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/1464294
VOLUME 59 ISSUE 15 APRIL 12, 2022 P137 to be attracted to testing him- self on more technical trails, seeing if he could negotiate a hill or a rock that no one had thought about trying before. Whaley was a big kid for his age (he would eventually grow to 6-foot-2) and was riding full-size motorcycles by the time he was 11. Shortly afterward, he was competing in his first trials event on a Montesa 250, and things pro- gressed quickly for Whaley from there. Backed by Montesa at 13, he won the California State Championship in observed trials when he was just a freshman in high school, beating established national riders like Lane Leavitt. "I even shocked myself when I won that first California State Championship," Whaley said. "I think I was ranked third coming into the final event, and the final round was up in Hollister, and my competition didn't have such a great day and I did. Winning that was so unexpected. I remember we were driving home and that night I couldn't sleep I was so excited." Whaley was fortunate in that the Japanese manufacturers were getting involved in making trials machines just as he was emerging as one of the sport's up-and-comers. At just 16, Whaley got the dream job when he became a paid factory rider for Honda. The pairing proved fruitful. With the resources of Honda behind him, Whaley domi- nated observed trials from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s—a Golden era in trials when all four Japanese makers and several European companies were field- ing teams in the sport. Honda got into observed tri- als trying to make a four-stroke competitive against the domi- nant two-strokes of the era and Whaley remembers the first fac- tory Honda trials machine was a 305cc long-stroke single. "It had a lot of titanium parts and only weighed 192 pounds, which was very light for a four- stroke," Whaley said. It was a busy time for Whaley. Not only was he competing at events around the world, but Honda also had him testing various engine configurations, including the earliest short-stroke singles that would later come to dominate the sport. The only hiccup in Whaley's 1970s domination came in 1978, when he said he had a nightmare year where everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. "It was so bad on and off the track for me that year," Whaley recalls. "One night Marty Tripes and I were driving our Porsches like idiots, going down to Mexico to get some tacos, when I spun out, hit a boulder and knocked the motor out the side of the car and rendering it virtually worth- less. I ran a saw through my thigh doing a home landscaping project. If I hadn't been living it, it would have been funny. It was like 'what else could go wrong?'" When asked how a trials rider, The five-time U.S. Trials Champion, Whaley, passed away in 2019.