Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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he would smoke everyone. Two things he didn't realize were the fact that a kid named Freddie Spencer was also in the race, and Homchick had never raced Daytona before, and, compared to the tracks he was used to, it was an entirely different animal. Homchick finished ninth despite crashing in both the heat race and the final. Later that summer, he broke through, earning his first big win, taking the Novice victory in the AMA National at Sears Point. In 1979, Homchick turned expert and raced a couple of 250cc Nationals. He scored a promising fifth at Loudon and fourth at Sears Point. With just three rounds in the series that year, those two finishes were enough to put Homchick fourth in the final AMA 250cc Grand Prix standings. Dunlop tire distributor Stan- ley Chan put together a deal for Homchick to race a Paul Dahmen-tuned Yamaha TZ750 in 1980. He spent most of that year learning to ride the big TZ at club races. In 1981, Homchick finished a very respectable eighth in the Daytona 200, despite running off the track once and having a chain stretch on his machine late in the race. He went on to finish ranked 10th in the final AMA Road Race National standings with three top-10 finishes. Homchick earned his best re- sults in 1982. He rode AMA For- mula One Nationals again and a few 250cc Grand Prix races. He was also invited to be a part of the American squad in the Anglo-American Match Races. Homchick said he learned a lot about race craft in the Match Races and came back from Eng- land more confident than ever. At Road America that year, he qualified on the front row and led most of the first lap of the Na- tional. In the 250cc race, Hom- chick finished second to Craig Morris, who, taking advantage of a quirk in the rules, won while riding an air-cooled 350. He went on to score another 250cc podium at Loudon that year but later abandon the ride to focus on the Formula One bike. He had an F1 podium in the bag at Pocono in the National before crashing late in the race. Honda recognized Hom- chick's potential, and he was in- vited to the ill-fated Laguna Seca Superbike tryout after the 1982 season where John Woo died. The Honda ride never mate- rialized, however. Formula One was dying and sponsorships were drying up, so Homchick reluctantly left racing. He had been hired as chief road-test rider for Cycle in 1980, so he had plenty to keep him busy. After breaking his neck test- riding a motocross bike, Hom- chick left Cycle and ended up doing PR for Suzuki during Kevin Schwantz's AMA Superbike days with Yoshimura. That was dur- ing the great Schwantz/Rainey battles, and Homchick says he'll never forget one famous inci- dent where Schwantz was using everything he had to psych out Rainey. "Kevin had gotten into a high- speed turn-one crash with his teammate [Satoshi] Tsujimoto," Homchick remembers. "After the crash, he was at the hotel playing tennis with somebody. Rainey walked by and saw him and just shook his head in dis- belief. You know Kevin was beat up, but he wasn't going to give any advantage to Wayne." In 1988, Homchick moved to Tokyo for a time and worked with Kawasaki setting up press intros all over the world. "I'd break in the press bikes before the journalists rode them," Homchick said. "I got to ride at Shah Alam, Estoril and all these state-of-the-art tracks. It was great." For a kid who started out peeking into Cycle's garage to leer at the new bikes, Homchick made a pretty good life out of the hobby he loved so much. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from the September 26, 2007, issue of Cycle News. CN has hun- dreds of past Archives editions in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to pre- vent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Ar- chives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road. -Editor CN III ARCHIVES P112 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives