Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

then just about the time that it didn't look like .we were going to be able to work out anything together as far as sponsorship goes for the next year, that's when Pat Moroney called me and told me some things that he thought he could put together that sounded really good, and also the deal over at Harley came along. Skip and I parted as friends. You went with Pat, but you really went with Mike Wheeler, who has been one of those best-kept-secret type of guys as far as tuners go. Was that what made the deal seem so good to you? Absolutely: I've just always been impressed with everything that Mike Wheeler has done. He is fundamentally sound. I mean, you've got to have a strong motorcycle and you've got to be looking for something all the time to be moving forward, but then again, the axle nut has to be tight. You've got to be fundamentally sound and prepared week to week. And Mike knows what I like. I brought him a 750 that I used when I was with TCR that was actually my motorcycle, and it works great. Now we've got four more identical motorcycles to that one. We also have two 600s, and one of them is brand new. Sometimes having that much equipment is not good, but the way that Mike has built everything, they're all perfectly the same. There is really no difference between my mile bikes and my half-mile bikes. The thing that is going to be really good is that our Springfield motorcycles are over in the comer sitting underneath covers, so we won't have to hope for that week off to rebuild our stuff. We can just go throw them up on the dyno to make sure that they're right and then put them in the truck. What about you? Are you prepared? Absolutely. I feel as good as I ever have. guy ain't going to get past you. They say it's always a crapshoot at Daytona. As far as a crapshoot, to me, Springfield is. It all depends on what happens on that last lap. You have kind of bounced around to more rides than anyone else over the last few seasons. If you had to go back and compare the situations you've been in over the past few years, good or bad, what would you say about each one. With TCR, it was probably the best learning experience that I've ever had. I learned a lot over there, especially about Harley-Davidsons. Just to be able to compare some of things that I liked to what Atherton liked, and to learn the setups that those Michigan riders like on the cushion, I got a lot out of it. Ben Ford was great. That was the first time that I ever got everything that I needed. As far as engines go, Tom Cummings gave us good stuff every single week. Not one week did we lack anything. That was a factory ride basically. It doesn't get any better than that. Then you made the move to join up with Skip Eaken in '99, and you guys went right out and won the Daytona Short Track. But you just never seemed to progress from there. Why? I don't know. We wound up winning two 750 races along with that short track, and Skip and I always got along great. Going into it, I respected Skip, and I still do. I think that the big thing there You're 36 now. That's about the right age to win a Grand National Championship, isn't it? That's right. How old was Ricky Graham when he came back and won the championship in '93? He was 36 or 37, somewhere in there, when he won 12 races. Then the way that Springer is ... I remember that 10 years ago somebody asked me when I was going to quit racing, and I told them that I had hoped to not be doing it much past the age of 30. But the truth is that I feel more confident now than I ever have. I can get on a motorcycle and ride it, and I'm not searching for anything. That doesn't mean I've stopped learning, because chasing the dirt like we do all the time, you're always going to learn something. It's just that I'm sure that I know how to do this now. So, come Daytona, you think that you're going to be fast out of the box, and if you win it you could be the was you can't teach an old dog new tricks - and the old dog was actually me. I went in there hoping to learn some things from him because I knew that he built some good stuff. But whenever it came time to set the motorcycle up, we would put our heads together, and a lot of times we were right there, but first man to ever win the Daytona Short Track three times. What would that mean to you? Daytona means a lot to me. That's my Super Bowl. I've got to say that winning the Hall of Fame race was big, but it wasn't any bigger than winning that first Daytona Short Track for me. Daytona is the race that my dad used to always talk about - it's all I ever heard about. It's not necessarily a crapshoot like people say it is, but is tough. You can't be off your game at all. You've got to be able to read the start line and go into that first turn ready to fight, do whatever it takes to win. If you fall asleep for one second, someone is going to knock you out of it. That's real racing to me. eN sometimes we were different. And when we were different, he might want to go one way, and I would want to do it another way. There were situations where I wanted him to help me, but then at the same time I wouldn't let him help me. I couldn't convince myself that some of the things that he wanted to try were going work at all, and so we were terrible. And a U c • _ n __ s • FEBRUARY 28,2001 27

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