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/192336
CN III ARCHIVES P120 BY LARRY LAWRENCE WHEN BUBBA ALMOST WON IT ALL I magine a rider today winning both the AMA Superbike and AMA Grand National Championships. That would be huge. Winning both series is something that has never been done and probably will never be done (although JD Beach has renewed hope of the possibility). But 25 years ago Bubba Shobert came agonizingly close to pulling off the seemingly impossible. That year the Honda factory rider won the AMA Superbike Championship and a week later came oh so close to winning the AMA Grand National Championship. A surging Scotty Parker eventually won the Grand National title aboard his factory Harley-Davidson, but Shobert and Parker went back and forth all year and the flat track series wasn't decided until the final weekend. The very fact that Shobert became a road racer happened almost by accident. The popular Texan was AMA Flat Track Rookie of the Year in 1980 and was going happily along as strictly a flat tracker on Harley-Davidsons in the early 1980s and rapidly climbing the ranks. By 1983 Shobert came into his own, finishing a strong fourth in the AMA Grand National Championship and winning three of the most prestigious races in the series that season the Sacramento, Indy and Syracuse Miles. That's when Shobert was scooped up by Honda to race its new RS750 flat track machine. It was the beginning of the incredibly intense Harley vs. Honda battles for the AMA Grand National Championship in the mid-1980s. This manufacturer rivalry was one of the nastiest in the history of motorcycle racing - maybe second only to the heated Harley-Indian rivalry during the first half of the 20th century. And it wasn't just spirited competition on the track - it went deeper than that. Harley-Davidson lobbied for and got the U.S. government to impose tariffs on Japanese-made motorcycles above 700cc. The Japanese makers were obviously not happy about the weighty tariffs and there was talk inside the industry that Honda specifically targeted the historic AMA Grand National Championship, which had been largely dominated by Harley-Davidson, as a payback of sorts. Honda figured to have some development time to get its RS750 competitive with the long-established Harley-Davidson XR750. Shobert and Ricky Graham might've needed a little help so it was decided that to earn extra points in the Grand Nationals the two would do some road races on special Honda big-bore versions of the Honda's VF750 Superbike machine. It was hoped that they might earn a couple of points at the road races to add to their flat track tally, but Shobert