Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1980's

Freddie Spencer rode both his Honda superbike (above) and his NSR500 GP bike at Daytona International Speedway on December 10. Interview: Freddie Spencer Fast Freddie's back! By Henny Ray Abrams Any recounling of 1986 wouLd be incompLele wilhoul lhe inclusion of lhe slrange laLe of dqubLe WorLd Champion Freddie Spencer. After becoming the onLy rider in t.he hislory of mOlorcycLe road racing to win both the 250 and 500cc WorLd Championships in a singLe season, Spencer virluaLLy vanished from the paddock. His absence from Daytona caused a variety of rumors thai wen I from lhe abominabLe 10 the absurd. Worsl of aLL, lhere was no way 10 check on lhem. Afler dropping oul of lhe first Grand Prix of lhe year, lhe pan ish GP al Jarama, Spencer's season was, essenliaLLy, over. Hoping for a recovery lhal never came from lhe tendinilis lhal slruck him, he wailed unliL afler lhe Austrian WorLd Championship round in JuLy 10 have lhe operalion which he hoped wouLd cure lhe probLem wilh his righl wrisl. Excepl for a press conference allhe French GP al PauL Ricard, he wasn'l heard from again. When we caLLed him' in earLy December 10 find out w'hat he'd been up 10, he laLd us lhal he'd been lesting the Honda VFR750 superbike al soul hem CaLifornia's WiLLow Springs and wouLd be 0.1 Daylona riding his 500 GP bike and the superb ike. When he suggesled we come to Daytona to taLk with him we immediateLy agreed and sent conlribuling editor Henny Ray Abrams, who over lhe Last five years has covered boul haLf of lhe Grands Prix for Cycle News. Mr. A brams fiLed this reporl... Editor. Spencer's test at Willow, aboard the Honda superbike, had gone so well that Honda decided to have his 500 shipped from Japan to Daytona where Team Honda riders Wayrre Rainey and Bubba Shobert were testing Dunlop and . .. . MIChelIn tues on therr updated superbikes. The purpose, for 6 Spencer, was to get as much time in the saddle as possible and to verify that his right wrist was, indeed, fit and could withstand the rigors of next year's sixteen-race World Championship eries. Looking trim and fit in a brand new set of white, red, and blue HRC leathers, Spencer was the first one on the track and it wasn't long before the unmistakable high-pitched whine of the Honda NSR500 spinning its rear tire going up the banking was heard in the pits. A suspension problem kept him from going full-out, but he was turning high I :54's nontheless. His superbike times were slightly slower. The testing done, we returned to the patio of his hotel room and slarted talking. From the beginning one thing was clear: Spencer saw this as his chance to set the record straight on the.events of 1986 and his answers somellmes became. excruClallngly detailed. (A transcnpt of the taped conversation runs 19 double-spaced pages long.) He wanted the truth to be known and addressed every question put to him. There are, however, a few things tbat he is still reluctant to discuss. Although he explained the reasons for his absence from this year's Daytona meeting he was reluctant to discuss the details and it was apparent that he was as surprised as anyone at how greatly he was affected. Neither dld he want to dlscuss hls spilt from Rothmans, even thougb Il was obvious to even. the least obser~ant on the Gra.nd Pnx scene thatthelr's was a marna~e doomed from the start. The parllng was mutual. We'began by lookmg back on 1986 and ended by looking forward to 1987. And if his physical problems are behind him, as he and his doctors believe, 1987 will certainly be the most exciting GP campaign since the classic one of 1983. When did tbe trouble with your wrist begin? Probably the only things, all the things that happened with the wrist and all that, I told the entire truth the whole time about them. And talking about the year and the problem and what started the problem, well what really started it was when I fell off the 250 at Silverstone in August of 1985 and I broke my hand-broke these two fingers. My wri t swelled up and I gOt through that race because I had to ride to win the 250 World Championship at Silverstone and the 500 at Sweden, and then I came home and found it was broken and it became sore that week. I had the choice of going to Italy that week and shooting it up with cortisone JUSt to get by. But the doctor that I have has seen all the effect that has on a person-on your bones. It gets you through that particular moment. It's a quick fix. And you know for a football game or something you're going to each par- . ticular game justlil:e each particular World Championship race. This is gelling into the philosophy and my philosophy is that you do whatever it takes to win or you try to do whatever you can. But I don't do this from week LO week. I do it for the long term. That started it and then I went to' Suzuka and fell and Ithink I hurt my arm, kind of JUSt banged it up. I played tennis a couple of times during the wimer and it bothered me a lillie bit, my elbow and kind of my forearm. And so I was treating it. It wasn't something I JUSt ignored. When was the first time you got on a . bike after that? The first time I gOt on a bike was in Spain (Jarama in May of 1986). I tested