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VOL. 55 ISSUE 16 APRIL 24, 2018 P133 "I was in a meeting with them and told them they should come back and do the superbike series," Ulrich remembers. "They told me they didn't have any budget for it. I said they should at least do the rounds on the west coast. I told them to send a proposal into Tosh Koyama, the racing manager at Suzuki, and propose a couple of one offs. They basically said, 'How do you do that?' "I said, 'Well um, you got any letterhead here?' Okay, give me that. You got a typewriter? Okay.' I asked them what they needed and wrote up a letter saying something like 'I think we can do well at these races and we need this much.' I think it was five K for each round. They sent it in and it got approved." Cooley, who'd been riding for Kawasaki in '83, was left without a ride when Kawasaki pulled out of the series. So, he was more than happy to come back to the Yoshimura Suzuki fold when they called to see if wanted to do the West Coast races. He would be riding a Suzuki GS750ES-based machine. It was basically a hot- rod with little or no factory parts, built hastily in a couple of weeks at the Yoshimura race shop. "I did it without a contract, probably for next to nothing, maybe expense money," Cooley recalls. "I did it because I was loyal to Pops. Nobody thought we'd be competitive, but I wasn't thinking that way. When I tested the bike, it handled reasonably well and I figured I could make up for the horsepower difference to the Hondas." Yoshimura's Suzuki GS750ES debuted at AMA Superbike round two at Riverside Inter- national Speedway. It almost didn't happen after a kerfuffle at Daytona where Cooley crashed and his superbike was given to Graeme Crosby before the team even knew Cooley's status. The team smoothed things over with Cooley and the former champ was back on the bike. At Riverside the Yoshimura hot rod proved not bad. The Hondas would put about 30 bike lengths on Cooley on Riverside's straight, but Cooley knew the track well and used the handling of the 750ES to get around Honda- mounted Sam McDonald and John Bettencourt to nail down second behind factory Honda rider Fred Merkel. Then at Laguna Seca, Cooley actually beat Merkel with a last- lap, last-turn pass, but the red flag came out just before the two crossed the finish line and scor- ing was backed up a lap giving the win to Merkel. It wouldn't have mattered anyway. After the race the top five bikes were weighed by the AMA and the Yoshimura Suzuki came in at 386 pounds, four pounds under the legal limit. Officials gave the team the chance to add two quarts of oil, but it was still light by three pounds. "They [Yoshimura] were push- ing it right up to the limit," Cooley said of the weight of his Yo- shimura Suzuki GS750ES. "They thought they needed to do that to have any chance of beating the Honda. It was funny, as the bike was going to the scales my me- chanics were dropping screws and bolts into the exhaust pipe trying to bring the weight up" Finally, at the second Sears Point race that year Cooley scored the win. Merkel had the race well in hand when about halfway though he crashed bring- ing out the red flag. On the restart it was all Cooley pulling away to a convincing victory. It ended nearly a three-year drought for Cooley and ultimately proved to be his final national victory. "It was sort of a tough way to win with Freddie [Merkel] crash- ing out," Cooley admitted. "But that's part of racing. You've got to finish. It still felt great to get that win and I think it was a big boost to the whole Yoshimura team. For years we'd been the team to beat and suddenly we were the underdogs." Cooley's lone win kept Honda from sweeping the entire 1984 AMA Superbike season. It also helped strengthen the ties be- tween Yoshimura and Suzuki. "Winning that race in 1984 proved the commitment we had to racing," Sakakura said. "It was big for us to get that victory. I think Suzuki was probably even surprised we pulled it off with that bike." CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives