16 minute read
COVER STORY SCHWANTZ GETS BACK!
FULL CIRCLE
World Champ and AMA HOFer Kevin Schwantz finally takes possession of the Superbike that launched his career — the #289 Yoshimura Suzuki GS700
BY MITCH BOEHM PHOTOS: LARS FRAZER AND KEVIN WING
Sometimes, being in the right place at the right time makes all the difference.
It certainly was for AMA Motorcycle Hall of Famer and 1993 500cc Grand Prix World Champion Kevin Schwantz, who, while negotiating to buy the ’94-spec Suzuki RGV500 he campaigned that year in the 500cc World Championship, discovered that the seller, British collector Steve Wheatman, also had Schwantz’s first AMA Superbike for sale — the #289 Yoshimura Suzuki GS700 that Schwantz won three AMA Superbike nationals on in 1985, his very first year of Superbike competition.
“Honestly,” Schwantz told me recently, “discovering Steve had the #289 Superbike — and that it was available! — was a total surprise. Marnie [Lincoln, Kevin’s business manager] was negotiating with Steve and, out of the blue, he said, ‘Hey, guess what else I have?’ We all had a laugh, and I ended up buying both,
and they’ll end up being displayed in the house I’m building on our family’s ranch in central Texas along with my ’93 championship machine.”
That #289 bike has quite a storied past, before, during and after Schwantz’s skinny Texas posterior was in the seat. The Yoshimura-built Suzuki GS700ES (700cc being a result of the Reagan-imposed tariff on Japanese motorcycles with engines larger than 700cc, a move to protect Harley-Davidson) had been the late AMA Hall of Famer Wes Cooley’s ride prior to Kevin showing up at Willow in late 1984 for an AMA Superbike tryout with Team Yoshimura.
The tale of Kevin Schwantz’s rise to professional prominence has been well-told over the years: A young and unbelievably talented club racer is noticed by an industry expert and ends up getting a tryout with a historically successful team on the verge of reigniting its bonds with a major manufacturer and the AMA Superbike series. The expert in question? Motojournalist, racer and team owner John Ulrich, founder and Editor-in-Chief of Roadracing World & Motorcycle Technology — who also had roots at Cycle, Cycle World and Cycle News, the publication he worked for when he first noticed Schwantz.
“I remember coming up behind the guy during a 24-hour endurance race at Nelson Ledges in ’84,” Ulrich told me, “and I couldn’t pass him. The Yamaha FJ600 he was riding was swapping and sliding and spinning, and his throttle hand never left the pinned position. I’d seen a lot of racers over the years, and I knew this
Schwantz on the family ranch in Texas with the machine that launched his AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame and World Championship career.
guy was good.”
“Yoshimura was looking to return to AMA roadracing at the time,” Ulrich added, “so I told ’Nabe [Suehiro Watanabe, Yoshimura’s main man at the time] he should take a look at this kid. ‘You won’t believe how good he is,’ I told him.”
“So ’Nabe says, ‘OK, we’ll do a test,’ but I knew how that was gonna go…it’d be difficult — three or four laps on an unfamiliar bike and racetrack, and boom we’re done. So I invited Kevin to come to Willow Springs [where the test would be held] the day before to ride my Team Hammer endurance bike so he could learn the track and learn to ride a big, fast bike with slicks. I called Jimmy Allen [Dunlop’s head tire honcho at the time], got some fresh Dunlops for the test, and got Kevin up to speed.”
Schwantz’s test the following weekend is now the stuff of legend, but suffice it to say he rode well, beating all the So Cal Experts handily in Sunday’s AFM featured event and breaking the AMA Superbike lap record in the process, even after stalling the bike on the line.
“I was pumped for the opportunity,” Schwantz told me recently, “so I’m in my leathers at 7 a.m., just waiting. The Yosh guys show up just before 9 a.m., and pretty quickly I’m being pushed out into practice. I get one lap and see the checkered flag! No fast laps at all, but still, somehow, I’m fairly calm. I mean, I’d been
JOHN ULRICH
Schwantz at speed at the Laguna Seca AMA National in ’85, where he jumped out to a commanding lead early-on only to blow an engine. But the message had been sent.
riding an FJ600, and here I am on a real-deal AMA Superbike!”
“Anyway,” Schwantz added, “the thing’s got a grabby clutch, and I dump it at the start and stall the bike. [Local So Cal fast guy] Doug Toland runs out to help me push it and I get moving, and as I’m tipping into turn one I see the pack heading into turn three, about a half mile in front of me. It took me about four laps to get the feel of the bike, and then four more to catch and pass the leaders and break the lap record.”
“When I got to the truck the Yosh guys’ jaws were on the ground. They time that was pretty good.”
