Many NASCAR insiders credit the late Smokey Yunick as being one of the most creative and conniving race car builders ever in terms of interpreting rules. Other people would simply say that ol’ Smokey was a vicious cheater and leave it at that. In fact, those same people might even label all racers in NASCAR as cheaters.
The same connection can be made about the pioneers of AMA Superbike racing, which celebrates its 40th anniversary this season. Cheating during Superbike’s formative years was, in a word, rampant. How else could you squeeze 100-plus horsepower out of a BMW airhead boxer twin that normally delivered about half that amount to the rear wheel than to bend the rules a bit? Otherwise, parts like connecting rods and push rods, originally intended for touring and commuting applications might bend instead.
Udo Gietl, who engineered and built the Butler & Smith BMW that won the first AMA Superbike Championship with Reggie Pridmore as rider in 1976, once told me, “To get that horsepower, you had to do something.” He placed emphasis on the word “something,” too. Years ago I spoke with various other Superbike team members, and to a man they all agreed that things were, well, different then. Cook Neilson, who as editor of Cycle magazine teamed with his co-worker, the late Phil Schilling, to win the 1977 Daytona Superbike race aboard a heavily modified Ducati 750SS, explained to me one day, “Everybody knew what the deal was. There were certain areas that you wouldn’t touch or tinker with. There was a gentleman’s understanding about protests.” Translation: Everybody in the class cheated, they just confined the cheating within known parameters that everybody agreed on.
The dawning of Superbike
And so when the inaugural Superbike season got underway at Daytona in 1976, the die was cast. Actually, it had been cast a few years earlier when the AMA tested the Superbike waters with two production-based support classes, Open Superbike Production and Lightweight Superbike Production. AMA officials had been unsure about the validity of racing production-based bikes at National races, so they conducted a litmus test by including the two classes at the 1973 Laguna Seca National, where Yvon Duhamel rode his Pops Yoshimura-prepped Kawasaki Z1 to first place and Mike Clarke won the Lightweight race riding a Yamaha RD350. By the end of the race weekend a new era in road racing had begun. By coincidence, the California-based AFM (American Federation of Motorcyclists) had been supporting a similar class — called Superstreet — at its local venues since 1971. That, plus a partnership enjoyed by the AFM with promoters Gavin Trippe and Bruce Cox to sanction their events in 1972, and coupled with unbridled enthusiasm by racer Steve McLaughlin, most likely led to the 1973 Superbike Production race at the Laguna Seca National, which was promoted by Trippe-Cox and Associates.
For the subsequent two seasons the AMA allowed all promoters the option to include Superbike Production races as part of their programs, finally announcing plans at the conclusion of the 1975 season to drop the Lightweight format so they could focus solely on the open-class bikes for what became Superbike. And now, folks, let the cheating begin!
Gietl, still with Butler & Smith leading into the 1976 season, picks up the story at this point: “There was a loophole [in the rules] that said you could modify the swingarm and relocate the rear suspension,” cited the master bike builder. “I tested the rules when I built the monoshock rear suspension.” Had Smokey Yunick been a bike enthusiast, he would have looked at the B&S Beemers with coveted envy. Gietl and his aide-de-camp Todd Schuster, who also happened to be one crafty SOB, had sliced and diced the R90S’ frame to accommodate a unique single-shock system. By reworking the swingarm, they tied the new assembly to the existing frame using a single Koni shock absorber pirated from a Formula 1 race car. The semi-horizontal shock bolted to the frame’s original backbone, just above the engine. The AMA Superbike rule book stretched ever so slightly that day.
Indeed, the Butler & Smith bikes — three of them were prepared for the 1976 season for riders Pridmore, McLaughlin and Gary Fisher — were works of art, not to mention fast. And, upon close inspection, any one of the bikes could have been deemed the love child of Smokey Yunick himself, who, coincidentally, had his famous race shop only miles from Daytona International Speedway.
Setting the stage
Clearly, the Butler & Smith bikes set the tempo for what was to come. The BMWs boasted all sorts of rules-bending detail, and it took a blind eye from the tech inspectors to pass them through that phase of the race weekend. For instance, to shorten the protruding cylinders, “for cornering clearance,” as Gietl pointed out, the cylinders were shaved and shorter titanium connecting rods resided inside. Additional hocus-pocus could be found inside — things like heavy-duty cylinder studs to keep the shorter horizontal jugs horizontal, re-carved intake and exhaust ports to improve breathing, and a special concoction of piston rings to keep blow-by and friction in check with the one-off Venolia forged pistons. And we won’t even mention the “stock” mufflers — OK, yes we will: They had been filleted down the middle and spread apart from end to end to remove the baffle guts to clear space for the special reverse-cone megaphones inside that famed tuner C.R. Axtell developed to fit prior to Gietl and his friends welding the muffler bodies shut and coating their flanks with semi-gloss black paint so nobody would be the wiser for what was inside. All of this added up to giving each bike enough power to stay with any bike on the track.
The bikes handled well, too, and McLaughlin, who had experience on the ill-handling Japanese inline fours, marveled at how well the B&S Beemers responded to rider input. Ultimately, the German bikes had enough horsepower to put them out front on Daytona’s steep banking to lead the race, and on the final lap teammates Pridmore and McLaughlin found themselves in a dead heat with the finish line in sight. As Pridmore explained years later about that last lap, “I went into the Chicane faster than anybody, including myself,” allowing him to lead heading onto the banking. And that proved to be his undoing, because McLaughlin, crafty at drafting, slingshot past Pridmore to the finish line. The spectacular photo finish was the talk of Speed Week that year, prompting race fans to agree that Superbike racing was for real.
