Duel!

DUEL!

Gary Scott vs. Kenny Roberts. It Began When They Were Novices.And Now It Is One Of The Hottest Things To Watch In The Expert Class.

D. Randy Riggs

FANS AT Ascot Park’s famed halfmile oval in California were treated to some of the most spectacular jump-up-and-yell, holler-and-scream racing events ever held at that track in the 1970 season. Sure, the Experts and Amateurs provided much of the thrill and excitement of the flat track spectacle, but it was a couple of first year Novices that literally drove them up on each other’s shoulders and caused their voices to go hoarse in the matter of moments that it takes to run a quick heat race.

The two Novices? Gary Scott and Ken Roberts...a couple of youngsters that had only recently reached their 18th birthdays. So well-known and famous were their racing clashes that they became known as “The Classic Duel,” a fitting description for some of the most uptight racing to be seen anywhere.

Appropriately enough, their first head-to-head clash came in the 1970 season’s first TT at Ascot. Neither Ken nor Gary came home with a victory, but their frantic race for the runner-up spot gave fans a preview of what was to be for the remainder of the year in the Novice division. Few realized, however, that this one contest would spark and pave the way for the “Classic Duels” in the seasons to come.

Most track-wise fans and followers had picked Gary Scott to wind up as the Number One Novice at Ascot, and anywhere else for that matter. After all, he had little or no competition at the sportsman tracks he raced in AMA District 37, recognized widely as the most competitive nut to crack for any future pro. It’s no secret that Southern California turns out some of the best riders in the country, and District 37 is the heart of that territory. Gary Scott kept it under his thumb with such insolent ease that he gave his competitors fits trying to keep up.

Very few of the people who were putting their money on Scott even considered Roberts as a serious threat. He was relatively unknown in the southern half of the state as he hadn’t done any racing there, with the exception of the early season Ascot TT. Had they been watching him a bit more closely by keeping tabs on race results in his district, their eyebrows would have been raised in surprise. Roberts too was a big winner.

April rolled into view and with it the Ascot half-mile season. The half-mile was new to Roberts, and it was new to Scott. The opener found Gary mounted on a Bultaco Single up against Robert’s rigid framed Suzuki Twin. Singles usually can’t quite cut it against the high winding Twins on half-mile tracks but in the early part of the season the Twins are anything but sorted out, along with their first-time-on-a-Twin riders. As a result, Singles do well the first couple of races, then relegate themselves to the back of the pack as the Twins start coming on. >

As in the months to come, both won their respective heat races and sat sideby-side in the front row. A few very hot laps later, Roberts retired with a dead ignition and Scott went on to his first half-mile victory.

Since that day, Scott has had his hands full with Roberts, and vice versa. It has been an unbelievable battle of machinery, guts, luck and talent that you and I never dreamed of having. And, with a few exceptions, most of the competition was simply swallowed up in their wake...really no competition at all.

After Robert’s half-mile debut ended in a DNF, he went home to Modesto, and with lots of help, got the Twin squared away. He returned the following week to Ascot and won, with Gary nipping at his heels. The scene was repeated a couple of more weeks in succession, when the time came for Scott to climb aboard a Twin and retire his Single from half-mile events.

The K&N Racing Team came to the rescue with a Yamaha TD1C engine mounted in a highly modified DTI frame, only it wasn’t highly modified enough. Although the pressure was greater on Roberts now that Gary was on a Twin, he still had the quicker machine, and hence held the edge.

And as if this weekly half-mile battle wasn’t enough for the fans, Ascot started a weekly TT on Thursday nights...and Ken and Gary started a battle for supremacy in the Novice TT. This time Roberts was on a 250 Montesa Cappra, while Scott climbed back on his super-quick, trusty Bui.

The TTs were every bit as hairy as the flat track, except that here Gary showed a slight advantage. More often than not, the two were so close that they’d come off Ascot’s heart-stopping jump side-by-side in mid air, and lap after lap yet! How either one survived that kind of pressure all season long is amazing, but it certainly made them both that much harder to crack under the kind of force they come up against now from the Experts.

