Cycle News

VOL. 55 ISSUE 20 MAY 22, 2018 P133 And things weren't much better in the 600 class were he also topped out with a 16th at Gateway Interna- tional near St. Louis. So that was it. Stark reality. Metzger had given it his best shot in the pro game in '95 and came up short. No shame in that. It's ultimately the fate of most privateers who spend big money chasing big dreams. So, while his visions of be- ing a big-time pro were pretty much out the window, he still loved road racing and would be happy doing it on the club level. And if he had some extra time, he might even still hit a nearby pro race or two. You never know, another top 10 could happen. Hope springs eternal. So, in '96 Metzger regrouped and set his sights on more realistic local goals. He went to Daytona '96, because it's Daytona and he'd had success there winning national club titles as he was coming up. He entered his first superbike race on his nearly stock Suzuki and in the Daytona 200 he finished 38th. The next pro race he'd hit would be Mid-Ohio, but in the mean time he was doing club racing and he raced several weekends in the rain, trying several tire combos, and had gotten a good feel for rac- ing in the wet. The AMA Pro weekend at Mid- Ohio rolled around in early June. Metzger was at his peak having raced a good club schedule leading up to the weekend and should it rain he was ready. He was racing 750 Supersport but entered Superbike just for the extra cash he could make. For the Superbike race he qualified near the back of the field, in fact Metzger recalls it being the last row (upon research, he actually qualified 32nd in a 42-rider field). Then it rained on race day. He used a well-worn Dunlop rain rear and new rain front. At the start Metzger was delighted to find he was slicing through the field at a pretty good clip. "I was just racing, having a good time and really didn't know where I was running," Metzger remembers. Then Mike Smith crashed bring- ing out the red flag. Metzger pulled into the pits and his buddy and fellow racer Jim Leslie came running up to him excited and said, "Hey, do you need anything? You're doing really well!" Turns out Metzger had passed 21 other riders and was up to 11th-place after only seven laps! Leslie had a new rain tire mounted on one of his wheels and offered to mount it on Metzger's bike, but then Dunlop's Jim Allen walked by, with clipboard in hand, looked at Metzger's worked rear tire just as Leslie was arriving with a new rear and Allen surprisingly said to Brett, "You're running pretty good. I'd say just run what you got." Metzger was just having fun racing in the first segment, but on the restart, he got a great launch and was quickly up to fifth place. "Now I'm paying attention," Metzger laughs. "I noted going into the Keyhole that Miguel [Duhamel] was slow- ing down way more than I was. So I made a note that if I was close enough I would pass him there the next lap." Sure enough he was there and zipped underneath Duhamel to take fourth the next lap. "Then he blows by me on the back straight so fast," Metzger said of Duhamel and his factory Honda. Surprisingly, even though Duhamel got by him one more time or two on the long straight, Metzger was feeling it in the rain and held off Duhamel for third when the race was red flagged again and stopped. "I was so excited and nervous and everything, that I was tongue tied when they came to me for the TV interview," Metzger admits. "I was packing up, one of the last guys out and Jim Leslie and the New England gang comes up and ask me what I was doing and I told them just getting back on the road head- ing home. 'No,' they said. 'You're coming out to dinner with us.'" That night Metzger went back to being a privateer, an invited guest of the New England crew meant sleeping on the bathroom floor of a packed hotel room with a group of other racers and their crew. Metzger raced for another couple of years, but never again duplicated the success he had at Mid-Ohio. "For years guys wouldn't intro- duce me as Brett Metzger, but as, 'Hey, here's the guy who beat Duhamel!'" Metzger laughs. And while his dreams of becoming a factory racer never came to pass, Metzger will always have that shining moment at Mid-Ohio to look back on and reminisce at accomplishing something only a rare few privateers before or since ever did. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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