After some pre-season testing, Schwantz and the Yosh team showed up at Daytona in March of ’85, practicing well and garnering a spot on the front row of the 200-miler with AMA HOFers Freddie Spencer and Fred Merkel. Both were on factoryspec VF750F Honda Interceptors, a far cry from Schwantz’s air-cooled, three-year-old, tube-framed GS700.
“Daytona didn’t go well,” Schwantz remembers. “Freddie had some sort of helmet-shield problem at the start, and we all waited for what felt like 30 seconds while he fixed it, some redemption a month or so later at Round 2 at Willow Springs, which was run in two 100-mile segments, with the lowest overall point total — as in motocross — taking the overall win. Schwantz battled briefly for the lead with VF750-mounted Wes Cooley in both races but pulled away in both legs and won by comfortable margins, scoring his very first AMA Superbike victory in just his second outing. The fist pumps while standing on the #289 GS’s footpegs on the cool-off lap were just a hint of the excitement he felt that weekend.
Schwantz and the Yosh team did
were all saying ‘What did we just see?’ Don [Sakakura, Yosh crew member at the time] said to me, ‘Kevin, you can’t drag the cases like that through [turns] Eight and Nine… your gonna run out of metal!’”
Schwantz’s performance that weekend earned him a semi-factory ride in ’85 with Yoshimura, who’d inked a limited deal with Suzuki for the season. “I signed for expenses and prize money,” he said, “and at the of us with our clutches in.” A number of riders in the front rows fried their clutches in the 200’s early laps, Schwantz included.
“I think something like six or seven of the top-ten qualifiers didn’t finish because of clutch issues,” Schwantz told me. “When I took off it just went ‘wuuuaaaaaaaaa,’ and when I stopped I just leaned it up against the rail.”
But Schwantz would earn
Schwantz carried #289 to the 1985 Superbikers event at Carlsbad on a Yamaha YZ490 sponsored by his uncle — and Yamaha dealer — Daryl Hurst. Right: Schwantz exiting Laguna’s Corkscrew during that 1985 AMA National.
shockingly well during that shortened — for them — ’85 season, winning three West coast races — Willow Springs, Seattle and Sears Point — and garnering enough points to take seventh in the series. “I blew an engine while leading the Laguna Seca round,” Schwantz remembers. “I had four or five seconds on the pack after only a couple of laps, so we clearly established ourselves as a force.”
KEVIN SCHWANTZ
Those forceful AMA Superbike performances would continue into ’86, ’87 and ’88, but on Suzuki GSXR750s, and with #34 replacing #289 on the bikes. It wasn’t to honor Wes Cooley (who nearly died during the ’85 season in a horrific crash at Sears Point) but Schwantz’s Uncle Daryl Hurst, whose national number was 34 and who owned a Yamaha dealership in Texas.
In 1989 Schwantz moved to the 500cc Grand Prix wars on Suzuki RGV machinery, eventually winning the title in 1993. AMA HOFer Wayne Rainey won in ’90, ’91 and ’92, with Kevin and Wayne battling just as hard as they’d done in ’86 and ’87 on Superbikes, as those were truly epic years in AMA Superbike competition. Schwantz retired from racing in 1995, and soon launched the highly successful Kevin Schwantz Suzuki School at Road Atlanta and, later, Barber Motorsports Park.
So whatever happened to ol’ #289? Once the Yoshimura team began using GSX-R machinery in 1986 it became a bit of a relic and ended up in the hands of one of the Yoshimura engine builders. When he passed away suddenly, his wife needed to part with it and one of Schwantz’s GSX-R Superbikes, and another Yoshimura crew guy who knew the widow gave noted Superbike collector Brian O’Shea a call.
“He told me it was Schwantz’s ’85 Superbike,” O’Shea told me, “the number 289 bike. My first thought was ‘no way.’ A few days later I got a letter with pictures, and sure enough it looked like the real thing — Kal Guard engine, works magneto, Yosh bits, etc.
BRIAN O’SHEA
“...It felt pretty much like I remember, with that wide handlebar. It wasn’t as fast, the wheels looked really narrow, and the chassis was a bit wonky... but the sound and feel were all there.” KEVIN SCHWANTZ
The front end was missing, as were the fairing wheels and brakes, but I figured I could get those parts, so I bought it for a grand and drove from Connecticut to LA to pick it up.”
“I was thrilled to have the bike,” O’Shea added, “but getting the correct parts turned out to be a real headache. Even my Team Honda contacts weren’t much help, as
Reuniting Schwantz with the bike — owned at the time and meticulously restored by Superbike aficionado Brian O’Shea — in late 2007 at Road Atlanta was a gas. And as you can see, the Champ felt quite comfortable on his old ride.
the Yosh guys used a lot of Suzuki RG500 bits.”
So O’Shea dug deep, contacting anyone he could find with Suzuki connections. It took time, but he finally made some headway. The correct Dymag wheels with rotors were found in England, as was an RG fork assembly. O’Shea flew to London for those, meeting with his contact in a pub.