While all this “ragged edge” activity was occurring out on the track, another kind of battle was going on right in the pits. It wasn’t a face-to-face, put-upyour-dukes kind of æ battle, but more of a not-so-subtle “psych out” game. The players? Ken and Gary’s pit crews...who else? Each team would keep very careful track of both rider’s lap times in practice and during the heat races. If Ken was faster in his heat race, Scott’s crew looked as though it was the end of the world, and a frantic tire swapping, plug changing, and jet trade would take place in seconds, right before your very eyes.

Meanwhile, Gary would be off standing casually with another rider talking about who knows what, looking very unconcerned about the fact that he was a couple of milliseconds slower than Roberts. The situation was exactly the opposite if Gary had fast time. The pit crews were usually beside themselves under the constant pressure, but it was sure a giggle for observers.

Pit strategy, naturally, was fierce the entire year, but the real corker came mid season at a Friday night half-mile. Roberts tells it like this: “We had the K&N guys crazy since I was winning more than Gary and at the time I was running the rigid. Gary was running a swinging arm frame and K&N must have figured that a rigid would be their way out. Meanwhile, Doug Schwerma had just finished building the first swinging arm Suzuki frame and I wanted to try it out. The night I brought out my swinging arm, Scott brought out his rigid!”

Scott tells it a little differently: “Kenny’s rigid was working good, but I think he figured that I had a little edge with the swinging arm, since that’s about the time I was starting to really get with the program. He was starting to get all panicky, I guess. Anyway, K&N had a rigid that they asked me to try, and since it was all set up the way I liked it and the thing felt real good to sit on, I gave it a go. ’Course that’s the time he brought out his Schwerma swinging arm!”

Never was there a dull moment in the Scott/Roberts pits. Anyone would have gladly paid admission to watch the antics behind the scenes and the between race Chinese fire drills that went on the entire season. That is not to suggest that the crews were not sharp and on the ball—they were. In fact, they were probably among the best teams on the circuit. It’s just that in their seriousness they became comedians.

The battle for the Novice Championship that year went right down to the last few races. In the end, Roberts was the Number One Novice in the Nation, taking the title by a scant few points. Gary wound up Number Two. 1970 has to stand as the most exciting Novice racing season Ascot has ever seen. And still “The Classic Duel” was not over.

It was time for the real test, a jump up to the 40 inchers and the Junior division of AMA professional racing. No one looked forward to it more than Gary and Ken. Negotiations during the Winter layoff put Roberts on the Yamaha factory team. Scott was going with his old sponsor, Ontario Cycle, who set up a Triumph for the Junior year.

Roberts looked like the favorite. For the second year in a row his equipment had the edge over Scott’s. Kenny literally had a stable of new factory-backed Yamahas to keep him going all year long, while Gary found himself traveling East most of the time with no spare bike. As it turned out, Gary could have used a spare on more than one occasion.

The season kickoff at Houston was a mind blower. Roberts won the Short Track event with Scott right behind for 2nd. Gary wound up with the TT under his belt...“The Classic Duel” had begun again.

Many people were wondering at this point how the two Juniors would fare at the numerous Road Races that were to be held during the season. Neither had done much in the way of pavement racing, so no one was too anxious to predict how either one would do. Both had their first go on the blacktop at AFM events. Ken started at Vacaville and Gary at Orange County, but neither had earned reputations as “shoes” on the Road Race trail at this stage of the game.

Daytona came and went and still the question of who was the better road racer went unanswered. Both Tiad dropped out with mechanical problems. Everyone would have to wait for Atlanta to see what happened.

Scott sat Atlanta out. He had no ride. The “duel” couldn’t come off; but even so, Roberts showed he had more than promise with a beautiful ride in the Novice/Junior event, which he won.

At Louden, Ken again proved he was on the way to becoming a “road racer,” by leading the Junior Main until his Yamaha went on one cylinder. Gary, in the meantime, was on a Kawasaki 500 that he was busy sorting out. He managed to wash out the front end and crashed.

By the time the San Jose Half-Mile rolled around in July, both Gary and Ken had added a National victory to their already impressive string. Roberts had collected one at Terre Haute after Scott’s Triumph quit in the heat race, and Jody Nicholas loaned Gary his spare Norton for the Columbus National, which he won going away.

