Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE J eff Heino was making all the right moves. After a successful transition from motocross to road racing, he blitzed his way from novice to pro in record time and suddenly found himself mixing it up with the factory superbike heroes, even though by all rights, he had neither the experience, nor the equipment to be turning in the kind of performances he was achieving. The AMA Superbike paddock really began taking notice of this young gun from New Hampshire, when in a superbike-qualifying heat race, on a wet Seattle Inter- national Raceway, Heino, riding a Suzuki GS1000 he'd recently bought from another club racer and was still getting familiar with, ran a close second to Kawasaki's Eddie Lawson. Honda factory rider Mike Baldwin just managed to get by him late in the heat. Even still, this almost complete unknown had qualified on the front row of an AMA Superbike race in his rookie season. It was all a little overwhelming for Heino. He laughs when he remembers when the track an- nouncer approached him. "They came to try to talk to me, this little kid from Henniker," Heino said. "They asked me where I was from, how'd I race with those guys, and I froze on the mic; I P114 JOURNEYMAN ROAD RACER As Heino explains it, the 1000cc formula at the time was a great equalizer. The superbikes of that era already had more power than the chassis and tires of the day could handle, so riders didn't really need to sink a ton of money into engine development. If they could just get decent suspension, a good set of pipes and carbs they were in the game. "If they would have had super- bikes stay 1000s another year, that would have been some of the best racing," Heino said. "Be- cause now they had the factory replicas and a lot of guys built some really good superbikes. Everything was pretty close, so it was the rider. Suzuki, Kawasaki and Honda were all pretty even. You had a lot of good bikes, and anybody could win. But they changed it to 750s, and that was a bummer for me because I had a really good bike and I only got to race it maybe six races. So now all of a sudden I was starting from scratch." That transition from 1000cc swear to God. I was there to race bikes, I wasn't there to talk. I didn't know what to say." His unexpected qualifying run turned out to be bittersweet. "We got on there on the front row getting ready to race, and we tried to push-start the bike, and it wouldn't fire. Turns out a coil wire shorted out." The paddock was taking notice. This rookie from New England was running with the big boys and was no doubt fast. People started thinking he was maybe even the next Mike Baldwin! The future couldn't have looked much brighter for Heino at that point. Then a couple of things stalled his rapid ascension into the upper echelons of American road racing. First, the economy of the early 1980s suffered a significant hic- cup. Motorcycles stacked up in dealer showrooms and factory warehouses. Factory racing sud- denly was not the top priority of the Japanese factories. Then the AMA changed the superbike rules. The bikes went from 1000cc to 750cc in 1983. All the money and development of those privateer riders had in their 1000cc superbikes went down the drain. Jeff Heino never quite made it to the grand stage of road racing, but he never really stopped doing what he loves—riding and racing motorcycles.

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