Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

I Gardner announces retirement ustralian Wayne Gardner, the 1987 500cc World Champion whose career has been scarred, like his 32-year-old body, by a series of horrific crashes, announced at the British Grand Prix that he would retire from GP racing at the end of the year. The one-time Woolongong Wild One fought back tears behind mirrored sunglasses while making the announcement on Friday, July 31, of his race-winning weekend at Donington Park. "It's pretty hard," Gardner said, choking back emotions long held in check. "In Japan (Suzuka in March) when I broke my leg, I said, 'Hey, what am I doing here?' I decided it was pointless to push on. I just asked myself if I was enjoying it like I used to. The enjoyment was the basis of it all. "I felt I took too much punishment over the years and I can't keep doing that because one ofthem's going to hurt you and I don't want to end up in a wheelchair," Gardner, who's campaigning an Erv Kanemoto Rothmans Honda this year, said. "When you're not enjoying it, you're not concentrating and that's when the serious accidents happen." Gardner's win this weekend gives him 18 500cc GP victories in his eight-year career. He had considered retirement in the past, one of the first times being in May of 1989 at the German Grand Prix at the Nurburgring when he broke several bones in his foot. Earlier in the year he'd broken his left leg at Laguna Seca, a circuit he was openly contemptuous of. He came back to finish 10th in the championship. His racing career began in his native Australia, moving to Great Britain in 1981 to campaign a Moriwaki Kawasaki, the team that discovered him and the same team he rode for to a fourth place finish at Daytona in '81. Racing mostly in England, he was Britain's TT Formula One Champion in 1-983 and '84 as well as the 1984 British 500cc Champion. He made a dramatic GP debut at Assen in 1983, accidentally hitting then World Champion Franco Uncini who was trying to get off the track after falling. Gardner's Honda Britain RS500 hit Uncini in the head, effectively ending his career, though he would later race, unsuccessfully. Gardner joined the GP circuit full time in 1984 riding for Honda Britain, joining the Rothmans team the following year and finishing fourth. He improved to second in 1986 winning his first GP at Jarama, Spain, and earned his only World Championship in 1987 riding a four-cylimler tuned by Jerry Burgess, the man behind Mick Doohan's success this year. Gardner finished second to Lawson in 1988, then. his propensity for crashing increased and his career was more notable for its broken bones than its finishes. Aside from the GPs, his greatest success came in the Suzuka 8-Hour, a race he won four times including this year and in 1991. Gardner said he wasn't sure what the future held, though he had a number of options. "One of them was possibly having a team management role, possibly with Honda or whatever. There's a possibility of racing cars. Touring cars interest me. I've watched German touring car races and have an invite from Mercedes to test their car in October." He also aid he was hopeful of testing a BMW M-3 at season's end. A Speaking of Jeff Ward, the factory Kawasaki rider made his final twowheel race appearance at the Washougal National MX and was honored during an intermission. Ward is the only rider to have competed at all 12 Nationals at Washougal and he won six of those, while never finishing worse than fifth. He was accompanied at Washougal by his three-week-old son, Brandon. Also spectating at Washougal were 1982 500cc National MX Champion Darrel Schultz and 1980 500cc National MX Champion Chuck Sun. Schultz and his brother Dean rode their Yamaha XT600 dual spon bikes 400 miles from Eureka, California, to the event. Schultz was overheard saying that he'd love to spin a lap on the Washougal track on his street-legal four-stroke, just for old times sake. Although Marlboro Roberts Yamaha team owner Kenny Roberts wouldn't confirm it, it appears his son, Kenny Roberts Jr. will be moving up to the World Championship 250cc Road Race Series in 1993. Roberts Jr. is expected to campaign an Aprilia backed by Chesterfield, another brand of cigarette owned by Phillip Morris, the parent company of Marlboro. There wiH likely be a second rider, as yet unnamed. Asked about the pur- ported deal, Roberts said: "That kind of stuff takes months to do. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." The Royal Spanish Federation of Motorcycling announced a $1 million, lO-round road race series to be run in Spain in 1993. And what makes this series different from most is that it allows riders from around the world to compete against the best from Spain, making it a training ground for upand-coming riders hoping to make it into the World Championships. Promoted by Ducados, the Spanish cigarette company, and R.P.M. Exclusivas, a promotional company, the series consists of three productionbased classes: 125cc, 25Occ, and 600cc Supersport. Hondas, Yamahas, and Aprilias will be allowed in the 250cc class, Honda and Aprilia will make up the 125s, and the 600 Superspon class will be run according to FIM regulations. Seven of the 10 races will be televised on TVE-2, Spain's leading sports channel, and the series will run on the five FIM-homologated tracks in Spain: Jerez, Catalunya, Jarama, Albacete, and Calafat. The races will be scheduled so as not to conflict with the current World Championship and will see established Spaniards such as Juan Garriga, Carlos Cardus, Alberto Puig, and Jorge Martinez competing against the best of the rest. Kenny Roberts is one of the leading forces behind the series with Australian promoter Bob Barnard working on it full-time. Roberts will certainly field a team in the series and may have more than one. His son, Kenny