor was an engineer who retired after a career in the aerospace industry.
He is survived by his wife of 36 years Myriene and two stepchildren.