Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/646962
CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE D ave Hoenig is an institu- tion in American flat track racing. It makes sense—after all he's been around dirt ovals his entire life, first, as the son of a racer, then racer himself and ultimately a photographer and reporter. Some of the earliest memories of Hoenig revolve around flat track rac- ing. Throughout his life Hoenig has hung around dirt ovals and over the years his entire family, including his wife Kathy, who is the chief scorer for AMA Flat Track and daughter Danielle have joined him in in becoming integral pieces in the work of putting on national flat track events. Talk about dedication—Dave and Kathy have worked 457 AMA Pro Grand Nationals, including 382 consecutive! It's easy for Hoenig to remember how many years he's been going to flat track races, since he attended his first race, the Peoria TT National, when he was five or six months old. "My mom didn't want to take me to Springfield because of sitting in the grandstands," Hoenig said. "But it was okay with Peoria since they could take me and sit up on the hills under the shade trees." Hoenig's dad was a racer and his mother was a rider as well. Dave started racing when he was 16 and at the time you couldn't turn pro until you were 18. "When I was 18 I got my novice license," Hoe- nig recalls. "And I rode three years as a novice. Then I moved up to what, at that time, they called amateurs. I raced that for a couple of years. I never had a twin of my own; I always had to ride somebody else's stuff. By that time I was starting to get bigger and bigger (to an eventual 6' 4") so I quit." Hoenig came back to racing again, but in the interim he began taking pictures at the races. Hoenig's job as an ironworker took him to St. Charles, Missouri, and he and his son would go across the Mississippi River every Tuesday night to Granite City, Illinois, to watch the races. It was great racing and Hoenig thought it was a shame that the results never made into Cycle News. "At first I just started sending in results," Hoenig remembers. "And then I thought, 'Maybe I should write a little story,' and they printed that. And then I started sending a picture in and they printed that." Those early reports from Granite City soon led to more and more race coverage and by the late 1970s Hoenig's secondary career as a race photographer/journalist was established. Dave's wife Kathy helped with photography in PURE DEDICATION TO DIRT TRACK P98 Dave Hoenig