Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

GINTERVIEW Ronnielones ! A day's night hard By Paul Carruthers Photos by Mitch Friedman and Bert Shepard o nnie Jones was in trod uced to dirt track raci ng in mu ch the same manner a lot of growing young boys were in the early '70s, by eating popcorn and watching " O n An y Sunday." But things were di fferent with 10year-old Ronnie. When the theatre cleared, he stayed, fo r two or three showings a day, until the final count reach ed so mewhere near 15. La ter in the year , he was for merly introduced to th e sport when h is fat her.drove him out to the O klahoma Ci ty Fairgrounds and he saw his heroes - the Rorneros, the Lawwil ls, the Manns - live. That was all the career counseling Ronn ie J ones needed. "I remember telling my dad, ' Yeah , that's wha t I'm gonna do when I grow up.' And I remember him tell ing me, ' Na h, you won't do it, Look at th is. They live out of their vans, they have dirt under their fingernails all the time, th ey don 't get to take showers, the y're on the road all the time. You ain 't go nna do that .' I remember th inking, ' Yep, tha t' s what I'm gonna do a lright. ' " Ronnie jones was having the kind of day that made him wis h he'd neuet sat through " On Any Sunday" on ce, let alon e 15 times. j ones was frantically hammering away on his rear shock, trying desperately to fin d a setting that would allow his Honda RS750 to hoo k up on the dry and dust y r.-m ile oval in Pomona, Califo rnia, looking a lot like the men in th e movie as he performed the kind of tasks his father wamed him about. And this w as only the beginning . . . Nobody step ped in Ronnie's way whe n he started racing motorcycles. In fact, hi s family supported him as he sta rted mixing it up wi th o ther youngsters on the well-oil ed dirt of the local short track in Yu kon, Ok lahoma. Soo n Jones started to venture out of sta te, racing at a short .track at Ross Downs in Texas on Friday night and then blitzing the 150 some miles back to Yuko n for more action on Saturday night. It was at Ross Downs wh ere g uys like Mik e Kidd and Terry Poovey were making names for themselves. " It was like a National every week at Ross Do wns," Jones recalls. Come winter, he wou ld head inside - racing in barns in Oklahoma. He was a short trac ker, through and through, in fact, he didn 't compete o n anything longer than a quarter-mile track until he was a first year professio nal racer , an AMA No vice. It wasn 't su pposed to be like this. After all, j ones had been tipped off on the correct settings to use at Pomona's oddly shape d, lo ng-straig ht , tightcornered oval. Th is was his first visit to th e sou thern Calijomia facility, but A lex j orgensen's mechan ic had given him all the inform ation that wo rked du ring a no n-National race here a few years ago. How quickly th ings change. j ones knew he was in trouble when he first set eyes on the surface. In stead of th e wet and tack y soil he'd been told about , and consequen tly set up his H onda RS750 for, he found dry, loose dirt. Th e firs t practice session only reinfor ced his worst fears - he was tuming lap times in th e mid-H-second range while R 20 the others were getting around in the 3Is . "I think it (the rear suspension ) was too stiff," a somewhat solem n j ones said after the first session. " N ow it's prob ably too soft . 1 probably went too far, but 1 want to see what it'll do." The best of times an d the worst of times came all in one year for Ronnie Jones - 1980. Ni neteen years old and impoverished, J ones showed up at the Houston Astro dome needin g to do well j ust to make his van paymen t. No problem. After all, this was on ly the world's biggest barn race and that was o n ly his hero Kenny Ro berts sitt ing next to him on the starting lin e for the Saturday night short track. So he went out and bauled with Roberts and Mickey Fay, and he won, say in g afterwards in the winner 's circle: "I knew I had arrived when I p ushed the bike up the sta rt ing line and took my po sition next to Kenny Roberts. Beatin g Kenn y is a thrill I do n' t th ink I'll for get." Well , has he? Fo rgo tten? No way. " Besides beating Kenny, wh o I'd looked up to all this time, it was a race really close to Oklahoma City. That's the one everybody ta lked about