VOLUME 57 ISSUE 14 APRIL 7, 2020 P107
tended. It was a face-off be-
tween Freddie Spencer on the
Honda and Eddie Lawson on the
Yamaha. Fatuously asked who
he thought would triumph on the
morrow, he met his interlocu-
tor's eye, and replied with great
solemnity: "If we knew who was
going to win, it would not be
necessary to hold the race."
And one of his successors,
asked why Honda still raced two-
strokes when they were dedi-
cated to making four-strokes: "If
you only ask questions you know
you want to ask, you never get
unexpected answers."
The best quotes come from
before riders were sanitized by
PR teams and sponsor-speak.
Nowadays, public utterances
tend to be about "trying to get
the best result possible," and
"giving my 110 percent." As if
they would be at the track for
any other reason. We took these
things for granted back in the
old two-stroke days, and people
were more prone to speak their
minds.
Like when Spencer was
heavily lauded for pressing on
to finish a distant second after
hitting his knee on a straw bale
at Rijeka in Yugoslavia in 1985.
Race-winner Lawson's laconic
reaction? "It was also possible to
miss the bale."
Sometimes a rider's words
might come back to bite his
ankle. Barry Sheene was always
witty and quotable, but not
always long-sighted. When Pat
Hennen signed as his Suzuki
teammate, snatching (in Barry's
view) an opportunity only creat-
ed because Barry's good friend
Gary Nixon had been badly hurt
in a testing crash, Sheene said:
"Pay peanuts and you get a
monkey." Another Sheene asso-
ciate Steve Parrish commented
wryly, after Hennen became the
first U.S. premier-class GP win-
ner: "Some monkey! This one
had horns."
Barry also stumbled when
commenting on rival Kenny
Roberts's bike-development
skills, saying: "He'd have trouble
developing a cold."
"If I'm so bad," Kenny told me
soon afterwards, "and I'm beat-
ing him, then what does that
make him?"
So, the best lines are often
just good ways of stating the
obvious, and often meant to
deflate people asking silly ques-
tions.
No-one was more dedicated
to this than the straight-talking
Mick Doohan who had little pa-
tience with an over-enthusiastic
press. As in Argentina when he
turned his best death stare on
a prying local, and said: "My
name is Michael Doohan, and
I've come to Buenos Aires to
race my Repsol Honda." Then
zipped his lips.
Or when somebody men-
tioned that he seemed to find it
too easy to win: "What do you
want me to do—slow down?"
Best of all, delivered with most
withering look at a bright-eyed
super-keen questioner, trying to
delve into the arcane niceties of
steering geometry and tire com-
pounds and talking too knowl-
edgably about 10ths of a second.
A withering look and then the
deflating put-down.
"It's only a motorbike race." CN
Like the
anonymous
U.S.
Superbike
racer way back
who said, after
being one of
only a handful
of finishers
on a grueling
afternoon of
crashes and
breakdowns:
"It was a race of
nutrition."
