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just wasn't ready to get that third bike ready to race. It was basi- cally a spare-parts bike. It had a weak ignition system. It literally had points from a 305 Honda, while the other two bikes had electronic ignitions." Weak ignition or not, McLaughlin was a rider who was talented enough to draft Pridmore on the last lap to win by three inches in a photo finish. Pridmore and the Butler & Smith BMW R90S went on to turn in a championship-winning perfor- mance in 1976 on the "Teutonic Tourer." "I look back on what we achieved by our success on that bike," reflects Pridmore. "I beat a lot of the bad boys and the Japanese and Italian factories. It made a lot of people sit up and say, 'On a BMW?'" Not only did Pridmore win the first AMA Superbike title, but Gietl's BMWs took second and third in the championship as well, with McLaughlin and Fisher. The team won all but one AMA Superbike race that season. It was a runaway suc- cess for BMW and its image. The R90S, even though it was relatively expensive, sold in great numbers, and Gietl's involve- ment was key in making BMW's racing program a success. In spite of the astonishing Su- perbike results, Butler & Smith decided to pull out of Superbike racing after winning the champi- onship. "It was because of the cost," Gietl says. "We'd made such a big splash—I mean, every maga- zine during that time featured the bike. You couldn't pick up a motorcycle magazine in 1976 without seeing a photo or a fea- ture on our motorcycle." It seemed Butler & Smith was satisfied that the racing program accomplished the goal of giving BMW back its sporting heritage. After a season of very little racing activity, Gietl got antsy and convinced Butler & Smith to let him revive the Superbike rac- ing program in 1978. The com- pany agreed to let Gietl get back in the game, but with very little support. Udo and Todd Schus- ter, a longtime friend and col- league in racing projects, started their own little BMW "works" team dubbed "GS Performance BMW," with Miami veteran John Long handling the riding chores. By 1978, the Japanese multis were beginning to handle better and had the power advantage. Yet, despite this, Long tied in points with Pridmore, who by then was riding for Vetter Kawa- saki. Pridmore won the title on a tie breaker, but Long would have won the championship, Gietl says, had a mistake at Loudon by an AMA official not happened. The official waved a late-arriving Long around for the warm-up lap when he came up to the grid, but later he was told he went out after the red flag was displayed and was docked a lap. Tying for the championship and coming that close to winning the title was quite an accomplishment for the low-dollar GS Performance squad. Perhaps that season, even more than the dominating 1976 campaign, solidified Gietl's reputa- tion as a builder. Gietl went on to head up Honda's Superbike racing ef- forts, but that's another story for another day. After retiring from Honda, Gietl spent three years building a 56-foot racing sailboat that was much lighter than other boats of its day. The boat was so successful that it became one of the winningest yachts of its time and was eventually purchased by the Hamburg Yacht Club in Germany. Gietl briefly came back to mo- torcycle racing, helping with the BMW Boxer Cup racing program and with San Jose BMW's Moto- ST squad. Gietl stands alongside Super- bike builders/owners such as Rob Muzzy and Eraldo Ferracci as larger-than-life personalities who became as well known as the racers who rode the ma- chines they built. CN This Archives edition is reprinted from the August 26, 2000, 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 III ARCHIVES CN P110 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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