on the Tuesday twO weeks before the race. And I went out the first day and everything was fine. I was in really, really good shape. That first day it was fine. The next day it ju t started aching ... like tendinitis, which I've suffered before. It goes way back to high school. In any athletics where you suffer, you may have a particular weak area. So I'd suffered from it before. I went home and gOt it treated and went back to Jarama. I was real careful in practice and taking it easy in qualifying to save it. Because I knew that what we'd done was one of those quick fixes. And I went out in the last session and was fast qualifier and we gOt the bike working good. Then in the race it started bothering me on the third or fourth lap The 15th lap of the race, it was about halfway... The hardest thing for people to understand is that they don't see you bleeding. Atleastlthink the hardest thing _ is that they don't see you bleeding or whatever. But you must have known before the race how it would feel. Sure, but it's no different than (football players) Tony Dorsett OJ" Terry Bradshaw. He could tell you stories about shooting his stomach up with cortisone because he'd tear his stomach muscles. The coaches know, the opponents don't know. You go in and do the besLjob you can. And what happened was it gOt to a point that it wasn't the pain or the swelling, it JUSt stopped working. See, as soon as the nerve gOt pinched, which l was this nerve in the wrist, that's what was happening. They couldn't tell that until they opened it up. That's why the scar is so big. The nerve is bigger than normal and that's a development of all the years of riding or whatever. It's JUSt a particular problem that I encounter. Do you think that you made a mistake in waiting until after the Austrian Grand Prix at Salzburg·to get it operated on? . • In retrospect, I probably should have done it right away. but I was like everybody else and I thought it would get beller right away. That's something that almost every athlete suffers from, the feeling of being somewhat invincible and fortunately I took two races off, Italy and Germany, because they sa'id with the tendinitis if nothing else is wrong it should take tbis amount of time and then go back OUt there and hopefully make up the difference. I didn't want to just struggle along and go back out there and end up hurting something else. There's so many diHerent things that can happen and that could go wrong. Looking back it probably would have been better if I would have known about it at the end of 1985. Then I could have had the operation and had the winter to recover from it. Why didn't you ride all winter? I never do. You didn't do any testing? Usually you do some. Right, usually we do some. I didn't test in February or race at Daytona. And that's a question that is stilI being asked, why weren't you at Daytona? Il strikes me that there never was an explanation offered and people are stilI curious. Well, I'm certainly not unfeeling as far as a lot of things are concerned. It does matter to me what people think about me and respect my ability. Maybea 10tofpeoplefeeithatIdon't care about what anybody thinks, but I mean that's not true. I get the feeling sometimes that they automatically assume it's something other than what it migh.t be. I think that if there is an assumption, _ the assumption I get is a certain distantness. That you're not one of the guys, you don't hang out with the guys, you don't act like the guys. That may go back to when I was younger. I grew up in an environment where I was different than everybody else because I raced motorcycles. I grew up in a neighborhood where no other kid had motorcycles. I went to a private school where most kids were br.ought toschoorin BMW's. It could go back to upbringing or anything. I certainly, and this is the truth, don't feel that I'm beller than anyone. I respect Eddie (Lawson) and I know his feelings toward me, but that's the truth. And I respect the other people . out there. I just try to be the best that I can be and I understand that assumption. And I'm not saying that I'm totafIy .. well, I do understand, maybe, where they could get that from. When I was younger I was real shy. I co"Uld not speak in front of a class. And there were a lot of th ings I had to overcome where I had to get up and act like a professional. Sort of like you could maybe build a wall that you don't realize sometimes. Which brings us back to the point that the only way that people are going to accept you or know you better is if you can be more ... and I don't know if it's more expressive, or more open or more accessible ... I think I'm always honest. The explanation, then, that I have gotten is that you missed Daytona because it was a series of bad things that happened at the same time. All at the same time. That's the bottom line. .Physical? Physical, persona,l, emotional. All of it came together at one time. The physical part would be brought on by the emotional. And all of'a sudden it's time to ride and I'm a professional and I know what it takes and I have my own standard and then you get down on yourself because you know you can't perform to your

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