CN
III ARCHIVES
BY LARRY LAWRENCE
I
t was just a fun, spur-of-the-
moment stunt that legend-
ary motocross racer Hakan
Carlqvist will forever be re-
membered. On the final lap of
the second moto of the 1988
Belgian Grand Prix at Namur,
Carlqvist had a big enough of
a lead that he pulled off to the
side of the track, was handed
a beer from an enthusiastic
fan and took a big swig be-
fore getting back into the race.
Fans went nuts. While that
stunt was the stuff of legend,
five years earlier Carlqvist ac-
complished a lesser known,
but infinitely more epic feat by
winning the 500cc Motocross
World Championship, racing
an outdated air-cooled Yamaha
against the much higher tech
water-cooled Hondas ridden by
a pair of racing legends.
Along the way in the 1983
championship campaign Carl-
qvist raced with cracked ribs
and compressed nerves in his
spine, with pain so great that he
nearly pulled out of the French
GP, but a pit board from his me-
chanic gave him the strength to
go on and finish the race. The
points he gained in that gritty
performance was the differ-
ence that helped him narrowly
win the title against Honda's
André Malherbe and Graham
Noyce. The victory for Yamaha
took at least a bit of the sting
out of losing the 500cc Road
Racing World Championship
to their archrival Honda.
Carlqvist was born in
Stockholm in 1954. As a
child he played soccer and
ice hockey, but when his old-
er brothers give him his first
taste of riding a motorcycle
the direction of his life was
set. At 16 Carlqvist won three
of the first motocross races
he entered on a Penton 125,
but mid-season, he switched
to a Maico, which was more
competitive in his eyes. It
showed that even from a
young age Carlqvist insisted
on a bike that fit his needs. It
would be a pattern that would
stick with him throughout
his career (he once alleg-
edly began digging a big hole
during a test session for a
water-cooled Yamaha proto-
type and when asked by the
wide-eyed Yamaha factory
mechanics from Japan what
he was doing, he told them
the bike was a "piece of sh*t
and burying it is what they did
with sh*t in Sweden).
Rather than serving a two
or three-year apprentice-
ship on 125cc bikes, which
was the normal course in
Scandinavian motocross in
those days, Carlqvist quickly
moved up to 250cc moto-
cross bikes, which fit his 6'
THE SUPER SWEDE
P132
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY
HENNY
RAY
ABRAMS
