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VOL. 54 ISSUE 39 OCTOBER 3, 2017 P121 wasn't able to get back inside the top 10 until round five at the Sal- zburgring in Austria, where he'd qualified on the front row. From there results steadily improved. He had another outstanding race in the Dutch TT at Assen. There Chandler worked his way up through the field and battled past Honda's Shinichi Itoh and Rainey to score fourth and just missing the podium by three-tenths of a second behind Àlex Crivillé, after Crivillé used the superior power of his Honda to blow by Chandler on the back straight on the last lap. Assen was the halfway point in the season and Chandler was seventh in the standings and things were looking good at that point for improving. Then the bot- tom dropped out. At Catalunya, Chandler was in position for an- other solid finish when Itoh hit the back of Chandler's bike causing Itoh to crash, taking Chandler with him. Then at Mugello, Chandler crashed in qualifying. "The next thing I remember I'm waking up in the medical center," Chandler recalls. The concussion kept him out of the next two rounds. With both Chandler and Mladin riding injured (Mladin had broken and then re-broken a collarbone) Cagiva started looking for other options. At the British GP they brought in FIM World Superbike rider Carl Fogary, who turned in a great ride finishing fourth in his one-off ride. Then the team brought on John Kocinski, who earlier that season had been fired from the factory Suzuki 250GP squad. Kocinski's hiring did not sit well with Chandler, or the rest of the team. "John had gotten fired at Suzu- ki and I think at the time they [Ca- giva] didn't have to invest much to get him," Chandler speculates. "It ended up good for them, because he won some races, but it caused a shit storm with the people inside the team. "I was giving it everything I had and then they bring John on. I was thinking, 'Wait, we're barely getting it done with what we've got and yet you're going to add a third bike?' They pulled one or two guys over from the test team [to work with Kocinski] and I felt they need to be doing testing, not running a third bike at the races. It was a little frustrating." Even though Chandler had closed out '93 well, with the Kocinski hiring, the bike throwing him down a few times, he wasn't in the best place when 1994 rolled around. But help came in the form of veteran crew chief Kel Carruthers, who Cagiva brought on board. "He helped me get my head on straight," Chandler said of Carruthers. The '94 version of the GP500 was closer to the other factory bikes in terms of top speed, but Chandler said the bike then started having reliability issues. "We'd qualify well and run well early in the races, but we just kept have mechanical problems with the bike and had a lot of DNFs," Chandler remembers. "It was kind of frustrating because we had a really good bike, but we couldn't get all the pieces to come to- gether. I remember at a couple of races I was battling near the front when a cylinder popped off." But Chandler had one more stellar performance on the Cagiva. It came at the end of '94 in Argentina where he finished runner up to Honda's Mick Doo- han and eight seconds ahead of Cagiva teammate Kocinski. With such a strong perfor- mance at the end of the year, Chandler hoped to re-sign with Cagiva, but then they unexpect- edly announced at the end of '94 they were pulling out of GP rac- ing. Chandler was dumbfounded at Cagiva's decision. "I thought they'd worked so long to get to where they got and then they just pulled the plug on it," Chandler said. "It didn't make sense." For Chandler, there was a happy ending. He came back and won two more AMA Superbike Championships with Kawasaki, following in the footsteps of Reg Pridmore and Fred Merkel as the only three-time champions of the series to that point. In the end Chandler looks back with mixed feelings about his time at Cagiva. "I looked at it as a challenge to try to run with the bigger teams," he said. "And we had some good results. And even though I was more interested in winning than the money, the years at Cagiva were my best paid years in GP." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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