and a lo t of O kies went do wn there to watch th at race. Ra cing back and forth wit h Ken ny was neat, If I'd jus t got o ut front and won the th in g it wouldn 't have been suc h a big dea l, but I th ink I started fifth or sixt h and Kenny was up fro nt and I just kinda worked my way up through the pack an d fin ally cau ght him. And th en we j ust went ba ck and forth . I a lso mad e a friend in Kenny af ter that race , and he al most h ired me the next year for hi s Men Lawwi ll team . Kenn y's always been real good to me. That race was wi thou t a doubt m y biggest thrill." Sadly , Jones' exh ilaration was followed all too quickly by 'despo ndency as hi s yo u nge r brother David was killed in a .tragic acci dent when a specta tor cros sed the track du ring a heat race at the Louisvill e Half Mile, almost putting a premature end to Ronnie's promising career. " My parents weren ' t there, so I had to call home from the hospital ," Jones said. "My mom made me promise that I'd quit, right then o n the phone. At th e time I didn't want to race. I didn't want to be around it," So Ronnie sta yed home. The funeral passed, the visi tors stopped coming by and his friends o n the Na tional circuit went back to raci ng. "I th ink my mom could tell I was depressed," Jones recalls. " I wasn 't really sure I wanted to race again, bu t I knew I mis sed all my friends. Sh e brought i t up and to ld m e that although she'd told me to sto p raci ng, she really just wanted me to do what I wanted to do. I told her that I really didn't know .wha t I wanted to do, but I felt like if I go t on th e track and raced, I'd know. I had to see if I reall y wanted to do it or no t." A Na tional at the Santa Fe TT was looming o n th e horizon, and Jones "I was happy about it, but it just wasn 't the same anymore," Jones admitted. " It was like winning Ho uston and winning Santa Fe were two completely different things. It wasn 't important to me anymore like it was at H ouston. " It took me five years after Santa Fe to win another National. Maybe I felt like I was doing what I was supposed to be doing, but it j us t didn't mean tha t much to me." jones' second practice session went better, but not by much. The 30-yearold Oklahoman improved his time to the low 31s, but th e others had also gone quicker. So there was more to change, and now the original settings he'd used from the cheat sheet were no thing more than a bad memory. (Ri gh t) Ronnie J ones was ranked third in 1990, bu t by the end of the 1991 season hopes to better that finish by two positions. (Below) Jones and owner/ tu ner George Garvis are entering their third season as a team. decided it was ti me to see if racing was sti ll im po rtant to him. Full of adren ali ne, J ones went out and won the secon d National of hi s career at th e Chicago-area track. " I took off and led th e thing wireto-wire," Jones said. " It was ' almost like a ll th e energy I'd built up inside of me just came out. People were telli ng me to slow down. I had a huge lead . I think I lapped half th e guys in the field. People talk about a man possessed, but it's like I wasn 't even th inking. I figure it must hav e been an omen or something - somebody tryi ng to tell me something. I guess it was meant for me to go ahead and race." But things had changed. Racing didn 't bring the same excitement that it did before his brother was killed. More teeth were added to the sprock et, and the front fork softened. " W hat we started out wi th wasn ' as close as we thought, but it still gav us a place to start," jones said. There are normally two Hand RS750s in th e p its of the Georg Garvis' Honda Town-backed team but tonight ther e's only one . Th wrong one. En route to the team ' headquarters in Des Moines, Iowa following the Sacramento Mile i northern California, the team 's true blew up. The alternate transporter w a minivan, and 'there was on ly roo for one bike. jones chose the bike he' won the 1990 Ascot Half Mile on , bike using the older styled chassi where the engine sits some two inche lower than the new model. "This one worked good at Asco because it was tacky," jones said " W ith this being a horse race track I thought it would be tacky here too R igh t now we're having a hard tim

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