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JULY 26, 2006 • C Y C L E N E W S 80 H ow many American riders can you racing trivia buffs name who have ridden in the Anglo-American Match Races, the Isle of Man TT, the Suzuka 8 Hours, the Day- tona 200 and a Grand Prix? If one of your guesses was John Long you get dinner on editor Paul Carruthers. As you can tell by the list of races he's participated in, Long's racing resume is impressive. And long. He was the top novice and then junior road racer in the early 1970s. As a Pro he was one of the early stars of the AMA Superbike Championship. In fact, riding a factory-backed GS Performance BMW, Long tied Reg Pridmore in the final series standings in the 1978, but lost the champi- onship on a tiebreaker. He was also a five-time member of the American squad in the Anglo-American Match Races, raced the Suzuka 8 Hours three times and was also a leading contender in the AMA Battle of the Twins and 250cc Grand Prix classes. John Long has certainly earned the moniker of road rac- ing's Mr. Longevity and he was often described as the Dick Clark of motorcycle racing for being seemingly ageless. The Miami native and second-generation racer is still active in the club and historic-racing level nearly 40 years after he started in the sport - and his story is one of the most interesting in all of American road racing. If, for no other reason, for the breadth and depth of his career. His son, Barrett, is carrying on the family tradition of road racing, and the two have even taken to the track against each other on occasion. Where father was once in charge of the family rivalry, John has pretty much conceded the title of "Fastest of the Longs" to Barrett these days. Long has been around motorcycle racing all his life, beginning when his father opened a motorcycle shop in the late 1930s. It's a shop that John continues to run today. Long's Motorcycle Sales is a Husaberg dealer, but mostly the shop - located on 12th Avenue in the heart of Miami, just a few blocks from the Orange Bowl - is a mecca for enthusiasts. A look out the shop's window offers excel- lent views of the downtown skyline, but it's the unde- niable racing aura that lures the enthusiast. Old racing posters, magazines, vintage bikes and rare racing parts are scattered all around. Just like they should be. As a kid John would go to Daytona with his dad, John Sr. "I'd hear my dad and Floyd Emde trade old racing sto- ries," Long remembers. "I was getting into racing at about the same time Emde's sons Don and David were." In 1969, Long entered his first race at Daytona as a novice and that was just the beginning as the teenager rose rapidly through the ranks to become one of the up-and- coming road racers of the early 1970s. He scored a victo- ry in the Novice class at Daytona in 1972, and in 1973 was about to draft into the lead past Gary Fisher on the final lap of the Daytona International Lightweight (250 Grand Prix) race when his Yamaha TD3 sputtered out of fuel. "Fisher pulled away and I got on the front straight and started sloshing around the tank with what little gas was left and Don Castro got by me too," said Long, who crossed the line on an empty tank and in third place. One of the biggest victories in Long's career came later that summer when he beat the dominant Kenny Roberts in the 250cc race at Pocono. But fun was racing up and down the East Coast in the early 1970s, battling hordes of other racers in AAMRR club events. "You'd get 400 riders showing up for these races back then," Long recalls. "We race in places like Danville, Virginia, Summit Point and some of these other tracks out in the rural countryside. All these riders would pull into town. Those things were more like big rock festivals than races. You could do anything you wanted. "We thought we were pretty hot back then, emulating the European riders. We all wore our Lewis Leathers and rode little two-stroke Yamahas and Maicos - always on old tires. You felt big time if you had new tires or windscreens." Long reached the peak of his racing career in the late 1970s. As a result of his club-racing upbringing, he was used to riding anything on a racetrack. Thus, he became one of the big names in Superbike racing when the class first took off. Long hooked up with the factory-backed GS Performance BMW team in 1978 - right when the Japanese multis were beginning to dominate the series. By then, Udo Gietl and Tod Schuster were getting very little help from the BMW factory and were forced to piece together the Beemer Superbikes with whatever parts they could beg, borrow or steal. "Udo and Tod had those BMWs tweaked to the limit," Long says. "I remember coming in the pits once and telling Udo the bike ran great except for a strange vibration. He looked down to find the motor was cracked in half from one end to the other. He went out in the parking lot look- ing for a BMW that he could borrow the motor from. He stayed up all night putting that thing together for the race the next day. He had total dedication." Long might have had the title of AMA Superbike Champion on his resume had it not been for a fateful deci- sion at the Loudon Superbike race in 1978. Loudon played host to two AMA Superbike races that year and the series was winding down as it headed back to the New Hampshire circuit. The race for the title was hot and heavy with Reg Pridmore, Paul Ritter, Harry Klinzmann and Long locked in a dogfight that would go the duration. But Loudon proved to be fateful for Long as his BMW was slow to start. By the time he rolled to the grid after the warmup lap, the one-minute board was already up. The rules stated in this case that the rider was to start from the back of the grid as a penalty for being late. So Long was directed to do so. Only he refused, believing he'd made it to his grid position on time. In the race, Long finished third behind Klinzmann and David Emde and headed to the podium to celebrate with the others. Once he got there, however, AMA officials told him something that probably still haunts him: He'd been docked a lap for his startline indiscretion - out with Long, in with John Bettencourt on the Loudon podium. "That cost us the Superbike Championship," said Long, who would have easily scored enough points - even if he had started from the back of the grid - to win the title since he ended the year tied with Pridmore only to lose on a tiebreaker. "The BMWs weren't capable of winning by then. We were just scrounging around third and fourth place for points." When asked if he had it to do all over again would he have started from the back of the grid? Long says emphatically, "In a New York minute. Those were the days when we were starting riders' unions and everyone was against authority and the AMA. But, yeah, had I gone to the back of the grid, I probably would have won the Superbike Championship and BMW might have stayed in the series. A lot of things might have happened." Believe it or not, Long would suffer more disappoint- ment in 1978. And, again, it was all about ties. In one of the more bizarre statistical anomalies in AMA racing his- tory, he also tied Randy Mamola atop the 250cc Grand Prix points. And - you guessed it - he also lost that title in a tiebreaker. Long ended his best year as a professional an agonizingly few points shy of winning two AMA titles. The winning didn't stop for Long and it was at his beloved Daytona in the 250cc GP class in the October races there in 1985 that he won again. His last National victory would come in 1988 in a surprise win over the likes of Dale Quarterley and Jimmy Adamo in the Pro Twins (formerly called Battle Of The Twins class) at Road Atlanta. By then Long was in his late 30s. Long continued to race Nationals occasionally until 2001, when he wrapped up his Pro racing career. Appropriately enough, that last Pro race came in the Daytona 200. Today Long runs his shop, is still winning club-racing titles, helps Barrett in his Pro racing efforts, and trains new riders in his racing school. And perhaps a fourth generation of racer will come out of the Long clan in the future. "I would never push them, but if they want to do it, I'll be behind them all the way," Long says with a grin. CN Mr. Longevity BY LARRY LAWRENCE John Long with son Barrett at Daytona in 2004. PHOTO BY JERRY MARKLAND John Long (center) in 1972 after winning the novice race at Daytona. He is flanked by third-place finisher Dennis Varnes (7) and Mike Devlin (31), who was second. PHOTO BY DAYTONA INTERNATIONAL SPEEDWAY