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he might, Hannah couldn't find a way around Dowdy. Han- nah even banged bars trying to intimidate the rider nearly 10 years his junior, but Dowd's track knowledge and toughness was keeping him on pace. Finally, after five laps of battling, Hannah found a way around Dowd and continued his chase to the front. He managed to get past Ward for third, but the extended battle meant Stanton and Lechien were too far out front to catch. Still, third was not bad at all, considering his bad start, and with a strong moto under his belt, Hannah was in good posi- tion going into the second moto. If he could get a better launch and get up front early, an overall victory might be possible. And that's exactly what Han- nah did. After a false start where Stanton's gate didn't drop, rid- ers were called back for a rare restart. This time Hannah nailed a great jump out of the gate and found himself tucked right in be- hind Ward and Lechien. Lechien quickly got by Ward and opened up a small lead. Then a few laps later the crowd could be heard cheering all across the facility when Wardy and Hannah moved in on Lechien, setting up a three- way battle. Today Bob admits he made a strategic mistake at that point. "My nature of always want- ing to battle and pass people anytime they were in front of me, won me a lot of races and championships," Hannah ex- plains. "But sometimes it caused me problems, too. That day at Southwick I found myself in the lead group [with Lechien and Ward] and we'd sort of broken away from the rest of the guys. I should have backed it down a little bit, waited until about the 20-minute mark and then hit go. I was playing it smart, trying to stay clear and not battle those guys too closely, so everything was going good. When Wardy and I pulled up on Lechien, you could hear the roar of the crowd and that really gets your adrena- line pumping." Suddenly things went haywire. At the end of Southwick's fastest straight, Ward lost control of his Kawasaki and swapped hard as he hit the face of a jump and flew all the way across the track and clipped Hannah's Suzuki, putting Hannah down hard. "I was all the way on the other side of the track, trying to give Wardy plenty of room," Hannah remembers. "I had this line down that straight that worked well and had a ton of momentum and was in the air just about to go by Ward and all of a sudden he swapped out, came flying all the way across and took out my front wheel and it slammed me." And that was it, Hannah's day was done. What might have been a storybook ending to his career, a victory in his final na- tional, ended with a DNF in the second moto and a ninth overall. Hannah went to Unadilla for the USGP a couple weeks later and thought he might have a shot of winning there since he'd won the 1986 USGP at the famous track and was part of the victorious Team USA at the Motocross des Nations there in 1987. "But when I saw the track, I told [promoter] Ward Robinson that he screwed me," Hannah said. "They'd graded the track smooth, so it wasn't the rough Unadilla that I was hoping for." Hannah finished ninth overall there with a 9-12. I asked Bob after such a solid showing at Southwick in '89 with sure podium and a possible victory before the crash, why he decided to walk away. "If Roger [DeCoster] had asked me to come over and ride the Honda I would have done it," Hannah admits. "That bike was clearly the best out there at the time, and I know I could have done some damage on that thing. But they were stacked with riders, so I understand." So let the record show that Bob Hannah was competing for wins from the day he took to his first national in 1975, all the way through several generations of riders to his final national at Southwick in 1989. If you look at the raw results you might not know that, but for people who were there, Hannah battling for a win in his final national is another reason many fans of that era consider him the greatest motocross racer ever to throw a leg over a bike. CN CN III ARCHIVES P106 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives