wet. I went, 'Well, I did myself
here. This isn't going to work.'
But by the halfway point of
the race, the sun appeared, and
Lawson's fortunes began to look
as bright as Chandler's did dark.
"Halfway through, it stopped
raining," Lawson says. "It was
starting to develop a dry line,
or at least a drier line. Then by
about the three-quarter mark,
there was a dry line."
Lawson had almost a minute
to make up, but his cut Dunlop
slicks were the perfect tool for
a track that wasn't quite dry, but
almost. Catching and passing
Rainey, Schwantz and Mamola
by lapping up to seven seconds
faster, the veteran four-time
World Champion set his sights
on some younger prey in the
form of Doug Chandler, whose
maiden GP win was slowly
but surely slipping through his
fingers as his wet weather Mi-
chelins gradually ate themselves
on the drying track.
With four laps to go, Lawson's
coup de grace on Chandler
was swift, but he wasn't done
yet. He continued to pile on the
speed as the chasing pack got
progressively slower, his margin
of victory a staggering 74.194
seconds over Chandler. Third-
placed Mamola, who took the
final podium place of his GP
career, was a massive 97.730
seconds off Lawson.
"I didn't think there would be
enough time to the end of the
race, but there was," Lawson
says with the same matter-of-
factness that was a trademark
of his GP career. "That race was
luck, for sure, because it could
have gone the other direction
real easy. It could have gone
sideways real bad. So, part of
it was a gamble, and it paid off.
That's all it was. It was fun. It
was fun to give them [Cagiva]
their first win. I just remember
how happy Claudio [Castiglioni]
was. Claudio was just out of his
mind."
Lawson duly retired at the end
of the 1992 500cc Grand Prix
season, leaving his mark with
four World 500cc Champion-
ship titles (1984, 1986, 1988 on
Yamahas and one for Honda
in 1989), 31 Grand Prix wins
(Yamaha, Honda and Cagiva), 78
podiums and 21 fastest laps to
go with his two AMA Superbike
and 250cc Grand Prix titles.
He remains the most success-
ful American in the history of
Grand Prix racing.
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"Everybody had cold wets, and I said, 'Let's put cut slicks on.'
Ago [Cagiva Team Manager Giacomo Agostini] was
yelling at me, 'You can't do that! You can't do that!' I told
him to piss off. We put them on."
– Eddie Lawson
