CN
III ARCHIVES
BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU
P104
FREDDIE SPENCER:
FAST FREDDIE'S BIG IDEA
bike, no works team, nothing."
But the idea was appealing
to Honda, and a game plan was
formed that would see several
seasons worth of development
crammed into just a few short
months. It would take all of the
physical and spiritual—if not finan-
cial—resources that Honda could
muster.
''A lot of people don't know it,
but that bike [the NSR250] went
from being an idea to go for two
winning both titles in one season,
only to abandon the 250cc class
midway through the year—and,
some say, too soon. The potential
glory of being the first rider in his-
tory to win both titles in the same
year remained, but regardless of
that, Spencer and Honda had a
hurdle to clear in that they lacked
a competitive 250cc machine
with which to contest the series.
"Honda had a production-
based bike that they were running
that year [1984] that wasn't a fac-
tory bike," Spencer says. "It was
based off a production 250, more
of a customer bike—an RS250,
they called it. There was no works
I
t started with an innocent con-
versation in the middle of 1984.
By the end of 1985, the dream of
becoming a double World Cham-
pion was reality for Team Honda's
Freddie Spencer.
In June of '84, at the Dutch TT
in Assen, Holland, Spencer, the
reigning 500cc World Champion,
had just dropped out of the 500
race after holding a I5-second
lead, a broken spark plug cap
frustrating his defense of the title.
''And we were sitting around
afterwards, Mr. Oguma—who was
the HRC manager—Erv [Kanemo-
to] and myself, and we just started
talking about the Championship.
This was about halfway through
the '84 season, and we'd had
a wheel come apart on me in
South Africa, and then had this
[plug cap] happen to me at South
Africa. We had gotten knocked
out of a couple races. Erv and I
had already been talking about it,
and I brought it up that I thought it
would be interesting if we decided
to go for two championships to
make up for the championship
that we might not win in '84. We
just kind of batted it around."
For the record, it would not be
the first time that the idea had
been tried. Upon entering his
first season of Grand Prix racing,
Kenny Roberts took a crack at
Freddie Spencer with Erv Kanemoto the
day Spencer clinched the 250cc World
Championship at Silverstone in 1985.
A week later, Spencer won the 500cc
World Championship in Sweden.
