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VOLUME 58 ISSUE 27 JULY 7, 2021 P137 the twins, that the days of winning Superbike races on a twin-cylinder machine were numbered. Then in 1980 when Honda came into Superbike to do battle with Kawasaki and Suzuki, the twin-cylinder Superbikes that were winning races just a sea- son or two before were sud- denly obsolete. That's when Jess O'Brien put Battle of the Twins together with help from the AMA, the Florida GP Riders' Association and several other clubs. O'Brien knew there were a lot of late 1970s twin-cylinder Superbikes still around and he figured there would be plenty of riders and fans of the twins to launch a series for the bikes. He was right, the inaugural Battle of the Twins race at Daytona in 1981 was packed with entries and fans loved it. So much so that after the first season of the class, which ran at most AMA road race nationals and more, it became an official AMA National Champion- ship in '82. Adamo, riding the Leoni Duca- ti, won that first race at Daytona in '81 and went on to when that first non-national BOTT Cham- pionship in '81 and followed that up with another dominant season in the championship's first AMA National designation in '82. He would win it again in '83, but that season Leoni thought with the new rules that Adamo might be able to do some damage in the Superbike class. They wouldn't be able to do a full season because some of the Superbike rounds were Pro-Am events not featuring the BOTT class, where Adamo made his money. One of Adamo's biggest BOTT rivals, Malcolme Tunstall also raced Ducatis and noticed that Adamo's Team Leoni/Sure-Fire Ducati showed up with numerous updates in '83. He speculates that many of those were put in place to compete in Superbike. "They were running wider wheels, full floater brakes, special bigger [diameter] forks, Fox was working with them on rear shocks, they had a special thin-tubing racing frame and the engine packing a lot of NCR performance modifications," Tunstall said. "I would guess the bike was under 350 pounds and was making very close to 100 horsepower." While those number are impressive, consider the factory Honda Superbikes were produc- ing 125-plus horsepower and probably weighed just under 400 pounds. "Getting a top-10 finish on a Twin in Superbike back in that era was like winning the race," Tunstall added. In the Daytona Superbike race Adamo qualified a strong sev- enth. While that sounds decent, but not earth-shattering, consider this—the only riders to qualify faster were five factory or factory- backed Hondas (Mike Baldwin, Freddie Spencer, Steve Wise, Fred Merkel and David Aldana) and the factory Kawasaki of Wayne Rainey. Adamo qualified in front of Honda-support riders Roberto Pietri and Sam McDon- Jimmy Adamo's Ducati was down at least 25 horsepower to the best Superbikes during the 1983 AMA Superbike season, but the Reno Leoni-tuned Ducati V-twin was lighter and nimbler than its four-cylinder counterparts. PHOTO: BERT SHEPARD