Cycle News

VOLUME 57 ISSUE 39 SEPTEMBER 29, 2020 P129 go. None of the factories in the U.S. sent any of our stuff over. I was new enough to racing at the time that, jeez, an opportunity to go over to England and race and maybe make some money was great. I hadn't won any Nationals yet, just Pro-Ams. So, I went over with Fred Merkel, Dan Chiving- ton, Reuben McMurter and Jon Ashmead. We didn't win as a team, but Merkel and I won most of the races. We just didn't have enough depth to help us out, so the English guys beat us, but I was the high points scorer, and Merkel was the second-highest points scorer. "Well, Wayne saw all the press we got from that—and in '86 he didn't really have a Superbike ride—but in '87 we got the same invite, and with all the press that we'd gotten, the factories sent over bikes this time. Honda sent over their bikes, and they took Wayne and Bubba [Shobert]. I went and [Doug] Polen went from Suzuki... The big story was that there was a hundred thousand pounds [British money] for any- one who could win all the races, and that was three at Brands and three at Donington two days in a row. "So, Wayne and I decided, 'Well, we're never gonna win 'em all. I ain't gonna win 'em all and you ain't gonna win 'em all, so let's race the first one and see what happens, and then we'll decide how to handle it after that,' because Wayne and I felt like we should be the two guys to win more than anybody else. Then we raced the first race, and I beat him, and he never even came over to talk to me after that. "To hear him tell it now, he says, 'I saw all the press you got the year before and how you just turned into an international f---in' everybody wants you to race their bikes, and I felt like I missed out,' so there was absolutely no way, even though I beat him in the first race, that he was going let me win all the rest of those races, because that would make me seem like even that much big- ger of a name. "So, at the second race at Brands Hatch, someone had blown up an engine going into Paddock Bend, where you go through this big, fast right-hander that crests the hill and drops into a valley. Bubba [Shobert] crashed there on like the third lap of practice and hurt himself, and I don't think Bubba ever rode. Anyway, somebody blew an engine going in there and went just off the paint on the inside, so where there was about a foot of clean track on the inside. It was a really hard place to pass normally because it was such a sweeping corner. "So, Wayne drives it in there and hits me, knocks me across the oil-dry and then drives a little wide himself. As he does that, I turn the thing out wide and get back past him up the hill, but then I out-brake myself and he comes underneath me again. There's a lot at the bottom of the hill and then a left/right double combination back onto Clearways and then the lap's done. So, as he went to go back right, I went left and jumped the curb going right and tried to get underneath him. But I guess he must have known I was coming, and he just stayed leaning on me. I was working the bars trying to get him off me, and he was headed toward the inside stripe, and I was running out of track. I ended up hanging my knee up on the inside grass and it kind of stood me up, and he ended up winning the race. "But then after the race, he comes over, and he goes, 'Hey, what did you think you were doing?! Look at all these black marks!' I was like, 'Yeah, but look at all these black marks on my bike from where you hit me in the first turn!' "That was that. At that point in our careers, we really didn't have any respect for one another, and we really didn't think that there was enough room in motorcycle racing for both of us. There wasn't two spots in Europe for us. There wasn't two spots on any Grand Prix team. We really felt like one of us was going to make it and one of us wasn't. You could see that by the Daytona '87 pictures. I was on pole, I think, and there were six of us all stand- GUY RAINEY'S SKIN

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