Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1970's

there is considerably more cost in making that particular bike. I'm not sure whether it will come with magnesium wheels or spoke wheels." The AMA restrictor rule for road racing has been very controversial. Here is how Clark feels about it. "Well, I think that the restrictor rule solved an awful lot of problems that they had. The bikes are extremely fast without them. And it's not so much the speed as it is the brute torque that they've got down low. They're shredding the tires , tearing the chains off and dumping the riders on their heads. If you just twitched or you happened to tum the throttle on and hit a bumps, it could fire you down the road so quick. And putting the restrictors in hasn't taken that much off the lap times, it's just made the bikes a lot smoother down low and a lot easier to ride. Kenny has said that there are race tracks where even if he is pennitted to not run any restrictors, that he would prefer "to run them because it's quicker. It doesn't take the ' mind ·sha ttering concentration that if you blink for one second, you're down with the thing. It's a lot easier to jsut go and roll it on without having to creep it on like you were adjusting a micrometer. I think that rule is an excellent rule." Brand competition has been sadly lacking in AMA Class "C ." On the dirt !t r a cks, Harley -Davidson rules supreme; on the pavement, you have f to ride a Yamaha. According to Clark, to stimulate brand competition, the AMA should : " T h r ow out the claiming rule . Throw out having to bring 25 of everything in and open it wide open and let everybody bring whatever they want to run . And if Suzuki and Kawasaki and Honda and Yamaha all show up for Daytona this year, that's got to be a whole lor.better than having 48 Yamahas running around. The days at Daytona really meant something to me . The days that they had BSAs and Triumphs and Nortons and Yamahas and Kawasakis and Suzukis all there. I don't want to see us win a Yamaha parade. (The AMA has dropped the claiming and homologation rules for Daytona . . . Editor.) "Then we get it from the factory, When you want to support guys like Skip, or Mike Baldwin or Randy Mamola or Dale Singleton, you get the same question back all the time: 'Why do we have to spend this money on road racing when Yamaha's going to win anyway?, I'm sure Dick O'Brien gets thesame thing. Dick and I have talked a lot about it . Dick said, 'The worst thing that would happen to me is for Yamaha to get out of it, because who are you going to beat, but yourself?' How do you explain to the people who are making up the budget that you want to hire two more riders and spend another $750 ,000 ,000 to beat yourself? That just doesn't make any sense at all . The 500cc GP class, where everybody is running, that has some value. The motocross has some value, because we can beat Suzuki and we can beat Kawassaki and we can beat Honda. The same thing with the World Championship road race class . If you just go out and for Kenny Roberts to beat Christian Sarron and Skip Aksland, all riding Yarnahas, is absolutely no advertising value to us at all." The AMA rule requiring that you delcare which motocross champion. ship class that you are contesting has been met with both boos and applause. When asked how he felt about it, Clark replied: "When the AMA motocross commissioner at that time, Mike DiPrete, called me up and asked me what I thought of it, I said I thought it was an excellent idea. I still do , because what it does is: If 1 Bob Hannah is the man who's holding the attention of Yamaha mechanic Keith McCarty and the ubiquitous KC. had taken a Bob Hannah , I could enter him in everything. Then all I would need would be a Bob Hannah and a back-up: and it's obvious he could probably win everything. He's one of the fastest 125cc riders; he's been the 125cc National Champion. He is the fastest 250cc rider and he would have been the 500cc National Champion if he hadn't had just a simple mechanical malfunction in the last race , And that's not good for anybody; it's no good for the sport. So with this , where you 've gOl everybody separated into classes and one series a year, at the end of the year where they all compete together 10 show who is best, that's great because that lets me hire more young riders and give the riders more places to go . They commit themselves to a class. Instead of having one rider, now I have five. Otherwise I would have two. That's just the way I feel about it personally. I liked that idea right from the conception." What does Clark think would improve and expand the sport of motocross? "As far as the sport of motocross goes , I think you're going to see m or e and more stadium racing. Because people in these days will just not drive 55 miles out into the country to stand up in either a very muddy or a very dusty cow pasture, watch two corners of a race a nd pay $5 to $7.50 to get in that place. They'll pay $25 to go sit in the bleachers at Anaheim Stadium or somewhere else and they can see the whole race right in front of them . Of course this doesn't generate much of the rider training for the two 45·minute motos , but I think you 'll see two years down the road that the majority of the hero -even ts will be stadium motocross." • 23

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