Laguna Seca '85: Mamola Wins, Roberts Returns
Laguna Seca '85: Mamola Wins, Roberts Returns
RACE WATCH
DAVID EDWARDS
RANDY MAMOLA AND KENNY ROBERTS were playing. Playing, that is, if your idea of fun is a through-the-gears wheelie up to 120 miles an hour along Laguna Seca’s front straight.
In Roberts’ 15 years of professional racing, he has made the wheelie his trademark. A master at yanking his Yamaha roadracer’s front wheel off the tarmac and waltzing it nose-high for impossible distances, Roberts uses the wheelie the same way a fighter pilot uses a wing-over victory roll: as a celebration, a display of skill, and perhaps to rub a little salt into his competitors’ wounds. >
Roberts returned to Laguna Seca this year after a self-imposed, oneyear retirement from racing. Any fears that KR might have been a little rusty after his layoff were blown away in qualifying. The wheelies were still there, and so was the speed. Using Japanese racer Tadahiko Taira’s YZR500 V-Four, the 33-year-old Roberts scorched the 1.86-mile course in 1 minute, 6.488 seconds, a new track record.
Randy Mamola knows a thing or two about speed, too, and about wheelies and Kenny Roberts. Honda flew over a spare Spencer-replica NSR500 V-Four for Mamola (both Freddie Spencer and Yamaha’s Eddie Lawson sat out Laguna to get ready for the final GPs of the season). Although he was hampered by the unfamiliarity of the NSR's handling characteristics—different than those of his usual RS500 V-Three— and a 30-stitch skin-graft to repair a torn finger-tendon suffered the previous week at the Belgian GP, Mamola qualified second-quickest, just a notch behind Roberts.
How fitting. It seems that for most of his career, Mamola has been just a notch below Roberts. Actually, Mamola was once a Roberts protege, billed in the mid-Seventies by Yamaha’s PR department as “the next Kenny Roberts.” And futhering the “Baby Kenny” image was the teenage Mamola himself, chubby-cheeked and freckled, showing up at races in KR-imitation black-and-yellow leathers and riding 50cc, 125cc and 250cc Yamahas decked out in bumblebee paint jobs, just like Roberts’ 750.
When he was 18, Mamola traveled to Europe, where for two years he rode a variety of privateer bikes with good results. Still, there was the teacher-student relationship with Roberts hanging over his head, a situation not helped by Mamola, who would often lay in wait for Roberts during practice sessions and then follow him around the track to learn his lines.
In 1985 at Laguna Seca, though, Mamola, 25 years old and his own man, had no need to learn Roberts’ lines. He had learned to fend for himself during the first three years of the Eighties, riding the slicks off a factory Suzuki that eventually fell woefully behind the Hondas and Yamahas in the GP technology wars. And in 1984, after a short,> two-race retirement, he had hooked up with Honda and finished second to Lawson in the world championship. For 1985 he is sponsored by Rothmans, the giant European tobacco firm that bankrolls four other Honda riders.
Mamola’s GP season prior to the break for Laguna had been less than wonderful. With only one win, a number of down-field placings and his Belgium crash, Mamola was an unthreatening sixth in the standings, a full 56 points below the SpencerLawson clash. So by the time Laguna Seca rolled around. Mamola was tired of playing second-fiddle and was ready for some frolicking in the California sun. And when he dove under Roberts to take over second place on lap three in the first half of the two-segment F-l race, up came his front wheel, a motorized way of saying, “ Take that, Kenny.” For the next 27 laps, Mamola and Roberts traded passes and wheelies, pulling well ahead of early leader Mike Baldwin. Roberts motored to a four-second lead and eventually the first-segment win when Mamola overcooked the Corkscrew, Laguna Seca’s infamous hard-left-hard-right downhill ess-bend.
The second leg was more of the same: Mamola, Roberts and Baldwin up front until the later laps when Mamola and Roberts got serious, the wheelies got less blatant, and the duo moved ahead, setting up a late-race showdown. Unfortunately, Roberts was willing but his YZR’s gearbox wasn’t, and Mamola crossed the finish line—front wheel high, of course—for the second-segment win and the overall victory.
What the Laguna win will do for the rest of Mamola’s GP season is hard to say. Perhaps it will persuade Honda to make an NSR available to Mamola for the last four GPs. Perhaps it will spark him to find that extra dollop of speed that’s been missing so far. One thing’s for sure, though: If Mamola does start winning more, at least he’ll have had plenty of practice at doing victory wheelies.
