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/658612
VOL. 53 ISSUE 12 MARCH 29, 2016 P113 While those types of tracks are never ideal and normally looked down on by road racing purists, renowned track designer Alan Wilson designed the track and it was actually met with approval by most riders. Wilson did an excellent job with the transitions from the oval to the infield sections of the track and he ingeniously managed a way to squeeze a 2.4-mile, 15-turn road course inside the footprint of a 1.5-mile oval. The first AMA Superbike weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway was scheduled as the season finale in October of 1996. The inaugural edition of the race was probably the best attended. The track was new at that point and there was an intense battle for the superbike championship coming down to the wire between Doug Chandler and Miguel Duhamel—a classic Kawasaki-versus- Honda battle. Chandler won it. The only problem with the event was, towards the end when promoters realized the crowd for the opening superbike race at the venue would be small, they "seeded" the event with thousands of free tickets given away at the casinos. The idea was once you got people out to see what super- bike racing is all about, they would see how excit- ing it was and come back as a paying customer the next year. What turned out happing however was something quite different. The story went something like this: Fan A who got free tickets at the casino, sits next to Fan B, a dream fan who paid full face value for the best seats in the house months earlier. Fan A says to Fan B, "Wow these are great seats, especially since I got them for free!" "You got them free?" "Oh yeah, they were passing them out like hot- cakes down at the Imperial Palace!" Guess what happens to the paying customer in that scenario? Exactly… he's so ticked off that he was the sucker who paid 80 bucks for a seat that almost everyone around him got for free, that he'll probably never come back. Of course it didn't help either, that in spite of the October date, with sunbaked 90-degree weather, you were being fried if you tried to watch from the grandstands. In 1997 it was again between Chandler and Duhamel for the championship. Duhamel, who really needed a win and for Chandler to finish well down the order, did about all he could and finished a close second to Ducati's Mat Mladin. Chandler, who led the series coming into the race, finished a conservative eighth and won the championship by 12 points over Duhamel. In the final year at LVMS the championship was again on the line and this time Chandler's two-year string of luck at the track ran out. Chandler had to beat Ben Bostrom in order to win the championship and in the final he was doing just that when his Muzzy Kawasaki ZX-7R suddenly sprang an oil leak. AMA Pro Racing officials allowed Chandler to continue to race in spite of his bike billowing a blue cloud behind him. It slowed Chandler enough that he dropped to 12th. Bostrom went on to finish second on the factory Honda to clinch the title. Interestingly Mladin won his first superbike race with Suzuki (he'd won races the year before on Ducati) at Las Vegas, giving the race a bit of interesting trivia. All of this action of course was performed in front of empty grandstands. The '98 race was symbolic of how the Las Ve- gas media treated the race. A local businessman and his wife who flew to the race in a helicopter crashed the copter on takeoff in the parking lot of the track. No one was seriously injured in the crash, but the local TV stations covered the copter accident, while there was no mention of the actual action on the track. Three strikes and the Las Vegas race was out. No matter what they tried the promoter could not get people to come out to watch superbikes at the facility and the plug was pulled after the '98 event. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives