Cycle News

VOL. 50 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 15, 2013 did more than that. The dirt tracker stunned the road-racing establishment when he came to MidOhio in September of 1984, and in the rain, won that weekend's road race National. The horizons for Shobert suddenly opened wide. Shobert went on to win the AMA Grand National Championship three years straight (1985-87). And after the '85 season the road races were no longer needed to gain points, since after that year the road racing and flat track championships were separated and the AMA Grand National Championship for the first time was strictly a dirt track series. However, Shobert showed so much promise in road racing that Honda kept him on the pavement. In 1986 he raced AMA Superbike as a third member of the Honda factory team with Fred Merkel and Wayne Rainey. That season Shobert scored three podium finishes and ended the year ranked fourth in Superbike. In '87 Shobert finished ranked third in the championship behind Rainey and Kevin Schwantz, all the while running his main gig as a flat tracker and winning Grand National titles. By 1988 Rainey and Schwantz were off to Europe to race Grand Prix and Shobert was now the man on Honda's Superbike effort. After three years of winning the AMA Grand National Championship, Shobert faced his toughest challenge yet. Not only was his focus split between road racing and flat track, Harley-Davidson's factory squad was loaded in '88 with Parker and Chris Carr. That trio would battle atop the standings most of the season, with Carr dropping out of contention for the championship after suffering mechanicals in the later races. The turning point in the season came at the Indy Mile. Shobert had won four of the five miles up to that point and Parker, with a slew of miles on the schedule to close out the season, had to find a way to overcome the top-speed advantage of the Honda. At Indy they found the perfect set up and Parker and Shobert traded the lead multiple times P121 each lap. It came down to the final lap. Shobert was trailing Parker coming out of turn four, just where he wanted to be. He pulled out to slingshot past Parker using the draft, only this time he didn't quite make it. Parker had just enough momentum coming out of turn four to hold off Shobert to win on the mile. Harley had found the key – give Parker a bike that could rail around the turns and that would negate the speed advantage of Shobert's Honda. That was key. Parker would go on to win four of the final five races that season. On the Superbike side, Shobert had his hands full with Yoshimura Suzuki's Doug Polen. Polen had risen from the club ranks and had immense talent, so much so that he would go on to win a pair of World Superbike titles. The battle between Shobert and Polen came down to the finale at Sears Point. Polen needed to win and then have someone else finish ahead of Shobert. At Sears Point there was one man for that job and it was Scott Gray. But Gray crashed horrifically in the Camel Challenge and had to withdraw from the National. Shobert needed only to cruise in behind Polen and that's what he did, finishing runner up to his fellow Texan and beating Polen by four points in the final standings. Going into the GNC finale at the Sacramento Mile, the strong run of miles by Parker gave him control in the points. The only chance Shobert had was if an appeals board overturned his disqualification for his bike being underweight after he won the Syracuse Mile. The night before Sacramento Shobert learned that he'd lost the appeal and that was it - his quest to win both the AMA Superbike and Grand National Championships in a single season came to an end. But he was right there in the running and very nearly pulled off what might have been the most impressive double in the history of AMA racing. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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