Cycle News

VOL. 53 ISSUE 28 JULY 19, 2016 P115 other hand, was a prototype of things to come, ripping around on ill-handling, super-powerful four-cylinder monsters like the Kawasaki KZ1000 and Suzuki GS1000, leaving big black marks accelerating out of the turns and carrying power wheelies all while waving to the crowd. Even though it may not have been the fastest way around the track, it was thrilling visually and fans came in droves to watch. Boehm was the man behind getting Cooley to come out of hiding after all these years. And to tie it all together was collector extraordinaire Brian O'Shea, who happened to own the very Yoshimu- ra Suzuki GS1000S that Cooley raced to the 1980 AMA Superbike Championship. If Boehm could convince Cooley to come out to VMD, he had the perfect machine for him to ride. "I've been doing the vintage thing and racing since the mid-90s and so has my partner-in- crime," Boehm smiled looking over at O'Shea. "Brian has a great collection of old pedigreed superbikes that have won championships. He doesn't just store them, he shows them and makes them run and likes to ride them occasion- ally and have the guys who raced them ride them. We've been talking for years about doing some- thing with the legends of this class. We talked to Wes about coming out and he was good with it, Brian was good with it and the AMA was good with it, so it was kind of the perfect storm. I'm just happy we could do it at Vintage Motorcycle Days— it's a good fit. "The most gratifying thing about this, is we went out to dinner with Wes last night and he looked at us and said, 'Thank you guys.' That alone made it worth it to me." For O'Shea the fact that Cooley was riding a former championship-winning machine that he now owns was at the same time thrilling and nerve racking. "Scary man, scary, you know?" O'Shea said when asked what it was like to watch Cooley pull out of pit lane on his bike. "You're responsible. I went over that thing five times. And then every- thing goes through your mind—the battery power on, is it on prime, is he going to run out of gas? And then you bump him off and you're like, 'Oh god, I hope he comes around.' And then he comes around waving and it's 'Oh, thank god! One lap down.' It's been exciting." Clean shaven and with closely cropped hair, Cooley looked a bit older, but healthy for a guy who barely escaped death in a crash at Sears Point in '85 and has a difficult case of diabetes. Fellow superbike racer Terry Hampton saw Wes and said, "I almost didn't recognize you without the mullet, but then I saw you walking and I said, 'yep, that's Wester." For Cooley, his return to the track brought back a flood of memories. "To be real honest with you, I was a little apprehensive about getting back on the bike," Cooley admitted. "I haven't really ridden much at all in 30 years. Suzuki gave me one of the replicas they built for me, but the problem is, I want to go too fast. But once I got out here, the sounds, the smells, it was like going back 40 years in time. I was happy, maybe even relieved, to find that people still remembered. To me that's what it's all about, whether it's dirt bikes, riding on the street, road race or not racing, whatever, it's a family. I always appreciated people that came that viewed what I did and understood it and respected it." When asked if it would be years again before we saw him again, Cooley was quick to say, "No, this opens the flood gates for me now. I had to get away from it for years because I still wanted to race, but coming back and getting to see everybody after all these years and finding that a lot of folks are still huge fans of that era I raced in… No, I'm going to come back to the races every chance I get now." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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