Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

INTERVIEW 20 oW badly do you want to race? How badly do you want to live out of a van, driving with narcoleptic neglect across the country, devouring road chow, the reward often being the chance to spend a considerable sum of your own money to be humiliated by better-financed, better-equipped, better-paid - or paid at all - racers. Every winter, every racer struggles with that question. Gerald Rothman Jr. was looking for the answer to that question a little over a year ago. Lying on his couch with five broken vertebrae, the result of a horrific crash in the season's final race at Sears Point, hardly able to move, he was wondering how much longer he could do it. ") definitely knew that) wasn't going to work my own deal," Rothman said recently, adding that his family's real estate business also was in a down cycle. "This was even before I got hurt. I knew that I just couldn't do that again. It's tough. It seems that when you're down, everything is just caving in around you." . Fast forward to Daytona, December, 1996. Gerald Rothman Jr., husband, father, civil engineer, Connecticut Yankee, survivor, is lapping the famed Speedway at a pace he never imagined on one of the most immaculate race bikes ever built, the estimable Fast by Ferracci Ducati. This is rarefied territory . and, though he knows in his heart that he belongs, it's not really clear that this is his destiny. It's not a tryout, he's told, but he doesn't have a guaranteed ride, he's also told. He's in a poorly defined no man's land and unsure how his performance will affect his ·status. It will be a few restless weeks before he finds out for sure that he'll be in Ferracci's Italian tricolors for 1997. "To get to ride the top bike out there is one of those deals that makes the whole ride worthwhile," said Rothman, whose sinuous path to a factory superbike ride is an 'illuminating tale of perseverance, after finally signing. When you next see 28-year-old Gerald Rothman Jr., he will be racing the FBF Ducati. His teammate will be Mat Mladin, the Australian who last year raced for Yoshimura Suzuki, a team which also once employed Rothman. Other than that, they arrived at the team. from very different paths. Mladin comes from a few very successful stints, an Australian Superbike Championship, a year racing Grands Prix for Cagiva and a season on the Yoshimura Suzuki Superbike team. High profile stuff. Rothman's route was more journeyman. He didn't own a street bike until 1989 and didn't start racing until the following year. His first race was a club event at" Loudon and he won. . . ". "So ) was hooked," he says, bilt the'" groundwork had been laid years earlier. He'd been riding dirt bikes since he was 5. "My dad is the kind of guy who would show up on Christmas morning with a new dirt bike," he says. When he was 10, he asked his grandmother to sponsor him. Though she declined, he wasn't discouraged. In his first 750cc Supersport final, at Daytona in 1991, Rothman finished eighth, earning his first national points on a Rob Muzzy-built Kawasaki ZX7R. He continued to club race, won a few regional championships and ended up 13th in the AMA 750cc Supersport class. The following year he campaigned the same Muzzy-built Kawasaki. Traveling to the races with fellow New Englander Dale Quarterley, he finished fourth in class and ninth in 600cc Supersport on a Honda CBR600 which he'd been given by a local dealership. That was enough to attract the attention of Suzuki's Bill Syfan, who signed him .up;'; '"~",",,, "':'''~0-~<,~'''~_~~~~~ with a bikes and p~fs .:: ~\:" " ~ . __ , ,~_"' ...""....... _ .."' d!!al as part of Team Suzuki ·Sport.' ::: . When the late Donald Jacks was seriously injured in the opening race at ried and flew off to Jamaica on his honPhoenix, Rothman was promoted to the eymoon. Yoshimura Suzuki team. The learning "I came back and literally washed curve accelerated and Rothman finished my clothes and hopped on a flight the the year third in 750s and fifth in 600s same night," Rothman remembers. "We with a win on the 750 at Charlotte the got down here and started riding the high point in his season. next day and it was just a mess." All this came while he was doing his There were innumerable motor probsenior design project in engineering at lems, but he still managed to finish third the University of Connecticut, an educain 750cc Supersport and fourth in 600cc tion which prepared him to work in his family real estate and property manageSupersport. There was another win that season, ment business. When the year ended, he this time in Phoenix, and fifths in both' was told that he'd be replaced by the championships. More significantly, then-recovered Jacks. "The intimidation factor dropped quite Team Suzuki Sport offered bikes and a bit from the year before," he says. parts again in 1994, but Rothman chose "Back in '93, it was like you go there a similar deal with Kawasaki. Delivery and this is so and so and the moment of the machines came just before Dayyou start racing with them and beating tona, about the same time he got mar-

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