Roberts Jr., was expected to race there until the recent deal with Chesterfield was done. The chances of Rothmans Honda's World Championship leader Mick Doohan returning in competitive form at the Brazilian GP on August 23 appear increasingly doubtful. Complications following his crash in the Dutch TT at Assen at the end of June have kept him flat on his back at a clinic in Bologna. When the 'bandages were removed from his right calf two weeks after it was plated, it was discovered that the skin wasn't healing properly. Doctors attempted to correct it with artificial skin, but that operation was unsuccessful and forced a more radical approach. The day he was supposed to start walking, June 20, following the French GP, an operation was performed that fused his lower legs together so that the skin could naturally graft from the front of his left leg to the back of his right leg. Patches of skin were also cut from both upper thighs to be grafted. The eighthour operation was attended to by 10 physicians. He was, basically, immobilized for 15 days, his right leg in a cast up to his crotch, though he had daily treatments in a decompression chamber to speed the healing process and also did upper body work. The legs were ·to be cut apart on Tuesday, August 4, following the British GP, and only then could rehabilitation begin. Since he's been mostly on his back for five weeks, the chances that he'll be fit enough to race a 500, are slim, at best. "Right now we're guessing how it's going to be in Brazil," Doohan said in a televised interview from his hospital bed in Bologna. "I haven't got a crystal ball. Hopefully, I can be strong for South Africa (the season's final race on September 6)." With Rainey's second piace in England, Doohan needs a fifth and a fourth . in the final two races if Rainey were to win both to take his first title, something crew chief Jerry Burgess believes is possible. "It's 16 days of intense therapy," Burgess noted. "The recovery will be slow the first two or three days. After that it should escalate. I reckon we can teach him to walk in 16 days." Burgess pointed out that the track in Brazil is mostly left-hand corners, which should save wear on his right leg, and that the injury was not joint-related. "It's not like we have to find movement," he said. Marlboro Roberts Yamaha's World Champion Wayne Rainey announced at Donington that he'd resigned with the Marlboro Roberts team for two more years. Whether the team would stay with Yamaha was the biggest question mark, though, with Roberts' long ties to the factory, no one believed Roberts would bolt to a rival factory, though he hinted at that during the weekend. "I need certain commitments made for this team to make Marlboro happy and make the riders happy. If I get that they can do what they want. We have to make commitments eailier which we have not done and that's why there's been· . so much speculation on where Wayne's going to go simply because Yamaha's not used to making a commitment to any rider at all. Marlboro pays me, not Yamaha, and I have to make commitments to this company." But the deal was done with the team staying on Yamahas, though Rainey said they came close to bolting. "Cagiva needed an answer yesterday and I couldn't stall them any more. I more or less told Kenny that if the circumstances were as we discussed (giving greater support for their team), we'll stay there. They said no and I was out of a ride. Kenny went back to Yamaha and they agreed. It all happened within an hour (on Saturday evening). That's how close it was." - - - - - - - Continued on page 5 Pennsylvania, Texas open carpool lanes to motorq_cle_s _ T Wo more states - Pennsylvania and Texas - have recognized the role that motorcycles play in reducing traffic congestion by opening up High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lanes to motorcycle riders, reports the AMA. HOV lanes, also known as commuter lanes, are set aside on crowded expressways for use by vehicles that utilize space more efficiently, like buses and cars carrying several passengers. A federal law passed in 1982 noted that motorcycles meet the same space-efficiency criteria and should be granted access to HOV lanes. But officials in Pennsylvania, Texas and Virginia have taken advantage of a legal loophole to ban motorcycles from their HOV lanes in large cities. The policy change in Pennsylvania and Texas is a direct result of an amendment passed as part of last year's federal highway funding bill. Under the terms of the current law, states that use federal funding for their HOV lanes are required to open them to motorcycles or certify to federal officials that two-wheelers would create a specific safety hazard in those lanes. The new ruling in Pennsylvania grants motorcycles access to the state's only designated HOV lane system on 1-279 near Pittsburg. In Texas, motorcyclists are now entitled to use the state's designated HOV lanes throughout Dallas and Houston. There is one more hurdle to clear in Texas, however. Over the next six months, officials plan to study the situation and determine whether motorcycle use of these lanes has created any safety problems. Other states, most notably California and Washington, have found no safety hazards related to motorcycle travel on HOV lanes. The opening of HOV lanes in Pennsylvania and Texas leaves only one state, Virginia, which officially prohibits motorcycles from most of its HOV lanes on 1-395 and 1-66. However, since Virginia transportation officials were granted federal highway money late last year, they have been required by the Federal Highwa~ Administration to open up seven miles of HOV lanes on 1-95 leading into the Washington, D.C., area. The AMA will continue its lobbying efforts to open all HOV lanes in Virginia to motorcycle riders. 3

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