Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

The Joker t's a pretty safe bet that you can judge the impact some motorcycle racers have had on the sport simply by looking at the record books. Check out the career stats of Mat Mladin, Scott Parker, Jeremy McGrath, Ricky Carmichael or James Stewart, and you easily get the picture of the marks they have made. Warren Reid has a single 125cc National MX win to his credit, but mention his name to any longtime fan of motocross, and they'll know exactly who you are talking about. From 1975 to 1990, it seems that Reid was everywhere. "I was the king of second-through-fourth," Reid jokes, and that's certainly appropriate enough. In his motocross heyday from '77 to '83, Reid's nickname was "The Joker," and he played some good ones. "I had a good time," Reid says. "One time I called up Jim Gibson and pretended to be a promoter from England, and asked him to come and ride a race in England. He asked me what the date was, and I told him, and he said, 'Well, that's a Thursday.' Iwas using a really bad Australian accent to pretend I was British promoter, but he didn't know the difference, so I said, 'Well, that's a British holiday.' Then I I told him that I wanted him to get Warren Reid to come over to the race too, and I had $5000, or something like that, for Reid if Gibson could get him to come. I told Gibson, 'You strike a deal with Reid, and whatever deal you make, you can keep the rest of the money,' and then Igave him my actual phone number. Five minutes later, Gibson 78 JANUARY 26,2005 • CYCLE NEWS calls me back and says, 'Hey Warren, this guy from England wants you to go over there and do a race, and he's willing to pay you $30oo!' So, I put on the accent again, and I said, 'Well that's not enough money!' Then Jim says, 'Man, you sound just like that guy!' He still didn't know. "Then later, I did the same thing to Jimmy Weinert the day before a Saddleback National. He had pretty much retired, but he was still doing some races. I called and told him I was a promoter who wanted him to do a British supercross. The next day Larry Huffman is interviewing him on the starting line before the race. Huffman asked him what he was doing, and he says. 'Well, I'm getting ready to go to England for a supercross race.' The race didn't even exist." On the track, however, Reid took his racing as seriously as anyone ever did, and he was as fast as the best of 'em, which makes that single National win all the more perplexing. "When I look back on the years that I raced, it was always in the most competitive class," Reid expiains. "Really, the only people who ever beat me are all hall of famers. I never got beat by any sqUids." That sole National win came at Escoheag, Rhode Island, on August 6, 1978, on a factory Honda RC 125. "It was at a ski resort," Reid recalls. "It was a sand track, and I believe it was the only race that was ever won using a 23-inch front wheel. That was the first year that any factory ever tried a 23-inch front wheel. I ran it all season. Steve Wise, my teammate, ran it for a couple races and then went back to a 21. The production bike the next year had them, but nobody liked them. The problem was that there just weren't any tires available for them." Reid burned through a lot of tires and, along the way, made a lot of history. During his career, he rode for all four Japanese factories, starting with Honda, before moving to Kawasaki, then Suzuki, and finally Yamaha. He was immortalized in magazines such as Motocross Action. One particularly historic intangible is that he was one of the first few riders to jump the infamous, triple-tiered Suicide Mountain, a feared obstacle at Saddleback Park in 1983. "It needed doing," Reid says. "It wasn't that bad. I mean, the stuff they do in supercross, the distance may not be as far or the vertical leap isn't as much [as Suicide Mountain], but by the time you finished flying up it, you weren't going forward very fast, so the penalty if you made a mistake was pretty minor. Nowadays, you come up short on a 70-foot triple in supercross and you're in trouble." One of Reid's more memorable races came on November I7, 1979. Reid recalls that he was leaving Honda for Kawasaki in 1980, and Honda was reluctant to supply him with a works bike for the final round of the AMA Supercross Series at Anaheim Stadium. "So, I just used my practice bike," Reid says. "It was slow, but my friend Cliff Let, who ended up working with Ricky Johnson at Yamaha, helped me with a pipe and work on the motor a little bit. Jon R. [Rosensteil] was my stepdad, and he had just left Honda for Yamaha to work with Marty Tripes. We literally just rebuilt the thing in my garage." On the rebuilt production machine, Reid won his heat race, but he knew that his bike was still not as fast as what everybody else was racing with. "I knew that I couldn't get to the first turn first, so I took the risk of the century," Reid recalls. "When the card turned sideways, I counted to three and just dropped the hammer. I figured I was going to hit the gate or have a World Championship holeshot. The gate went down exactly when I let the clutch out." Reid led the race for 18 of 20 laps before Kent Howerton slipped by him to take the win. Even so, Reid finished seventh in the series, a position he would match two more times, with Suzuki in 1982 and again with Yamaha in 1983, his final year as a full-time pro motocrosser. Just two of his career highlights with Kawasaki include winning all three Pro classes at the Mammoth Mountain MX, and contesting the very first Superbikers at Carlsbad Raceway, a race he nearly won. Add that to two fourths in the '77 and '79 12Scc National MX Series, and to two more fourths in the '80 and '83 2S0cc National MX Series. Paints a picture, don't it? And even when retired, he still didn't retire, and he sure didn't stop making his mark. "I still rode selected motocross events," Reid says. "Then I helped Horst Leitner with the ATK, and I rode the desert World Championships on it. I raced the Baja 1000 on a BMW, and I made the main at the Ascot National n on an ATK. I raced speedway. I finished in the top five in the Baja 1000 and in the top lOin the desert World Championships. As far as I know, I'm the only guy who ever held an AMA pro license in Expert road race, dirt track, motocross and speedway. I held a pro license in every discipline except hillclimb." These days, Reid, 46, is a tech rep for American Honda, in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, his home for the last 15 years. He is still active in racing but has traded in two-strokes for two pedals. Reid is the race director for a mountain bike race called the Cat Classic. For more information on the event, check out www.catclassic.net on the Internet. eN

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