Pushing limits
Yet Superbike still had to grow up, so the cheating persisted. For a closer look, let’s visit some of the early Superbike teams that relied on first Kawasaki and later Suzuki and Honda inline fours for power. That’s when the whole cheating thing came to a boil one day with what became known as The Big Protest.
But first the teams had to fulfill their prophecy as cheaters, which they did rather well. Said two-time Superbike champ (1979-1980) Wes Cooley, who rode for Team Yoshimura (first on Kawasakis, later on Suzukis), “When Honda and Kawasaki came in, it was apparent that everybody was cheating. But because there was so much at stake, they had to be discreet.” Their discretion included chopping and re-setting steering head angles to improve turn-in for corners and straight-line stability, relocating engine placement for improved handling, and incorporating frame gussets and thicker tubing to help minimize wobbling. Rare front forks containing certain unobtainium components normally used on Suzuki’s RG500 Grand Prix bikes found their way onto the Yosh-Suzuki Superbikes, and in 1980 special ultra-thin, lightweight fairings similar in appearance to the nose piece on the stock GS1000S were secretly shipped to America for the Superbike effort. Cooley explained to me a few years after that incident: “The bikes at that time were unsafe, and they still went 160mph. They were ill-handling bikes.”
In response, Honda built special chrome-moly sections that were grafted into the frames to reduce weight and increase stiffness, and Team Kawasaki once showed up at the races with frames devoid of battery boxes and all unnecessary brackets and tabs. Hmm. One team member innocently claimed that these were stock frames. And we’re all to believe in leprechauns, too.
Neilson divulged even more about what went on behind closed doors in the teams’ shops. “The rules said no aluminum axles,” he pointed out as an example, “so we said, ‘fine, we’ll use titanium.’” Problem solved, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.
Indeed, one of the most ingenious cheats was created by Neilson and Schilling. Not even people like Smokey Yunick can beat the laws of physics, and one of its laws states in so many words that less back pressure (read: more noise) equals horsepower. But if you’re crafty enough, Superbike rules can be bent enough to challenge that undeniable law of physics. AMA rules required stock mufflers on the bikes (see Butler & Smith above), so tuners often just gutted their pipes (again, see B&S above) to reduce back pressure, and thus increase horsepower — and noise. But editors Neilson and Schilling had a plan, and so after skillfully ripping the insides out of their Ducati’s pipes, they took a clever route to fool the guys at tech inspection. Rules stated that the bikes must pass a pre-race sound check, which basically required the engine be revved to redline, at which point the good inspectors would activate their accurate sound meters to make sure the exhaust noise was below the required 110 decibels level. The Ducati duo’s solution was elegant in its simplicity: They mounted a substitute tachometer onto the bike for inspection. This temporary instrument had been recalibrated so that when the engine revved to about 5,000rpm, the tachometer’s needle pegged itself at redline. The tech inspector was happy, Neilson and Schilling were happy, and ultimately the Duck fans that came to watch (and listen) to the race were happy. After all, there’s nothing sweeter than the sound of a desmo Ducati engine uncorked and at full chat on the front straight, no?
The Big Protest
Eventually, though, all good things must come to an end, and the beginning of the end took place at the final race of the 1980 season. This incident developed into The Big Protest involving Team Yoshimura-Suzuki and Team Kawasaki. Their riders Wes Cooley (Yoshimura-Suzuki) and Eddie Lawson (Kawasaki) were locked in a duel for the championship, and with one race to go Lawson led Cooley by 13 points. Lawson needed only a fourth-place finish or better to wrap up the season as champion. Cooley needed a win to have a chance of retaining his title. As things developed, Lawson’s bike wouldn’t start for the race, so the team mechanics quickly put his No. 21 number plates on teammate Dave Aldana’s bike and then rolled it onto the grid. This was in absolute violation of AMA rules, which state that a competitor has to race the same machine used for qualifying. Even so, Cooley ultimately won the race, while the Lawson/Aldana bike broke its engine. Cooley kept his title, setting the stage for The Big Protest.
Kawasaki protested, claiming the cantilevered shock absorbers (clearly illegal) on Cooley’s Yosh-Suzuki weren’t legal. Yoshimura countered, stating that Lawson hadn’t raced the bike on which he’d qualified, so Kawasaki had no grounds for protesting. Finally, the AMA disallowed both protests, and Cooley was crowned the champ for the second year in a row.
Following that ordeal, much of the rules violations subsided, but not completely. However, the cheating tapered off noticeably in 1984 when Honda flooded the field with a bike that came factory-fresh ready for racing. Honda’s VF750F Interceptor was like no other bike of its time, and it changed the profile of Superbike racing forever. Clearly, history points to 1984 as the turning point in the cheating, not to mention how the motorcycle manufacturers from around the world repositioned their views on how a sport bike should be engineered and sold.
What followed on the salesroom floors and on the Superbike tracks of America, and later the world (when the World Superbike Championship was launched in 1988), was a flurry of new motorcycle designs. Yamaha joined the frenzy with its FZ lineup, Kawasaki went into battle with its Ninja-based warriors, and Suzuki showed up with perhaps the most influential design of all, the GSX-R750. Later Ducati donned its racing duds, and even Harley-Davidson had a go at Superbike racing.
These bikes were — and still are — essentially race bikes slightly dumbed down for street use. Anybody wanting to go Superbike racing could, with a few relatively minor modifications, join the fray. Cheating — at least at the level that defined Superbike racing in the 1970s — was no longer necessary. To be sure, there will be guys like ol’ Smokey willing to push the envelope on design, but the fact remains that today’s sport bikes are so intertwined with features that show up on the track that Superbike racing will never revert back to its good ol’ carefree ways that helped shape the class that it is today. MC