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/265963
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE I t's easy enough to picture rid- ers like Cameron Beaubier, Danny Eslick, Josh Hayes, JD Beach and Roger Hayden getting together to do battle on AMA Pro Road Race week- ends. Now imagine that these riders were not only clashing on Pro weekends, but the rest of the summer going at it ham- mer and tong at small club-rac- ing events on nearly every "off" weekend. That was exactly the scene in the mid-to-late 1980s, when the manufactur- ers had such lucrative contingency programs that many of the top pro riders rarely took a weekend off, instead racing nearly every weekend from Day- tona in March to the WERA Grand National Finals in November. Talk about making them "match tough." Is it any wonder America continued to produce world-class riders at a rapid rate during this period? If you want to look at maybe one of the reasons America isn't producing the road racing stars it was in the 1980s, it's not hard to figure out. The riders in that era were racing so often they honed their skills to a razors edge. Such was the case in June of 1987 when many of the top AMA Supersport racers in the country gathered at a new, twisty, little 1.3-mile road course called Talladega Gran Prix Raceway (they decided to leave out the "d" in Grand for some odd reason). The King of 600 Supersport racing at that time was Doug Polen. He was doing much of the same thing on Honda 600 Hurricanes that he'd done on Su- zuki GSX-Rs the season before. In one of the biggest shockers of that timeframe, a hard-charging racer from Southwest Florida named Thomas Stevens stunned the road-racing world when he beat Polen in the AMA 600 Super- sport event at Road Atlanta in May of 1987. Ste- vens was brimming with confidence a few weeks later as he came to claim some Honda money at "Little Talladega." The only problem with coming to this gnarly little track though was WERA raced there so fre- quently that riders like Ron Ewerth, Greg Tysor, Paul Bray and Kurt Hall were so dialed in there, they'd be tough to beat. And then there was the new kid by the name of Scott Russell. Russell was a still green, rookie WERA expert. He had obvious raw talent, but was still a bit rough around the edges. People really took to Russell, a rider who spoke just what was on his mind at any given moment. With a Southern drawl so thick it was hard for anyone from north of the Mason- Dixon Line to understand, Russell boastfully said P100 STEVENS WINS "LITTLE TALLADEGA" SHOWDOWN In 1987 Thomas Stevens was winning at AMA Pro Races, but he, like most of the top Supersport riders of the era, stayed sharp by racing contingency club racing events nearly all summer long on their "off" weekends. Here Stevens leads Kurt Hall, Greg Tysor, Ron Ewerth (hidden behind Hall), Paul Bray and a first- year expert named Scott Russell at Talladega Gran Prix Raceway in a Honda money race. PHOTOGRAPHY BY LARRY LAWRENCE