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/128144
The Final Superbikers Event Revisited Back on October 27, 1985, ABC Sports staged their seventh and final made-fortelevision Superbikers race. This annu.el event WlIiS up to participate. How cool is that? I attended the second of the two tards, so I got used to watching the speed that those guys were running. Then the Open-class guys took to the track with the likes of Schwantz, Hayden and Pegram. The first time I watched Pegram come off of the longer back straight and back it into the hairpin I was blown away. These pre-season non-points-paying SITARS events, while contributor Brian Catter- three guys were so much faster than anyone else out there it was unbeliev- son covered the first (see Cycle News Issue #6, February 13 for race cover- able. I could sit and watch these guys ride all day, the bike control that they age). Practice was run with the sportsmen classes first and then the minimo- posses is just amazing, and this was just the practice sessions. The speed Salaverria , and Andre Castanos. As for the royalty, none other than the 1993 500cc World Road Racing Champion Kevin Schwantz showed star- t() Ue If you want to talk about spectacular, let me give you a name to remember: Garrett Willis. This] I-year-old was truly one of the most spectacular riders on the track at Anaheim period. I immediately noticed Garrett in the practice sessions and kept an eye on him the entire day. You should do the same - this kid is going to be good. Garrett easily won the minimotard class, beating most impressively Cycle World magazine's Mark Cemicky - no slouch at all as he finished second in the Premier-class standings in the STTARS Southwest region and won the Middleweight title last year. Don't give Cernicky a hard time because I already did. I found Garrett in the pits and asked him a few questions. Remember, he's in the fifth grade. What were you doing back then? QHOW did you get so good at this? A Just being trained by good people. Q Who are they? A Kenny Noyes, Justin McReynolds, Casey Yarrow. Q You're a dirt tracker aren't you? AYeah. QWhere do you race? Check out Garrett Willis backing It In, and he's _Iy 11-years old. His hero Is N1ckr Hayden, If you coulcln't tell. Lodi, Uvermore, and sometimes we race at StockA ton. QDO you like racing Supermotard? A 'Motard Junkie The day of the STTARS (SuperTT American Racing Series) event at Edison Field, promoter Don Canet had his hands full, racing and doing whatever promoters do, so we caught up with him the following week over the phone. Q What is Super TT? the grandfather of Supermotard this is where it all started. These were the events that gave the French the idea to start their own series, which has now exploded all over Europe. For those of you who remember seeing the races on TV or read about them in Cycle News, you know the caliber of riders that participated in the races. The results from the finai event at the famous Carlsbad track read like this: I. Eddie Lawson; 2. Kent Howerton; 3. Wayne Rainey; 4. Jeff Ward: 5. Ricky Graham; 6_ Bubba Shobert; 7. Steve Eklund; 8. Chris Carr; 9. Eric Geboers; 10. Kevin Schwantz. How about that for a star-studded affair? Of course, that was the point, but talk about a nice chunk of talent all in one place. Our fearless leader, editor Paul Carruthers, who at the time was merely a 24-year-old peon associate editor like the rest of us here, wrote at the time: "Eddie Lawson is slowly but surely becoming the King of Carlsbad. For the first four years, of the ABC-TV/Superbikers race, it was the motocrossers who dominated. On the fifth year, road racer Lawson broke the tradition with his first win in 1983, and today he became only the third person to win the race two times. And if he continues to attack the two-mile, multi-terrain course in the manner in which he is becoming accustomed to, it may be a long wait before the throne is abdicated." The final Superbikers wasn't the death knell of the sport, as is becoming more apparent all the time, but the start of a new form of racing all together. Stay tuned. (first weekend), Hooters Suzuki's new recruit Larry Pegram, Mark Miller, AI )llill (:ililet, Yeah, it's a lot of fun. r"\ Which do you like better, dirt track or the Super\:X.motard? lt depends on the track, sometimes I like SuperA motard better if the track's fun. See our Local Talent section on page 64 for more information on Garrett. ll's origins spring from the ABC Wide World of Sports Superbikers TV shows from A Carlsbad, Califomia. back in the early-to-mid 1980s. Some savvy guys came up with the concept to have an invitational race to bring together guys from all disciplines, on a hybrid course that would theoretically create a level playing field for the different stars of the sport from dirt track, road racing and motocross. Uke every TV show, they eventually run their course. It never caught on here as an amateur-level sport, or even a professional series. The French were the ones who picked up on it, and interestingly enough it was a French joumalist who had come over to cover the famed Carlsbad Superbikers events and caught the bug, and took the idea back, organized some events and it grew from there. They took it beyond the annual invitational type thing and tumed it