Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

By 30 YEARS AGO••• FEBRUARY 15, 1972 Texas youngster Steve Stackable rode his BSA 500 to the Open Expert-class win and was photographed doing so for the cover of Issue i5. Stackable also won the 125cc Expert class, with his chief competition coming from Kent Howerton ... Terry Clark, the number-one Trailbike desert racer, showed the motocrossers that riding long races in the desert pays off in conditioning as he won the 125cc Senior class with a 1-2-1 showing after picking off the leaders late in each race as they slowed. Kenny Zahrt and Brad Blair rounded out the top three ... The AMA Nationa) Competition Congress ruled that no race should be run where there is sex discrimination, which meant there would be no Powder Puff division at the Lompoc Sio-Pokes MC MX. Because of that, Donna Earnest was forced to ride the 250cc Junior cJass and crashed while running ninth on the first lap. As she was leaving to reportedly have a body cast fitted, she said, "The heck with Women's Lib." 20 YEARS AGO••• FEBRUARY 17, 1982 We jumped the Honda XR200R down an embankment for the cover of Issue #5. We decided to do a test on the machine after Honda reported sales of more than 5000 units in 1981. We deemed it "the perfect playbike"... Jay Springsteen (H-D) won the Houston Short Track, round one of the AMA Grand National Championship. His win tied him for the most-wins record with Kenny Roberts, both of whom had 29 victories to their credit. Mike Kidd (Hon) and Terry Poovey (Hon) rounded out the top three. Ricky Graham topped the TT, with Mickey Fay and motocrosser Steve Wise rounding out the top three. Reportedly, Wise was challenging for the lead when he lost his rear brake... Rick Johnson (Yam) won the 250cc Pro class after mid pack starts forced him to come through the field at Carlsbad Raceway's round six of the Golden State MX Series. Anaheim Supercross winner Donnie Hansen (Hon) finished second. Brad Lackey (Suz) and Johnny O'Mara (Hon) topped the 500 and 125cc Pro classes, respectively. 10 YEARS AGO••• FEBRUARY 12, 1992 Team Green's Danny Hamel was photographed leaving the start line of the Parker 400 in Arizona for the cover of Issue #5. Hamel teamed with Paul Ostbo and Garth Sweetland to win the event. The next day, Hamel won the opening round of the National Championship Hare [,Hound series in California ... Yamaha's 19-year-old superstar Damol) Bradshaw rolled on to his third win of the season at the Seattle round of the Camel Supercross Series. Honda's Jeff Stanton and Jean-Michel Bayle rounded out the top three. The 125cc main was won for the second week in a row by Jeremy McGrath (Hon), and for the second week in a row his teammate Buddy Antunez finished second, ahead of Kyle Lewis (Yam) ... Scott Plessinger (KTM) topped Scott Summers (Hon) for the overall win at round one of the National Hare Scrambles Series... Damon Huffman topped the 125 and 250/0pen Pro classes at the Anaheim Amateur Supercross, and David Pingree (Suz) won the 125cc and 250cc Intermediate events. was there. I was actually covering the first-ever CCE/CMC Anaheim Amateur Supercross for this issue (as you can see on page 30), and I was signed up to compete as well. I was in line for practice from 9:30 a.m. until I finally hit the track right at 1:00 p.m. Yes, for those of you who are not great at math, that's 3 1/2 hours of sitting on the bike, in my riding gear, waiting. I understand everyone's frustration that day, having lived it myself. And, after leaving well before my race was to be run, but also after staying long enough to witness a few of the good races of the day, I was pissed off, sunburned and disappointed - just like many others. I vowed upon leaving that I would find out exactly what happened that day to turn what was supposed to be a great time into a total fiasco, and then tell all you readers what I found. I even have a few suggestions for next time, if there is one. I started off thinking, like many of you out there, that CMC, as the sanctioning body for the event, had, plain and simple, bitten off more than they could chew - even though I knew Clear Channel Entertainment (CCE) couldn't be entirely blameless, either. I had even thought of clever ways to put down the people who ran the event in this very column, such as, "It was an amateur supercross, but I was under the impression that the riders were supposed to be the amateurs, not the people running the thing." But neither of those thoughts are entirely fair, and this is why. First off, the event was originally supposed to be a "pre-entry only" affair, meaning if you sent in your money and your entry by the date required, you would be signed up for your class when you got there - if not, you couldn't race. Well, that all changed a few weeks before the event when CCE reportedly made the decision to allow post-entries as well - for $90 a pop instead of the $60 for the pre-entry. That doesn't sound like a big deal by itself, but think about the fact that there were already more than 1000 people signed up to race! Besides just adding bodies to the pool, allowing post-entries also required the start of practice to be delayed for an hour - from 8 a.m. to 9 a.m. - and from there, the snowball was rolling. Once everyone was in line for practice (and I mean everyone), CCE reportedly decided that the release waiver that must be filled out on the back of the CMC entry form wasn't to CCE's liking. So that meant that the riders ended up having to sign a new release form