Cycle News - Archive Issues - 2000's

The Day Bruce Wasn't So Good I ':, t's understandable that two-time World Individual Speedway Champion Bruce Penhall hasn't ever really taken much pleasure in talking about the fact that he probably should be three-time World Individual Speedway Champion Bruce Penhall. In fact, bringing up his disastrously disappointing World Final debut at Ullevi Stadium in Gothenburg, Sweden, on September 5, 1980 elicited the following response: ''Aw man, can't we talk about the fun times that happened after that?" In truth, Penhall's embarrassing Gothenburg performance - he finished fifth(!) • stands out as one of the very few failures that the golden-haired California boy ever suffered in a career that ranks to this day as the greatest ever enjoyed by an American in the sport of speedway. "I was favored to win the 1980 World Final, and the disappointing side to the whole scenario was that I had already spent almost two years in England and was denied the shot at even being in the World Championship because of how jacked up the AMA was with speedway at the time," Penhall, now 47, says. "We didn't have proper qualifying rounds, and the first time I tried I got knocked out when we had to come back to the States back in '78. Then, in '79 we had a qualifying round at the Santa Ana Bowl [in Santa Ana, California]. They only took two riders that year, and I believe that Scott Autrey won it. I was in a runoff for second place with Steve Gresham, and he knocked me off, and I was excluded. So, 1980 was really the first year that I was able to go after the World Championship." Penhall finally got his World Championship title run going when he easily won the American Qualifier at Anaheim Stadium in 1980. 94 MARCH 9, 2005 • CYCLE NEWS "If my memory serves me correctly, we ran the American Final the day after the Supercross there," Penhall says. "I think that Mike Goodwin and Harry Oxley were in some sort of partnership on that deal because all of our press stuff was wrapped around Supercross. It was definitely the first time that we had a good-sized track for proper qualifying for the World Championship stuff." Penhall did well in the Overseas Final to advance and then went on to the Intercontinental Final in White City, Australia, where he just lost a runoff with England's Chris Morton to miss out on winning the meeting outright. Either way, Penhall was through, and America's hopes for its first World Speedway Champion since jack Milne in 1937 were at a new high. "There was a lot happening at the time," Penhall recalls. "'van Mauger had won the World Championship the year before, and he didn't even make it into the World Final in '80. Ole Olsen was still as fast as ever, and he was a reserve. Even Autrey, who was the main American, struggled and didn't qualify. There was a real changing of the guard going on." Penhall was the only American in the field in Gothenburg, and he was favored to win. The speedway press had tabbed him as the frontrunner because of the tremendous momentum that he had built throughout the '80 season. It was his title to lose. Consequently, many of his family and friends made the expensive trip to Sweden that year in order to witness the coronation of America's certain new speedway hero. "Something like 30 of my family members came over two weeks before the World Final, and they followed me around to all the tracks before Gothenburg," Penhall says. Though he was sure of himself then, Penhall now says that in hindsight he began making mistakes before he ever turned a wheel on the racetrack in Sweden. "What happened was that we had just started going from the side-mount carb speedway frames to the centermount carb frames," Penhall says. "The center-mounts, we were a little quicker on them, but I was a creature of habit, and I liked the side-mount frames, which were a little bit more flexible. My times in practice the day before were pretty close to equal on both frames, and I made the decision to stay on the side-mounts for the World Final. My tuner, Eddie Bull, tried to convince me to ride the center-mounts because of the length of the track and because we thought it was going to get a little bit deeper. He was right, and I was wrong." Penhall won his opening heat race, which was also the opening heat of the night, by defeating john Davis, future multi-time World Champion Hans Nielsen and Petr Ondrasik. It was the kind of start he was looking for, but Penhall says that even then he knew he might be facing an uphill battle from there. "I made a mistake, and I was down on horsepower for the entire meeting," he says. In his second ride of the night, heat five, Penhall dropped his first point to the man who would go on to win Gothenburg and become the 1980 World Speedway Champion, England's Michael Lee. Things got worse when he came third to 1976 World Speedway Champion Peter Collins of England, and Egon Muller, the German destined to win it all in 1983. Another third to Morton and Finland's Kai Niemi in heat 13 doomed Penhall's chances. All that was left was to scrounge whatever points he could. A runner-up finish to England's Dave jessup in his final ride, heat 17, tied him for fifth place in the meeting. The plan had gone all wrong. "It was huge disappointment because I always felt that I should have won it in 1980," Penhall says, "but coulda, shoulda, woulda. Had I raced in 1983, I might be able to say that Ishould have been a four-time World Champion. I can say that till I am blue in the face, but the fact is that I am a two-time World Champion." And perhaps America has never had a better one. It took the failure of Gothenburg in 1980 to create the determination that blossomed into the heroics of Penhall's electrifying 1981 Wembley Stadium World Championship performance - the video footage of which, to this day, can still give any American speedway fan goose bumps - and the highly entertaining, though very controversial, 1982 Los Angeles Coliseum World Final, where Penhall became the first and still only backto-back American World Champion before promptly retiring on the podium right then and there. In three World Final appearances, Penhall won two of them. Those, and a host of great performances with Team USA By 1982, Penhall was America's first two-time World Speedway Champion, having won back-toback titles in London and Los Angeles (pictured), teammates such as Autrey, Bobby Schwartz and Dennis Sigalos, were the fun times. "It's like I tell my kids, who are very active in motocross today, 'How much do you really want it?'" Penhall says. "There's always the chance that you could always be denied. I just came back a lot more determined. Sweden played such a huge role in my mind that next year [198 I], and we won everything that year. I grew so much from losing in 1980." So much so that the words "Bruce Penhall" and "lose" simply aren't associated with each other. eN

• Cover