Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES P106 BY LARRY LAWRENCE HONDA'S FIRST Q uick, name the rider to give Honda its first 500cc World Championship. No, it wasn't Mike Hailwood or Jim Redman. The first Honda rider to win the world's top motorcycle racing championship was none other than American Freddie Spencer. He accomplished that momentous feat 30 years ago. It was 1983 and Spencer won out in a riveting battle with American racing legend Kenny Roberts, who'd won the title three times riding for Yamaha. The 1983 season was an epic battle between the two Americans, who quickly sprinted away from the rest of the field in that year's championship campaign. It was quite simply one of the greatest seasons in motorcycle Grand Prix history. In 12 rounds between them Spencer and Roberts won every race and every pole position. A monumental encounter on so many fronts, not only was it a battle between Honda and Yamaha, who were then and remain today archrivals, it was also a battle between Michelin and Dunlop, Kanemoto vs. Carruthers, Castrol vs. PJ1, Arai vs. AGV, NGK vs. Champion. Seriously, you could take the main rivals in just about every category of racing equipment and these guys were lined up on opposite sides. Adding even more intrigue was the fact that Roberts announced that he would retire at the end of the season. It was also a marked contrast between riders. Spencer was a polite, shy, 21-year-old introvert, while Roberts of course was, well… Kenny Roberts! That is to say, the exact opposite to Spencer in nearly every way. Spencer was an enigma to the Europeans who followed Grand Prix racing. He came to Honda with a lot of hype, but not much in the way of championships or big wins to back that up. He wasn't loud like the other American riders they were accustomed to. He wasn't from California, but from a place that no one there had heard of. When explaining where he was from to Europeans, Spencer would just say it was in the same state as New Orleans, and even though Shreveport was about as far away in character from New Orleans as two cities could get the Euros would nod approvingly when told this geographic tidbit. The rumor in the paddock was that Spencer was a Christian, considered quaint to the hypersecular European racing crowd. And Spencer was nowhere to be found around the paddock, preferring instead to stay in the air-conditioned comfort of his motorhome stocked with food, TV and VCR. Spencer was also notorious for flying to the races at the last possible moment, sometimes the morning of the first day of practice and qualifying, jet lag apparently not a major issue for him. And as soon as the proceedings of the weekend were done he was on the first flight back to the U.S. To those on the Continent, Spencer must have seemed like a phantom, who would appear out of thin air, turn in some blazing laps, and then disappear as quickly as he'd arrived. Fans craned their necks just to get a glimpse of this mystery man. Spencer's first full-time season in GP in '82 was by any standards a major success. He scored a pair of wins, as well as a handful of poles and track records. He had second in the championship pretty much locked up when Franco Uncini center punched him on the last lap of the season finale at Hockenheim, sending Spencer to the

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