into a full-on legiti- mate series. QHOW did you become interested in the sport? AS a joumalist, we would receive all sorts of European magazines, and I would thumb A through them and see the photos of Superrnoto and I thought, 'Damn that looks like too much fun.' In '95, I convinced David [Edwards, editor of Cycle World magazine] to let me build a CR500 Project Supermotard bike. So now I had a bike and no Superrnotard events to race it at, so I road raced it at Steamboat Springs, which is about the closest thing - a street race - it was a fun environment. That was the whole origin of it for me - it looked like a super-fun form of racing. Q What made you decide that you should create a series for it in the as? The only way that it was going to start happening was if someone took the bull by the A homs and started making it happen. So I organized a race called "The Retum of the Superbikers" in '97 out at the Streets of Willow Springs [a racetrack in Rosamond, California]. I only had about two-dozen riders show up for that first event. In '98, I formed the series and it's been going every since. QWhy did you call it Super TT and not Supennotard, or Superblkers? When I started this thing back then, I thought, 'If I call it Superbikers, with my luck A someday down the road after putting all the sweat and blood and hours into it, and it catches on again and becomes some sort of commodity, maybe if it had some value and got on TV again, some guy would serve papers on me and say that they owned the rights to it or something.' Besides, Superbikers is too much like Superbike, and that was just a TV name anyway. The general public these days knows what Superbike is because of all the TV coverage. So I came up with Super TT. In Europe, TT is associated with pavement racing, like the Isle of Man or the Dutch TT lAssen]. in America you say TT and you think of the Peoria TT, or Ascot or Castle Rock - you think of American dirt track with a jump. So I came up with Super TT. QDO you think the sport will ever get to be as popular in the as as it is in Europe? lt's going to be bigger! Europe has a huge head start on us, and right now after five A years of running events as a moonlight kind of gig, because of my day job, I think I've achieved a lot. We're still at a grassroots level, and you don't realize that until you go to Europe and go to a round of the French championship. I've raced in few of those in the past couple of years, and if you compare it to supercross it's chump change, but they do have half a dozen factory teams with transporters like you see in a supercross paddock. There's enough factory involvement from all the players, mainly European manufacturers, like Husqvama, KTM, VOR, and Husaberg. Their series has that going for it, but it doesn't happen ovemight. Q What are your goals with Super TT, and where do you see it in five years? My goals have always been to expand the Super TT series beyond the west coast. A Because of my day job, the venues close to home have been enough work in themselves, but eventually I'd like to see it expand to other parts of the country so that there could be a legitimate National Championship series. r"\ What type of riders do you think adapt best to Super TT - road racers, dirt trackers, \.ol-or motocrossers? lt seems to me that the motoccossers adapt the quickest. That depends on the track, A though_ Which raises another question. some people feel that it should be 50/50 dirt and pavement, but I disagree. 'What's unique about dirt bikes in the dirt?' I see Super TT being different than that - in the aspect that now you have dirt bikes doing silly stuff on the pavement. That's the biggest attraction. The ideal balance is about 80-percent pavement and 20-percent dirt. If there is that much dirt, the motocross guy is able to jump on a motocross bike lean the thing over, and get the feel of what it does on the pavement, and they're certainly not afraid to slide the bike. The road race guy is on an awkward kind of bike, but on a familiar surface - being the pavement - and ultimately they end up being pretty even, but it seems the motocrosser adapts quicker. QHave the celebrity riders helped gain credibility for your Super TT series? lt's unbelievable what these past two events in Anaheim have done. All of a sudden, A people realized that this thing exists, and they didn't even know about it before these two weekends in Anaheim. None of that would have happened if it wasn't for Schwantz, Hayden, Gobert and Pegram coming out to these events. I think also the location, the venue, plus the big-name riders - it was just the right combination. Q What are the costs of the sport like? This has got be the cheapest form of racing I've ever been involved in. The levei of A competition in our series right now is at a point where a guy can run multiple weekends on a set of tires. You don't have that luxury even at a club road race level if you want to be competitive. You're slapping new rubber on the thing twice in a weekend. I've had guys run the Sportsman class the better part of a season on a set of dual-sport tires. That may change as the series gets more competitive, but right now it's real affordable. Virtually any off-road-capable bike has a place to race in our series. cue. e n e _ s MARCH 6, 2002 25