Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 36 SEPTEMBER 9, 2015 P101 I was basically riding a 250 for the last five laps and Marshall got back past me. But I had fun." His run at Mallory Park so impressed Heron Suzuki's managing director Denny Rohan, that Schwantz was invited to race in three GPs in '86, Assen being the first, then Belgium and Italy. And he would ride a 500, foregoing the normal route of racing one of the support classes before enter- ing the premier GP class. So with the earlier Mallory Park race under his belt, a GP machine wasn't completely foreign to Schwantz when he came to Assen in '86, but the track would be. But there was a solution for that, too. The day before the GP there was a TT For- mula One race. Heron prepped a street bike for Schwantz for that race, a Suzuki RG500 Gamma fitted with pipes and carbs. So it was with wide eyes that Schwantz made his way to The Netherlands. Once at the track he ran into a fellow American who characteristically didn't offer much encouragement. "My dad and I were walking through scrutineer- ing and Kenny Roberts walks up and says, 'What are you guys doing here?'" Schwantz recalled. "I said, 'Man, just came to race a grand prix.' And he says, 'You couldn't have picked a worse place.' And then he just turned around and walked away." What Roberts meant by that statement was that if you were going to make your GP debut, Assen was a tough circuit for that, with its narrow width, no curbing and just generally being an unforgiving racetrack. In the TTF1 race Schwantz ran surprisingly well on the street version of the Gamma. He battled factory Honda's Joey Dunlop and Paul Iddon. Dunlop pulled away, but Schwantz caught Iddon late. "I passed Iddon on the last chicane, which kind of upset him because I took some championship points from him," Schwantz said. But after dig- ging a little more it was discovered that Iddon was more than a little upset. He came blazing over to Schwantz' pit after the race wanting to fight, he was so livid that another Suzuki rider cost him points in a championship he was battling to win. The backstory to that was Schwantz was more than eager to beat Iddon after mechanics of the British Formula One Suzuki team were openly making fun of Schwantz and his well- scuffed leathers, thanks to a few practice falls. After getting beat, Iddon was not only ticked at Schwantz, but also got in the face of those same mechanics for not giving him pit-signal warnings that Schwantz was chasing him down. Then in the GP, Schwantz found Roberts' earlier warning prophetic. "It was push start still in '86," Schwantz said. "I got a pretty decent start and ended up running off the track, off the back straightaway, where basically everybody runs off at Assen. Lawson ran off there earlier. I ran it off in the grass, toppled over, got back on the bike and got back inside the top 10, I think, before it ingested enough grass and dirt and stuff that it seized." Reports of the race indicate that Schwantz ran as high as fourth in the early stages of the GP before running off the track, dropping to seventh and then crashing a half-a-lap later. He went on to race a couple of more GPs in '86, scoring a pair of top-10 results and then three more again in '87, where he finished an outstanding fifth in Spain. Schwantz said those early forays into GP racing did wonders for him by the time he went full-time in the championship in 1988 with Pepsi Suzuki. "Anytime you can get on a 500 and ride against the likes of Lawson and Gardner and the guys who were there at the time made you a better and faster rider," Schwantz explained. "The learning curve just steepened up immediately." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

• Cover