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/1499843
onds away from being lapped, such was the pace Baldwin and Cooley were pushing in the rain. Determined to make up for the gap to the leader in the For- mula One race, Wise rocketed out of the gate in the Wiseco Su- perbike 100 event to lead from the line over a young Kawasaki- mounted Wayne Rainey. It didn't get better for fourth- placed Cooley whose engine went "bang" on lap two to cap off a miserable weekend for the late former two-time AMA Superbike Champion. Rainey would also soon be out of the reckoning, dropping his Kawa - saki on lap five to leave Wise and Baldwin to begin open- ing a gap to Ducati-mounted Jimmy Adamo and Honda's Fred Merkel. Baldwin was in no mood to hang about and get involved in another close tussle and put the hammer down, stretching his lead a potentially race-winning 15 seconds by lap 15. Then, as fate would have it, the gods smiled on Wise. "After 40 years, I don't re - member a whole lot about the [actual] race," Wise says, "but I do remember that I hadn't rid- den in a month after my crash at Riverside [International Race- way, in California], where I broke my collarbone. I remember [at Mid-Ohio] that Baldwin was leading, and I was running sec- ond and Baldwin had crashed [on lap 15]. I was about a corner behind, coming up over a rise and saw that he had run off the track. I'm not sure that he had actually crashed but had run off the track. It had been raining a lot, so it was probably muddy, and he couldn't get back on [the track]. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, I could see [him], but that was about it, it was so fast." Wise now inherited the lead but was still not in a position to relax as the eventual two-time WorldSBK Champion Merkel began to chip away at the gap, as Wise started disposing of the backmarkers, eventually lap - ping up to sixth place (imagine if Jake Gagne lapped up to sixth place in this day and age!). With three laps to go, Wise hit the cruise control button. Happy with his 12-second lead over Merkel, Wise brought it home with a raised fist over the line to his Honda crew with tuner Mike Velasco almost more pumped than he was. For Wise, that torrential day in the Ohioan countryside was to be the highlight of his road racing career. Wise admitted to struggling with the constant changing between the light - switch powerband and lithe weight of the two-stroke 500 and the heavy, comparatively docile four-stroke superbikes, and not long after this Mid-Ohio triumph, two crashes on the Honda NS500 landed him in hospital, the second of which at Laguna Seca was severe enough for him to rethink things and call time on his racing career. But Wise is far from a forgot- ten man. He was named the AMA Pro Athlete of the Year in 1982 and he was inducted into the AMA Hall of Fame in 2001. And this year, he'll return to Mid-Ohio as the Grand Marshal at the Permco AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days event, where he will lead the Lap For History tour of the course. Every dog has his day, and for a jack of all trades like Steve Wise, deservedly so. CN CNIIARCHIVES P116 Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives Honda ran this ad in Cycle News after Wise's and Mike Baldwin's win at Mid-Ohio 1983.