Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
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t CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE B lame it all on Kenny Roberts. The in- credibly popular motorcycle racer from Modesto, California, emerged from the horse and car racing dirt ovals of America in the 1970s and went on to conquer the world on the road racing circuits of Europe. Roberts started a craze of bringing over American flat track racers that would last for a quarter of a century. Following Roberts, every American that went on to win the World Championship grew up flat-track racing. That included Freddie Spencer, Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Kenny Roberts Jr. The notable exception was Kevin Schwantz, who, like most of MotoGP riders today, came up through club road racing as a teen. The legacy of American dirt continued in the person of Nicky Hayden, the 2006 MotoGP World Champion from Owensboro, Kentucky, who started riding dirt ovals on minibikes when he was just three years old. And now the likes of Marc Marquez and Valentino Rossi have caught flat track fever and now consider the sport an integral part of their training for road racing. Flat track racing (also popularly known as dirt track) was, and continues to be, a uniquely American form of motorcycle competition. Dating back to the earliest days of the sport, racing on dirt tracks was what American riders did, while road racing emerged as the dominant form of two-wheel competition across the pond with our European motorcycle racing cousins. In America the premier motorcycle racing series was the AMA Grand National Championship. From 1954 to 1985 the series included flat tack racing and road racing, so a rider who wanted to win the Grand National title during that era had to be proficient on the dirt as well as pavement. American and European motorcycle racing evolved in two completely different ways. Bikes that worked well on the flat tracks of America were generally powered by big V-Twin engines (i.e. American-made Harley-Davidson and Indian motorcycles), were a little heavier and longer for stability in the rutted turns and made power— tractor like—at lower revs via massive cylinders. The European motorbikes were lighter, often powered by much smaller single-cylinder mo- tors. Short and nimble and with powerful brakes. The two worlds of motorcycle racing, Ameri- can and European, rarely, if ever, collided. Then came Kenny Roberts. Raised on the rough-and-tumble dusty ovals of California's Central Valley, Roberts became a master of steering his racing bikes by the rear wheel (aka throttle steering). To turn harder, Rob- erts simply twisted the throttle a little (or in Ken- ny's case a lot) more. He rose through the ranks to become the AMA Grand National Champion in 1973 and '74 riding for Yamaha. By then Roberts was equally as good, if not better, on American road courses as he was on the dirt ovals. Europeans (especially the British) generally GROWING CHAMPIONS IN THE DIRT P148 Like many American road racing heroes, Kenny Roberts got his start racing dirt track.