Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/126254
during a time when every factory team and privateer thought the only the way to win in national caliber competition was with an exotic multi-thousand dollar works bike . Bob Hannah was making everyone eat crow. especially the privateers who bitched last year that they needed machinery equal to what th e factories had in order to be competitive. Why was Bob using a production bike. anyway? It seems that Team Yamaha won 't receive any new 1977 works bikes from Japan until just before the AMA Nationals began in April. All they had in their Buena Pa rk race shop were a couple of well used 1976 works bikes and a limited number of parts to keep them running. National Racing Manager Ken Clark figured it would be best to save the old works bikes for the important Supercross Series and find som e other bikes to use in the season opener Florida series. The only alternative was to put th e team on YZ producti on bikes. What happened in Flo rida is now history . T eam Yamaha won two out of three classes in the Winter·AMA Series with th e production b ikes. Broc Glover narrowly missed winning the 125cc class because he was penalized for jumping the start at one of the four . races, but Rick Burgett won the Open class and Bob won every moto in the 250 cc class . After th e Florida seri es came the Supercross Series. For the opening race at Atlanta Stadium, Burgett and Pierre Karsmakers made the switch to th e OW26 works bik es. but Hannah decid ed to stay with his YZ production bike. He said he felt "used to it " and _want ed to see how it would fare againthe exotic equ ipment at Atlanta . It obviously did well at Atlanta . Bob won. Some folks might say that he was just lucky, because Gary Semics broke a chain two laps from the end of the ra ce wh ile lead ing , and· then Jim Pomeroy stalled in the last tum while leading to tum the win over to Bob. But Bob had some bad luck himself, crashing in the first turn and having to work up from the back of the pack. Then, after working up to second place just behind Semics, he crashed again. Restarting the bike , he caught back up to the new leader, Pomeroy , on the last lap. If none of the three riders had the bad luck they did , all things considered, Bob would still have won at Atlanta. After Atlanta, Ken Clark was rather worried about the YZ's lack of speed against the factory bikes on the A new production m onoshock control s the swingarm. Th e heavy-looking ch ain gu ard is actually lightweight tubular aluminum. f M otor mods were limited to McCa ar ound the carb m ain j et. It prevents Bob Hannah's Keith McCarty·tuned Yamaha looks like a standard production YZ250D. Is it really stock? Read on. How "stock" is Hannah's YZ250D? Bob Hannah beat the works machines with this " st ock " bike, winning the Florida Winter-AMA Series and three Supercrosses. It had never been done before. At least not d uring the recent history of American motocross. A top factory rider- Bob Han- 8 nah-vwas using a production motorcycle to dominate AMA professional motocross in the United'States. And he was doing