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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 17 APRIL 27, 2021 P123 In 1974, Yamaha came calling, and Hartwig raced one of the company's first monoshock YZs brought to America. He scored wins in two of the first three 500cc Nationals that year, including an opening-round victory at Hangtown over Tony DiStefano and a win on home soil at the very first Na- tional held at RedBud (even though Hartwig had never raced the track before), ahead of Jim Weinert. The new YZs were good—very good, in fact, when they lasted—but as the season wore on, the DNFs began to mount. "We had a tremendous amount of mechanical problems with the Yamaha," Hartwig explained. "It kind of put us out of the hunt. I led a lot of motos, but we couldn't put two together without something break- ing. The bikes were a little bit on the fragile side. Chassis, engines, air cleaners—everything went wrong. It needed a lot of improvement." Because of the mechanical problems, Hartwig did something that would be unthinkable today. He went to Yamaha and asked to be let out of his contract before the '74 season was over. "We left Yamaha and went back to Husqvarna in hopes of salvaging the championship," Hartwig says with a tone that still reveals a hint of desperation all these years later. "Unfortunately, by that time, Husqvarna was lagging behind the Japanese and they were no longer competitive. They ended up having reliability issues, too." Another problem with the Husqvarna's Hartwig found he would have to deal with was the lack of suspension travel as compared to the Yamaha. An old back injury Hartwig had suffered didn't flare up riding the longer-travel and softer Yamaha factory machines, but the harshness of the Husqvarna's of the time put Hartwig in serious pain. In spite of all the DNFs, Hartwig still finished the 1974 AMA 500cc Motocross Championship in fifth. He looks back at leaving Ya- maha as a decision he might have changed if he could do it all over again. "Looking back at it, leaving Yamaha was a mistake," Hartwig admits. "The Husky turned out to be a hard machine to ride, and it agi- tated my back so bad that I couldn't ride. Had I stayed with Yamaha, I'm fairly confident my back would have eventually healed the rest of the way. As it turned out, my career was extremely short and pretty much over by the end of 1974." Hartwig came back and tried to run a few races in 1975 on a priva- teer bike, but it was no use. The pain in his back was too much, and he hung up his racing helmet. His professional career had lasted just a little over two years. The competitive juices were still flowing, and Hartwig later pursued biathlon, the winter sport that com- bines cross-country skiing and rifle shooting. Hartwig was a skier and marksman from a young age, and he trained with the goal of making the Olympic team in 1988. He quali- fied for the Olympic trials, but a let- ter came just days before the trials stating that since Hartwig had been a professional motocross racer, he couldn't participate. "We knew beforehand this might be a problem, and I had a lawyer work with the biathlon association, and we had a verbal agreement that I could participate," Hartwig said. "Then, just before the Olympic tri- als, I got a certified letter that said I was ineligible to compete. It was my first view of the politics involved with the Olympics." There was no time to mount a legal challenge. Hartwig's dream of making an Olympic team came to a crushing end. Hartwig credits all the people who helped him along the way with the success he experienced in motocross. "Tom Volin was my mechanic at Husky, and he worked really hard, too," Hartwig says. "When you think about it, there are a lot of people behind the scenes that make the factory riders' lives a lot easier, from the mechanics to the people in the office who make the travel arrange- ments and so many more. I don't think those folks get the kind of credit they deserve." Eddie Warren, Keith Bowen, Todd DeHoop and Nick Wey and the rest of the Michigan Motocross Mafia can point to Mike Hartwig as the Don. Michigan's first moto- cross star turned out to be a brilliant comet that lit up the northern night sky before fading out of view much too soon. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from the August 1, 2007, issue of Cycle News. CN has hundreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives