Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

Veeck, the man who invented the electric scoreboard and sent a midget to pinch hit, was also way ahead of his time in the use of trash stats and had come up with better numbers than I had gleaned from the back of Tops cards. It was a great injustice, but I learned the lesson and have frequently come up with far-fetched statistical arguments to prove in the Grand Prix press rooms some very unlikely and often untrue premi es. (At one point I had a lot of credulous scribes convinced that it was virtually impossible to win the 500cc World Title and the British Grand Prix at Dcmington in the same season... until Doohan finally won both the title and the British GP in 1994. Coincidence is not cause and effect.) Nevertheless, you can't approach the question of Mick Doohan's true place in modern Grand Prix racing without delving into the stat stash. Who is the best SOOcc rider of the last 30 years? Agostini, Read, Sheene, Roberts, Spencer, Lawson, Rainey or Doohan? Or was it Kevin Schwantz, who won only one title but was, from his first full season in 1988 until he retired at the beginning of 1995, always in the mix, winning or crashing, but never out of the hunt? Let's all keep our opinions quiet for the moment and look at the facts and at the stats. Cycle News' choice of the 32-year-old works HRC Honda rider, Mick Doohan, as the 1997 Rider of the Year may have rankled som readers who would have preferred that honor to be given to American john Kocinski, the World Superbike Champion; to the brooding' and charismatic Italian Max Biaggi, four-time 250cc World Champion; or even to the flashier Italian wonder boy 125'cc World Champion, Valentino Rossi. It may not always have been exciting to watch Doohan en route to a new record for most victories (12), most pole positions (12), and most points (340) in a single season, but a lingering look at his ongoing lifetime results makes it clear that the kid who started his GP career as third-string factory Honda rider behind two of the greatest of the '80s, America's "Steady Eddie" Lawson and Australian Wayne Gardner, has today earned a place as one of the best ever to race a 500cc Grand Prix machine, the ultimate challenge in professional motorcycle racing. His stats can't tell us who woutd have won if he had battled it out with the likes of john Surtees, Phil Read or Mike Hailwood, or even how he would have stacked up if he had reached his prime a few years earlier, in the days of Roberts, Spencer and Lawson. We don't (Above) Though Eddie Lawson doesn't top any of the catagories we looked at, "Steady" Eddie spent the last two years of his GP career on Caglva, which probably hurt his numbers a bit. (Right) Doohan chases Wayne Rainey In 1990. Rainey is second only to Doohan in average points per start, and even then only by one-hundredth of a point. (Below) Among current SOOcc GP riders, Alex Crivllle has finished on the podium a solid 38.4% of the time. But his number pales In comparison to Doohan, who has been up there a whopping 68.6 percent. Doohan has won 38% of the times he's started. know what Tony Gwynn would have hit against Lefty Gomez either, but we know it would have been a hell of a match-up. Last season, from the commentary booth, I had the opportunity to watch Doohan put together one of the best seasons in Grand Prix history. It was often useful to go to the stats to put Doohan's accomplishments in perspective, but it was never necessary to look for obscure achievements because Doohan's stats stand proudly, and they are very easy to understand. They're about winning, going fast, and being consistently dominant - stats that mean something. But just in case there is anyone left out there who doubts that Mick Doohan is, today, motorcycle racing's undisputed top dog, and one of the all-time best, we've got some numbers that establish Mick as the modern leader (since 1976) in Career Winning Percentage (38%) and Average Points per Start (17.40), just in front Kenny Roberts (37.9 winning percentage) and Wayne Rainey (17.39 points per start). Look as these awesome numbers: Mick Doohan has started i21 Grands Prix in the 500cc class and won 46 of them (38%), with 83 podium appearances (68.6%). He has taken the pole 50 times (42.3%) and set the fastest lap 41 times (33.95%). Of all riders to participate in the 500cc class in the "modern era" (when complete statistics became available from the FIM in 1976), he has the highest average points per start at 17.40 (with points adjusted to compensate for the several changes in the points sy tern that have taken place over the last 30 years). He is one of only three riders ever to win four consecutive SOOcc title (the other two being Giacomo Agostini, who won seven in a row, and Mike Hailwood, who took four in a row). He didn't equal Italian Giacomo Agostini's perfect 10-for-10 season in 1968 or Brit john Surtees' seven-forseven year in 1959 (the only two 500cc champions ever to go undefeated over an entire season), but, unlike Agostini and Surtees, who often enjoyed the vast mechanical superiority of four-cylinder MV Agusta machines against a field of rorty British singles, Doohan faced 11 opponents on full-factory four-cylinders last year (five rival Hondas, four Yamahas and two SuzuJcis). Doohan was beaten last year in Jerez by'Alex Criville, when he had an electrical problem, and by Tadayuki Okada in

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