San Jose should have been a Scott/ Roberts benefit in the Junior Main, but it never turned out that way. Ken was having trouble getting all his horsepower down on the surface and ran a distant 5th, but Gary’s luck, or rather lack of it, was much harder to swallow. He led the entire race, only to have his bike break a crankshaft on the last turn of the last lap. He went from 1st to 7th in the matter of seconds that it takes to stomp out a cigarette.

Scott sat out another Road Race National when Kent came around. He couldn’t justify the long trip and expenses without a reliable machine to accompany him. Roberts, on the other hand, had a good ride and, of course, trucked it to Washington. After running in 3rd place for awhile in the Main, another rider fell in front of him and Ken nailed the dude, knocking himself off in the process. Lady Luck was out for Roberts’ hide almost anytime he stepped onto a blacktop race course.

The night before the National at Castle Rock, Roberts unloaded hard at a dirt race at Graham Speedway. It was the first time all year long that it was his fault that he crashed, only his second spill on the dirt in six months of racing. He got a bad concussion out of it, and couldn’t ride the following day in the big race.

Meantime rival Scott had landed himself a ride on a local dealer’s special framed 650 Kawasaki Twin. While everyone was saying, “Really, a 650 Kawasaki?!,” Gary was busy riding it to 3rd place in the Junior Main. Incredible. Now Ascot was around the corner.

Ascot always seems to stir up the juices a little more in Roberts and Scott. Even though both are superb wherever they go, the Gardena track always manages to excrete a bit extra from them. Here Gary and Ken go for broke, right out to the extreme last edge. It’s probably just force of habit from their Novice year.

The expected duel in the TT National became a reality and Roberts and Scott fought like they never had before, right down to the wire. Ken had to fight off Gary’s repeated bids at the lead and came close to losing it with a couple of bad bobbles. He held on, though, and for Gary, finishing 2nd at the Ascot TT was one of the biggest disappointments of his career.

His revenge came a week later at the controversial Corona Half-Mile. With just two laps to go, Scott charged under Roberts going on to the back straight and won himself another big one. From here the circuit swung to the East and both Gary and Ken had three Nationals under their belts.

To the disappointment of many, Scott dropped off the circuit at this time. He felt that with only one machine to take East, it wouldn’t be worth it to go all that way to suffer the same breakdowns he did a few months before. He was tired of borrowing other rider’s machines. He would stick it out at the local tracks such as Ascot and Corona and make do with them. It was a difficult but wise decision.

Roberts went to the Livonia Mile with his toughest competition tucked safely away back in California. The real pressure was off and for the most part it was easy sledding for Ken the remainder of the year on the dirt.

Gary helped out even more in this respect when he broke his hand and wrist at Corona in early September. This kept him away from the half-mile Nationals at Ascot and Oklahoma. Kenny won them both, along with Livonia, Hinsdale, and Nazareth. Roberts was the winningest Junior in AMA history with eight National victorys. Had Scott been on the last half of the trail things might have been different. They would have certainly been tougher.

Both riders finished out their Junior tour of the National Circuit at the Ontario Road Race. Somehow they got through the inane security force that the track conjured up and got to the starting grid with only minor delays.

Ken put on a show for the observers that they would not soon forget. His road race talent beamed like it never had before. He lead the big Junior event right to the end, only to have his machine up and die just before the finish. Even though he didn’t win, he opened many eyes that day.

Gary Scott finished the race in 5th position, on another borrowed bike and with a hand that had only come out of a cast a few days before. It wasn’t too bad an end for a season of many frustrations and problems. Like Kenny, he learned a great deal in his Junior year and he was now ready to become an AMA Expert. The time had come. Gary Scott and Ken Roberts were ready. But were the established AMA Experts ready for them?

Both had already beaten a number of outstanding Experts at races around the country, and often their qualifying times were as fast as any of the quickest “white platers.” The Houston Nationals this year told the story.

When the dust had cleared, Ken Roberts was the new National Point Leader and Gary Scott ranked 5th, both off to a record start as first year Experts. Scott also set the new 1-lap Astrodome indoor short track record of 15.93 sec. on his new 250 Kawasaki Single. Ken and Gary had put themselves on the map as forces to be reckoned with.

They are a new and different strain of the “New Breed” racer, and the two with the best chance ever of going away with the Number One Plate in their first Expert year. Many might call it a “longshot;” but even so, don’t be too surprised if either one does exactly that. Roberts and Scott have what it takes... and then some.