before they were allowed on the track, which further bottlenecked the proceedings and got that snowball rolling even faster. CMC was also just really unprepared for practice. They set it up like they would any event, but at most I LCD STEVE COX limited entries on either a tota I- number or by-class basis. There are plenty of ways to do this, and I hope CMC/CCE takes the time to revise this for what I hope will be a next time. First off, I think we should eliminate all Pro classes from the schedule (after all, they raced the night before, right?) and all Beginner classes as well (a supercross track is no place for a beginner). Next, there should be no 500cc classes (they can race in their age category - Before The Hill, Over 25, Over 30, etc.), and the quads should be eliminated as well (they cause too much dust, and the track is designed with two-wheelers in mind). And if we want to go a step further, we can make the minimum age of participants 12, because that would help ensure that the riders at the event were ready for a track such as that. Or, as an alternative, why not run one or two CMC races in the weeks approaching the Amateur Supercross at different tracks as qualifiers for the event? Then, if you qualify, you racel The entries can then be set exactly how the event operators want them. Those are just some suggestions, because I think the event was a great idea, and I also think everyone everyone - involved played a hand in the fiasco it turned out to be. But I think the snowball began rolling early, when 1000 riders signed up for the event (and then the powers that be allowed post-entries). Nobody involved was prepared for such an onslaught, and it showed. The bottom line is, this is a truly great idea - to allow amateurs into the stadium to race on the "same track" that their heroes did the night before - but they had to expect the first one to be rough, and to quit now would be a horrible idea. CCE announced that they've canceled the Atlanta event because of a lack of parking area and various other logistical problems, but why not hold one at another venue instead? CCE put out a press release a month ago that said they are showing their commitment to amateur racing by holding these amateur supercrosses, and if it only takes the first one not running well to scrap the idea, that doesn't show any kind of commitment, as far as I'm concerned. Maybe CCE and CMC will hold another event; after all, CMC has been running races forever, and a debacle like this has, as far as I know, never happened to them before. This just seemed like a case of "the right hand isn't talking to the left hand." They both now know what not to do, so they shouldn't waste that knowledge. It was a great idea. Give it another events there aren't more than 1000 riders, and the track is much longer (so as to accommodate more riders). And the staging area was a joke. People were getting off the track and getting back in line in front of people who hadn't even seen the track yet, and that problem needs to be fixed. I personally got in line for practice at 9:30 a.m. (after all, practice was supposed to have started at 9, and I was supposed to be in practice number four), and many of the people in front of me in line had dusty bikes, meaning they had already been on the track. Practice was a complete c1uster. .. something. There was no order, no rhyme or reason, and at one point they even decided to cancel it altogether (while many of us hadn't even been on the track yet). Jim Holley jumped in front of the now-angry mob of riders and got things calmed down and got everyone out on the track. (Thanks, Jim.) During practice, Scott Rousseau, who was acting as my photographer for the event, got his media vest taken away by a CCE official (everyone who had one got it confiscated) for no apparent reason - which meant we'd have to shoot our pictures from the standsl And the snowball continued. As I stated earlier, I finally got on the track at exactly 1 p.m. and got in three whole laps of practice. They had announced before I even got on the track that racing would have to be cut down from two motos to one, and after practice they posted the race order - all 54 of theml When I found out that, after waiting that long in line for practice, I had drawn race number 38, I knew I wasn't going to be able to hang around for that long - and a lot of people shared my sentiment, leaving before their race, and some even before they got to "practice." I hung around long enough to cover a few races from the grandstands while Rousseau did the best he could shooting from the spectator area, and then I went home at 4:30 p.m., just after they had called race number 14 to the staging area. The racing, as far as I saw, weilt rather smoothly, with the only complaint really being the dusty condition of the track - due to the snowball, there wasn't time to prep it much during the day. Not everyone was down on the event, though. There were more than a couple of people to whom I spoke who, although they were upset about the wait time, were very pumped to be able to race on the same track their heroes had raced on just hours earlier. And that's the idea. Amateur Supercross is a great idea. It's great for the fans, it's great for the sport, and it's great for the riders - if it's done properly. The general consensus in the >Amateur Supercross pits was that things would've gone well had they (the powers that be) ... U .... e n e ~~I vv so • FEBRUARY 6, 2002 75

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