Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127830
TIME REMEMBERED By Eric Johnson Eighteen-year-old Marty Smith tackled both the National and World MX circuit in the saine year. • he year: 1976. I was 12 years old and had just opened up an issue of one of my dad's motorcycle magazines that had arrived in the mail. Upon casually flipping through the pages, I came across a big color picture of a racer on a bright red Honda, cranked over in a berm. He was wearing striking red, white and blue racing clothes and a white Valvoline, Mid-0hio, 125cc U.S. GP racing bib. His hair was flying out of the back of his helmet and his red Jofa mouthguard was unsnapped and fluttering in the breeze. Who is this dude? I thought to myself. I was very impressed. Long before you could get your helmet painted in the latest vogue colors by Troy Lee, tune in ESPN2 and watch Jeremy McGrath, Jeff Ernig and Doug Henry win the very latest supercross, purchase baggy motocwss clothing or turn on your trusty computer and E-mail Supermac at his personal web site, there was a young motocross racer named Marty Smith, and what he attempted to pull off in 1976 is arguably the single most ambitiqus feat in the history of the sport. In 1974 Smith, a relatively unknown Team Honda rider, raged out of the baked suburban landscape of San Diego, California, to win the inaugural AMA 12Scc National Motocross Championship. Super talented, polite and good _ looking, Smith was the Eddie Vedder of 1970s American motocross - he even looked like him. 1974 would be a precursor of things to come from Marty Smith. In 1976 Smith, after losing the first national of the season, went on a rampage, reeling in six consecutive national victories, thus allowing him to claim his second consecutive AMA 12Sec ational Championship. Smith was, by all accounts, in a league of his own. But that was all about to change. Prior to the start of the 1976 race season, key racing and marketing executives at the Honda Motor Corporation - both in Japan and in America - made a collective decision that Marty Smith would compete in both the AMA 12Sec National Championship Series and the FlM 12Sec World Championship Series, concurrently. It was an ambitious plot that would. require substantial resources and logistical support on both continents. However, for Honda, that was not a problem as this "two-front war" would generate tremendous worldwide exposure for their potent, and hugely popular CR12S. With confidence in Smith and its motorcycle, Honda's plan - and all of its subsequent logistics - soon fell into place. The young and confident Smith also liked the idea, as he was more than willing to take on both his countrymen in the United States and the worldrenowned Europeans who, at that point in lime, still intimidated - and smoked the Americans at their leisure. '1 felt like I was in a class of my own at that point in my career," Smith says. '1