Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE E ndurance road racing is fairly obscure today, but it reached a peak in status with the WERA and AMA/CCS Championships of the 1980s and early 1990s. Endurance racing in those days was popular enough to attract some of the biggest names in road racing and it's where many of the leading road racers of that era honed their skills. Of all the great teams that raced during that period - and there were many - perhaps the most loaded of them all was Cycle Tech Racing, the 1985 WERA National Endurance Cham- pions. Cycle Tech came and went in a flash. They really only competed for one full season, but what an impression they made, and what a roster! Endurance road racing, huge in France and big in Japan thanks to the Suzuka Eight Hour, was always the red-headed step child of motorcycle road racing in America, maybe a notch or two ahead of sidecars, but that's about it. Attitudes changed starting in the early 1980s when WERA established the first true na- tional endurance program. WERA's races were real endurance races in the mold of the world champion- ship events with six, eight and even 24 hour races. By the mid-1980s the WERA National Endurance Championship, founded a decade earlier, was attract- ing TV exposure on the popular weekly MotoWorld program, was covered extensively on the pages of Cycle News and other motorcyclng publications and began attracting factory support and contingency money. Teams were well equipped and featured an intriguing mix of young up-and-comers like Kevin Schwantz, Scott Russell, Thomas Stevens, as well as established AMA Pro veterans. The best of the lot was Team Hammer, founded by Southern California racers John Ulrich and Bruce Hammer. Hammer brought to the series a truly pro- fessional effort. Before Team Hammer, most of the teams in WERA Endurance ran fairly stock street bikes, reliable but often clumsy on the track and in the pits. Hammer utilized dedicated endurance rac- ing machinery built for speed and using components that enabled very quick pit stops. Instead of a bunch of buddies thrown together at the race making for dis- orderly pit stops, Hammer instead had a real crew; each team member knew their jobs and pit stops were efficient and well organized. Team Hammer set the tone and gradually other teams began taking cues from the 1983 and '84 WERA champions, stepping up to give the series ever more competitiveness. But even the two-time defending champs were blindsided by the arrival of Cycle Tech Racing in 1985. Cycle Tech, owned by John Bradley and headed by crew chief Bill Foster, matched or bettered the crew aspect of Team Hammer. And they certainly came loaded in terms of rider talent. The block- buster riders were David Aldana and Wes Cooley. Aldana was an AMA Grand National racing legend and had ample road racing experience, including stints with the factory Suzuki and Kawasaki efforts. And to top all of that off Aldana was just a couple of years removed from being a factory Honda World Endurance road racer. He had competed in races such as the prestigious LeMans and Bol 'd Or 24- hour events and the Suzuka Eight Hour, at that time arguably the single most important motorcycle race in the world. Aldana teamed with Mike Baldwin to win Suzuka in 1981. MAKING ENDURANCE RACING COOL P86 Wes Cooley and David Aldana were the biggest names the WERA Endurance Series had seen to that point. John Kocinski joined the squad after Cooley was injured. PHOTO BY LARRY LAWRENCE

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