“To this day I don’t know how much those parts cost me,” he told me with a grin. “I traded the guy some parts I’d brought, gave him some U.S. dollars and English pounds, not to mention the pints, and I hadn’t even checked into my hotel yet. There I was, on a train, a bag in one hand and holding the forks with the other.
But I had the parts I needed.”
Then, luck intervened. “I didn’t know it, but someone from So Cal had the original Schwantz fairing for sale on eBay, complete with the #289 number plate. I found out about the sale after the fact, which bummed me out, but luckily another friend knew the guy who bought it, and that guy, once he heard I was restoring the original bike, donated it to the cause.”
And that’s when O’Shea called me early in 2007 with an angle for what was obviously a thoroughly cool story. We brainstormed a bit and settled on the idea of reuniting Schwantz with the bike later that summer at Road Atlanta during one of Schwantz’s Suzuki schools, which Kevin was totally up for. I then called Yoshimura marketing honcho Brant Russell (now deceased), who offered to ship the bike to So Cal and Yosh HQ for a period-correct exhaust and dyno tune before the bike would be shipped to Road Atlanta for a thrashing by the champ himself. Ol’ #289 hadn’t turned a wheel on a racetrack since 1985, so O’Shea did a couple of short sessions early in the day to be sure it functioned properly and wasn’t gonna toss Schwantz into the bushes. “It felt pretty good,” O’Shea said after hopping off. “I don’t think it’ll kill him!”
It didn’t, and Schwantz turned far more laps on the GS than we ever imagined. “Riding that thing was a blast,” he said later. “It felt pretty much like I remember, with that wide handlebar. It wasn’t as fast, the wheels looked really narrow, and the chassis was a bit wonky, not having been set up. But the sound and feel were all there, and it brought me right back. Back then, if you didn’t have a
Honda, you wanted to be on a Yosh Suzuki. I can’t believe it’s been 24 years since I first threw a leg over this thing. Big fun! Thanks for making it happen!”
Hearing the GS engine’s wail echo off the trees and reverberate through the paddock as Schwantz ripped down the back straight took us all back to a time when AMA Superbike was changing in a big way, especially for Suzuki. In ’85 the air-cooled GS was on its last legs, already surpassed mechanically by the Honda Interceptor and Yamaha FZ750 and about to be replaced by the GSX-R, which had already debuted in
Europe and Canada that year. “That thing was really good in ’85,” Schwantz told me. “It was fast, because the Yosh guys always built fast engines, but the chassis was also amazing. It felt light and narrow and was really stable at speed. I don’t know if they did anything to the frame, and looking at it now it doesn’t look like it, but that thing was on rails, even at really fast and really demanding tracks like Willow and Sears Point and Laguna. And I loved riding it, too! Once, after I’d hurt myself somehow, Scott Gray rode it and crashed it at Sears, and I remember thinking, ‘Damn, that’s my favorite bike!’”
When the #289 bike showed up at Schwantz’s Texas ranch in a crate a couple years ago after a successful purchase from collector Wheatman, Schwantz noticed a bit of corrosion on some of the magnesium parts, but otherwise the bike was in good shape. Internally it was in even better shape, as Wheatman had a guy with serious inline-4 engine building expertise go through the motor while Wheatman owned it, which means it will run whenever Schwantz feels the need to take it to
Before the Schwantz GS was shipped to Road Atlanta for the 2007 reunion it went to Yoshimura HQ in Chino, Calif., where it got a tune-up and a period (and custom) exhaust. Schwantz (left), Yosh boss Don Sakakura (middle) and O’Shea discuss.
an event (such as 2022 AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days, where Schwantz will be Grand Marshal, June 22-24) or a track day. And he says he definitely wants to do that.
And the plan for ol’ #289 going forward between now and whenever he decides to fire it up at an event?
Clockwise, from left: Schwantz and O’Shea at Road Atlanta. The champ tending to hungry longhorns (and multitasking!) recently at the ranch. Schwantz at Road Atlanta in 2007, posing for Kevin Wing’s Brownie camera. Far left: Tucked in on RA’s long back straight.
“I’m gonna display it alongside my GP bikes and the Norton Manx I got for my dad upstairs in the new house we’re building,” he told me. “I have my ’93 world championship bike, a ’94 version, the square-four RG I rode a little in ’86, and the Manx, which has a 4-valve head on it, which makes it really rare. I might get the GS running at some point so I can ride it, and just like that day at Road Atlanta, it’s nice to feel and hear it, and refresh all those great memories.”
Being in the right place at the right time really can make all the difference. And for AMA Hall of Famer Kevin Schwantz, and the AMA Superbike he began his professional career aboard 37 years ago, being home in Texas — coming full circle, if you will — seems just about perfect. AMA
