BEST OF JODY’S BOX: MY ROAD RACE GLORY DREAM WAS CRUSHED… OR SO I THOUGHT!
Just to the right of the mirror in the bathroom is a photo of me working the back section of Dallas International Motor Speedway on a 125 GP road racer. Every morning, after crawling reluctantly out of bed, I walk to the bathroom with absolutely no will to live, let alone any desire to go out to the barn to drag my bike out to the Jodymobile in the dark. While I’m rubbing sleep from my eyes, the first thing I see is that road race photo. Racing motocross every week, testing two days a week and spending every spare minute working on MXA’s bevy of test bikes has a tendency to make motocross seem like work. Actually, it is my work, and I like it, but the constant repetition has an effect on my mood, especially when the sun isn’t up yet and the warmth of my bed is calling me like a siren song.
A couple years ago, more like two decades, I cut back on what was the life of a SoCal racer in the 1980s, which was to race three times a week (two day races and one night race). Back in the early days, a SoCal racer could race five times a week. I felt guilty only racing three times when my friends were racing at Irwindale, Ascot, Corona, OCIR, Saddleback, Carlsbad or Indian Dunes five times a week. I had been on that treadmill for a long time, but over the ensuing years, I have gone from racing three times a week to racing two times a week to only racing one time a week. I’m better for it. And that road race photo reminds me that it’s not quantity that counts but the quality of the experience.
Why does that photo have so much power to keep me motivated? Because for a brief period from 1969 to the mid-1970s I decided to cut back on racing motocross and focus on road racing. I thought that road racers had an easier life. They didn’t get roosted. Their tracks were silk-upholstered. Road race pits were paved, and road racers got to dress in shiny leather suits that didn’t get dirty during practice. I decided to start on little bikes before moving up to the big bike classes; It was the smartest thing I ever did. In 1974 one of my dirt track/road race friends let me do a couple laps during a test day at a local track on his new Yamaha four-cylinder TZ750. The circuit was two miles long, but on my first lap on the TZ750 I went 2-1/2 miles. Back in the pits, my friend suggested that my lap times would improve if I didn’t take the escape road at the end of every straight. Right then, I was glad that I had become a 250-and-under road racer. The brutal acceleration of a highly tuned four-cylinder two-stroke made my eyes water at top speed (and, in my case, some of it was tears).
I loved my 125 GP bike, and I still have it sitting under a layer of dust next to my twin-cylinder Suzuki road racer in my barn. My motocross experience helped me and hurt me during my road race days. Road races didn’t have starting gates; they lined the bikes up in rows of three or four for as many rows as it took. And when the flagman waved the flag, everyone took off. Without a starting gate, it was a piece of cake for a motocrosser to come from a couple rows back to the front in the first 100 feet. Yes, I cheated a little, but the AMA never punished me.
My rocket starts only bit me once. At the Austin Aquafest road race through the streets of Austin, Texas, I qualified fifth, my best ever starting spot, and I lined up in the second row directly behind Freddy Spencer. He wasn’t a three-time World Road Racing Champion at this point in his career, but he was very good, and I knew that being directly behind Freddy in the second row of the grid was as good as being in the front row. I knew Freddy would get a good start, and my plan was to blast off behind him on the long drag down Riverside Road, which actually was right next to the Colorado River, and then just before the hard left at Lee Barton Drive, highlighted by curbs and telegraph poles, I would draft up the inside and pass him going into the very dangerous 90-degree left. Yes, he would pass me back when we turned into the Austin Convention Center parking lot, but that didn’t matter because I had raced most of the guys on the grid before and knew that I was barely a top-ten guy by the race’s checkered flag. But—and this is a big but—I’d still be the only guy to ever pass Freddy Spencer!
It didn’t happen. When the flag fell for the start of the 125 GP race, I kept my head down and launched like no one ever launched a 125 road racer before. It was a beautiful thing. Unfortunately, when I looked up, horror of horrors, Freddy Spencer’s Yamaha TA125 twin wasn’t cleaned out yet. He was trying to clutch it up to speed when I hit him from behind so hard that the front wheel of my E.C. Birt-tuned Hodaka single wedged between his right exhaust pipe’s stinger and the Yamaha’s swingarm. We were locked together. I held the throttle wide open and pushed Freddy for 50 feet with my front wheel skidding until his engine caught, and he popped loose. I was last to Lee Barton Drive, and my dream of lasting road race glory was crushed.
However, when I quit road racing a year later and went back to full-time motocross, I found out that in motocross I had become a cult hero as the man who rammed Freddy Spencer. Hey, it was something!
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