Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/1463762
tuners," Winters said. "And you had this local Willow hero Chuck Graves going up against the go- liaths like Marlboro Roberts and the Valvoline Suzuki team. There were a lot of compelling stories. It made for great theater, and we played up the personalities. That TV series made heroes out of those guys." One example of that was cast- ing riders in certain rolls. It was the storyteller in Winters coming out on the broadcast. And they didn't have to make it up, they just emphasized and focused on riders' personalities and encour- aged rivalries and outlandish quotes. Scott Gray, for example, was cast as the cocky, fearless, big blond conqueror astride his ultra-fast punched out Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R1100. And that was, in fact, Gray to a tee. When they asked Gray what he had to say to the other riders before the race, his reply was pure central casting, "They'd better watch their girl- friends," Gray said with a sly grin. With time, effort and sheer youthful passion, Winters and Code secured advertising and assembled a crew of cameramen and they started covering the F-USA races. The first race to launch the national broadcast of the series was almost a com- plete disaster. It was in April of 1990, at Willow Springs Raceway and the high desert winds that weekend were relentless. Video cameras were getting gummed up and microphones ruined by the blowing sand. Even on sturdy tripods, the cameras shook in the 60-mph gusts. It wasn't pretty in that first race, but Formula USA went national that summer of 1990, and the more the crew worked together, the better the shows got. Putting the programs together was a crazy flog for Winters. "We couldn't afford a switch- ing truck, like the big boys use," Winters remembers. "So, I would try to find the highest vantage point where I could see the most of the track. And I had a radio to all the camera guys and would tell them what races were devel- oping. I would key up and say, 'Shoot number two, he's about to come to your corner.' And some were better than others at captur- ing the right bikes. You never knew what you had on tape until afterwards. I would take all the tapes from the race and off-line edit it and then take it to a studio and do online edits and it was expensive. It was probably $200- 250 per hour studio time, and you'd be in there for a week. "And the most expensive part was the travel for the camera crew, paying them their day rate of three or four hundred apiece, renting long lenses, replacing cameras that got thrown off a bike or something, the amount of Beta tape we used wasn't cheap either. Combine all that and pro- ducing these shows cost in the hundreds of thousands." Sometimes the editing would go right down to the wire. Once Win- ters was so late that he hopped on his motorcycle and rode like a demon to deliver the tape to Prime Network just minutes before the program was to air. The national F-USA coverage lasted just two years. Winters was too busy to worry about pro- tecting what he'd done, he says, but others were taking notice. And the AMA was not happy that this upstart series was making such a big splash. "So, what happened was another group went to Prime with the AMA Superbike Champion- ship and sort of stole our deal out from under us," Winters said. "It was tough at the time, but we were pioneers and did something that made history and that was it. I went back to movie making. "I was proud of what we ac- complished, and that F-USA broadcast back in '90 and '91 re- ally opened the doors and made a path for motorcycle road racing to be on American television." CN CN III ARCHIVES P122 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives "But they just blew us off. They didn't actually believe anyone could get a complete road racing series nationally televised." -Paul Winters