Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 21 MAY 27, 2015 P133 have Honda support. It looked like a Dale Quar- terley/Fred Merkel showdown in Sunday's final, but Merkel crashed hard in oil left by a blown bike. The race was stopped for more than an hour for the cleanup. The Loudon rowdies got restless and started booing of- ficials thinking that the restart was being delayed to give Honda time to repair Merkel's badly damaged machine. Merkel suffered se- vere abrasion and when the race restarted he bravely rode, but was well back. Meanwhile Quarterley was gone – stretching a seven second lead over McDonald late in the race. With just five laps to go a col- lective gasp could be heard from the Loudon faithful as Quarterley slowed and pulled his green ma- chine off to the side of the track. McDonald cruised home to his one and only AMA Superbike win. COOK NEILSON DAYTONA 1977 Cook Neilson's influence on AMA Superbike goes light years be- yond his modest two-year career in the series. Neilson and Phil Schilling were editors at Cycle during the zenith of that publica- tion. In the mid-1970s, Neilson began racing a mild-mannered 750cc Ducati Super Sport, with Schilling serving as the tuner, in the up-and-coming Superbike Production class. The exploits of Neilson/Schilling and the Ducati were chronicled in detail on the pages of Cycle. Their stories not only brought AMA Superbike racing to the attention of tens of thousands of readers, it also helped launch the Ducati sport bike revolution in America. The Desmo displaced 883ccs and was affectionately dubbed the California Hot Rod. The V-Twin was going against the more pow- erful 1000cc, four-cylinder Japa- nese bikes. What the little blue Ducati lacked in raw power it more than made up for in light weight and superb handling. Everything came together for Neilson at Daytona in 1977. Neilson and Wes Cooley, riding a Yo- shimura Kawasaki KZ1000, battled early in the race before Neilson pulled away. Cooley blew a shock on his big Kawi trying to stay with the nimble Ducati. Up front it was Neilson who won by an incredible 30 seconds. Neilson finished just three points short of winning the '77 championship, in spite of missing two rounds of the series. "Daytona was really the only thing we really wanted to win," Neil- son said. "Phil [Schilling] was so excited about how good we'd made the bike that he convinced me to race it, primarily in the West Coast rounds, the rest of that season." DALE QUARTERLEY – MID-OHIO 1993 Dale Quarterley's astonishing win at Mid-Ohio in August of 1993 will go down in history as one of the great memories in AMA Superbike racing. Almost 10 years to the day after he finished fifth in his Super- bike debut at Mid-Ohio, Quar- terley's decade of determination finally paid off. Tears flowed freely from the Team Mirage Kawasaki team members on the podium that day. Even Quarterley's com- petitors were happy for him. Quarterley's win came 10 years and at least 65 starts from his first Superbike race, making it the longest wait for a first win in the history of the series. He was 32 at the time of the win. It also marked one of the few times a privateer won an AMA Superbike race. What made Quarterley's win that day in Lexington, Ohio, extraor- dinary was that fact that he beat all the big guns in the series such as Jamie James, Doug Polen, Colin Edwards, Miguel Duhamel, Mike Smith and Thomas Stevens. Quarterley should have won much earlier in his career. He led many times – most notably at his home track in Loudon in 1984 when he had a huge lead late in the race and his bike ran out of gas. The Brockton, Mass. rider made a successful jump to stock car racing after leaving motor- cycle racing in the mid-1990s. "Maybe I should have won a lot more," Quarterley said when looking back on his career. "But at least I finally got one and doing it as a privateer made it really special. That's something that hopefully will make that win re- membered for a long time." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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