Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

·VINTAGE.· Inside Team Obsolete By Henny Ray Abrams ob Iannucci has been involved with motorcycles for better than 25 years, but he'd never seen anything like this. Prior to the 1995 Dutch TI at Assen, Iannucci put five of his exotic racing motorcycles, along with their original pilots, out on the hallowed Circuit van Drenthe as part of a 25-rider celebration of road racing history. There was 15-time World Champion Giacomo Agostini on the MY Agusta, six-time champion Jim Redman On the jewel-like Honda 250 sixcylinder, 1969 250cc World Champion Kel Carruthers on another MY after his Benelli started making funny noises, former World Champion Luigi Taveri and Franco Bonera. "The crowd went wild," Iannucci said during an interview at his Team Obsolete shop near downtown Brooklyn, New York. "They climbed over the fences, they were ·out on the track, they were chanting 'more, more, more: The Grand Prix mechanics abandoned their garages and they ran out on the track, and there were people crying and hugging and kissing and we were on television all over Europe. It was a really great thing. It was a total watershed event." The Dutch TI was part of what Iannucci has come to call EuroTour '95, a series of exhibitions of his classic motorcycles at tracks around Europe. He came away from it in awe of the power of the machinery. "I felt like I died and went to heaven. Never before in my whole life was I personally able to make so many people happy. It was great. It was like being a performer." That, in a .nutshell, is the essential Iannucci. Equal parts bombast and boast, promise and performance, enthu- R siasm and ceaseless energy. He has his detractors, but none would deny his unyielding tenacity or the rabidity with which he pursues his quest. He is known to speak in hyperbole, often announcing the impending arrival of the pithy quote. "I was about to come up with one of my famous quotes," he says during a discussion of the current state of road racing. "And that is, "Noise is to Grand Prix road racing what taste is to eating good food:" Subjective? "It's not only subjective, it's an essential element. Good bad or indifferent, it's an essential element. It's something that has to be reckoned with, and the one thing that the two-strokes don't do, is they don't make the right sound." Dave .Roper, vintage racer nonpareil, working nearby in the Team Obsolete shop, said, "That's subjective, Rob. I think two-strokes sound great." 'That's because you'ee a sick (expletive), and it's a good thing you're n'ot running Grand Prix racing otherwise the whole sport would be barefoot and shirtless," Iannucci blares amiably, to which Roper calmly responds "It's totally subjective. I think four-strokes sound great, too. I'm not saying that one is better than the other, even a Wankel sot,mds great." "I think you're way out in left field here," Iannucci said. "You can have your opinion and I can have mine. I'll bet you that if you went out to a road race track and you put some of our multis on the .track and then you put some of the modem GP 500 two strokes on the track, and you put equipment on the spectators to measure things like heart rate and pulse and blood pressure and..." I (From left to right) Team Obsolete • Hobby CIBrk, Rob l8nnuccl. Dave Roper and Alax Mclean • poae with two 01 their valued ~aIona. the HoncIlI 8 and an MY Agusta. Roper interjected, "Erections... "...erecti9ns. The whole nine yards, sexual arousal, whatever it takes. I'll bet you that we could charge up the fans with these multi four-strokes better than the two-strokes can. I bet we could do more with parades than they could with races, in terms of charging them up. Certainly, if you wanted to compare apples to apples, that sport lost something. Speed is not an important thing. People go to horse races and the horses go 30 mph:' . Stepping up to the challenge, I sug. gested that they go to horse races to gamble away their life savings. "They don't go to horse races to watch the beauty of the horse:" "Tha t' s not true, there's a lot of places where horses are raced in the world where they don't bet on them:' Iannucci responded. I disagr,ee, telling him that most places, they go to bet on them. "Whatever it is, it doesn't make any difference if the bike is going 100 or 150 or 200 or 80. It's a question of close racing. Speed is a relative thing. "My point," he says later in the discussion, "is. that in order for racing to be interesting, first it has to be close, and that's more important than the absolute speeds or lap times or whatever else. And secondly it has to sound right. I think if they just told those guys you've got to have four separate exhaust pipes,. even if they're muffled, they still have a nice sound to them." After a bit of back- and-forth Iannucci distilled it down to a single element: 'There's a flavor in there also. Maybe flavor's riot just the right word, but I'm not a noise expert or acoustics expert," he says. "There are some who would say you're a noise expert," I offer. "Moi?" he said in mock horror. "Not myself, but there are some:' "But you've heard rumors:' '1've heard, I've heard. I'm not sure they're rumors. I've heard things," I say. Dave Roper has worked for Iannucci full-time since 1984 and is the longest serving of the nearly 200 Team Obsolete employees. The secret to dealing with Iannucci, he says, is multi-pronged. "Part of it is ignoring him, just going ahead and doing what I was going to do anyway. Part of it is listening to him, because I think he is genuninely a very bright guy and he does have a lot of very good ideas. Part of it is telling him, 'so fire me: And part of it is poking him in the chest and telling him he's a (expletive). With all of those, we seemed to have worked out something. "Sometimes he does surprise me. Sometimes he comes up with these ideas, and sometimes I think, 'this is crazy, this is just going to be a nuisance, it's going to be a pain in the ass, it's going to get in the way: Like we did the video of the classic experience by mounting the camera on the G-50 and doing the Isle of Man (the site of one of Roper's most notable triumphs. He won the 1984 Classic TI and still holds the lap record for a standing start for that clas~. It was both the only time an American has won the TI and the only time a G-50 has won a TI). I thought that was just the dumbest idea when we're trying to run a race here. But it turned out that it was great. It wasn't that much in the way and the video came out very well and it's brought so much joy to a lot of people. People all the time are coming up and telling me how much they enjoyed it, so it was a great idea. And I didn't realize how many people would enjoy watching it:' "After you take away all this other stuff, at the center of it is people," iannucci says. "And I am very, very much a people person. I talk all day long. I ·never stop talking. I should probably have a telephone implant." Rob Iannucci is a bear of a man with narrow-set eyes that gaze over a largish nose which sits above a graying goatee. His almost shoulder-length hair is worn in a pulled-back ponytail. That, along with a six-foot frame that's a few belt notches toward portly, suggests either a well-groomed dirty shirt or a jazz musician who's been on one too many dinner cruises. He's a New York lawyer by vocation and everything that encompasses. "I recently did a murder case in Virginia," he says when asked about how actively he practices law. "I got the guy one year, the co-defendant got 30 years. My guy wasn't guilty, really. "I don't normally do criminal defense work, but I just did it because it was a challenge, and I guess a lot of the things that I've done in my life I've done because they were challenges:' The end result of those challenges is that he has established himself, and the revolving hard-core group of enthusiasts that make ilp Team Obsolete, as the preeminent force in classic motorcycle racing and collecting. He organized his first vintage races at Bridgehampton, Long Island, back in 1976 and immediatley began to think bigger. After much cajoling he convinced the powers-to-be at Daytona to allow him to run the first vintage races in 1981, but Daytona only

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