Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

Rich Oliver described myself early on in my career as being more logical than exuberant. When I got really, really good and skilled on the 250, 1 never made any notes. I never wrote anything down. I did it all off the top of my head, and some 01 my best races, OT my finest performances, were races where I went and rC1de with such a subconscious level of concentration that I didn't even think.about what I was doing. It was all just totally natural and it was just happening and it was really one of the... it probably happened five or six times in my last season. And those rides were probably the most enjoyable moments I've ever spent in my whole life. Of being able to do something without even trying, is basically what it came down to. So totally subconscious and totally by letting your body do what it has to do and react and reflex in the / ways that i~s learned over tile years, and you just open up your mind to the possibilities of how fast you. go and just enjoy it. And a Jot of times after those races would finish, I'd kind of snap out of this zone that I was in and get back to reality. It was quite a life-changing experience. It was kind of funny that it would come through motorcycles. But it really did. So I put a high value on that type of riding. Unfortunately, when I would get into that mode, when I had my superbike job, I would tend to go back to the old habits that I had with the 250, which would then cause me to crash. So I had to really start from ground zero, as far· as building new habits. And also try to not go back into the old patterns that I had before. can ,next time he finished second was in 1989 - a year he beat series champion John Kocinski twice. In 1990, he took his first win at Daytona"but didn't contest the series and he spent the next few years racing mostly outside the AMA. The 1994 season began with Oliver concentrating again On the AMA series. Eight wins out of 10 races later, Oliver had the first of his four titles. Seven out of 10 gave him the title the next year. The 1996 and 1997 seasons were perfect. Tilne to move on. Yamalla, with whom he'd had a strong relationship for over a decade, signed him to ride the YZF750 Superbike in 1998, after giving him a taste in the final few races of 1997. The start was inauspicious. It wasn't the ninth in his debut at Sears Point that was a glimpse of the neor future, it was the cras1;l while running near the front at the Las Vegas finale. There would be more crashes while Oliver learned the transition from the Yamalla TZ250 to the YZF750, a transition which took longer than he'd hoped. It wasn't until late last year that Oliver and his team began to consistently get it right, an arc' they carried into this season with a brilliant third at Daytona. There was - in his mind, and in the minds of those who've watched him - no doubt that he would eventually get it right. When he ran his own team, it was as professional as some of th.e factory efforts - and his single-minded pur- suit of excellence was obvi~ aus. We talked duri.ng the promoter's Thursday prac-· tice day at Phoenix. Reading the transcript, you'll see how clearly Oliver thinks about racing and how eloquent he is. What doesn't come across is his passion. When the subjects of track safety and the direction of racing were brought up, Oliver's concern· and anger were palpable. Having not won a race for over a year now, the move to Superbike racing seemed like a good place to start. Let's start with the adjustment to the 5uperbike. You crashed at the first few tests. A Oh my, I crashed so .t""\muc.h. I don't know, I don't like to think about how difficult the transition was now because I've made so much progress with that. But if we look back, I started out really the year before .at the end of the season, where I got that little shot at Sears Point and I got a littlebit-better bike at Vegas to run. I've learned so much, i~s just incredible. The problem that I h.,d, which really Larry Griffis and Tom Houseworth helped me see, was just tha t I was just riding with a lot of cornering momentum and then opening up tl,e throttle a lot, and very early, and i~s a subconscious habit from riding a two-stroke, which tends to bog at that point in the corner and you have to really lay into the throttle hard to get it to get going. And, unfortunately, for some reason - it sounds silnple enough now looking back on it, but for some reason I didn't realize that I had 185 hp available at any -moment and I didn't need to wail into the throttle early. So that would spin the tire up when I was really cranked over and then, of course, I would just high-side. That was what I had tended to do early on, initially. I did that, I think, mainly because I was always a very logical, analytical rider early on in my career. Kenny Roberts really helped me with that. When 1 rode for him, that was the very high emphasis of his teachings - to really think about what the bike's doing, and things like that. And, also, Kenny taught about how to ride with emotion and enthusiasm and raw guts if that's all that's left to 11$e, and to use your talent. [ would probably have Q ich Oliver is a winner. Over the course of the 1996 and '97 !,MA 250cc Grand Prix seasons, Oliver won every race - 20 in a row - a record that will surely stand the test of time. When his 250cc career ended with the last of the 20 wins, at Las Vegas Motor Speedway in October of 1997, he'd amassed 42 wins and four consecutive titles. No one has more wins in a single class and only Miguel DuHamel has more career AMA road race victories. Oliver's four-eonsecutive titles tie him with Mike Baldwin, who took the Formula One crown four years running. Oliver also won the Formula USA crown three times, including the 1991 title he took on ti,e Marlboro' Yamalla YZR500 backed by Kenny Roberts. The 37-year-ok at them and go, "What a great drive you've got." Or, "You got in there really good and then turned it really well and got going again." It was just sort of an appreciation of the different technique that was needed. And once I started to watch and look for the tl1ings I needed to do myself, I could emulate some of the better guys out there and copy what they were doing. And so now I've kind of really switched gears, and the interesting thing is tllat this year we've got the R-6 Super Sport program. So all those ideas that I used io have to put on the shelf from my 250 days, I've been able to pull a lot of them back down and ride the 600 with a lot of cornering speed and momentum and things like that. So it's kind of neat that I've built up the new technique on the Superbike, but I also have the old techniques in the back of my mind from the 250 that I've been able to kind of recycle a li~e bit on the 600. I wouldn't say that I ride the 600 exactly like I used to ride the 250, but [ ride it about halfway.tllere, halfway like a Superbike. So it's actually worked out really well. I wish it wasn't quite as painful a learning experience initially, but tha~s the way it goes. IS it difficult to ride them both on the same weekend? A-No. You know, it's funny - when I was riding the r t YZF600 and the 250, that was very difficult. Because that was really a mixed bag of equipment and everything was different. Now, the 600 and the Superbike complement each other. The R-6 gets me up to speed right away ancl it's pretty easy to ride for me, compared to the Superbike. It's a little bit less powerful and i~s running in a much stocker class, so ifs a little bit more tame when you're used to riding the Superbike. But you get a lot of laps in and i~s very competitive, very close, you've got to really think about what you're doing. And then you go out on the Superbike and you feel comfortable with the track and things like that. Last year, when I just rode the Superbike, [ think I missed out on being even a better rider because I didn't have a 600 to ride. So this year, rather than resenting the extra work or not enjoying it, my days go by faster, I get more track time, and I enjoy riding both bikes more than I did before. It's been working out really well. They both have been helping the other. Q When you went to the team, there was a belief that you would be a great help to the team for having done all the work yourself on the bikes and organized everything. But you actually like the notion that all you like to do is ride it. well, no, initially I probably came in there and I had to zip.my mouth at times when I would put in advice or comments about how to run the team. Which it certainly was never tJ1y place to say those things. Although the team understood that because I'd been used to being the boss for four years,. running my own· team, ifs only natural you're going to kind of slip up and fall back into that role once in a while. Our team works very well. We've been getting a lot better, and the level'of communication and the way that TOJ:!l Houseworth, my crew chief, and I and Steve Rounds, my superbike mechanic, have put our heads together and we've come up with a method of communicating and talking about wha~s going on that we all understand. And, utitially, we ran into some problems where I would describe things in a way that they had never heard before. 1 wO)lld Q A

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