Daytona 200 Roberts' Retirement Win
DAYTONA 200 ROBERTS' RETIREMENT WIN
John Ulrich
The record book says Kenny Roberts won the 1984 Daytona 200. Right there in black and white it says Freddie Spencer was second.
Black ink on white paper, stark facts, names and numbers: none can do justice to what happened at Daytona on a sunlit Sunday afternoon when Kenny Roberts beat Freddie Spencer.
More than a simple race, Daytona was a rematch, a piece of unfinished business, one more chance for three-time World Champion (retired) King Kenny Roberts to meet reigning World Champion Fast Freddie Spencer.
W'ith Roberts rode the honor of Yamaha, loser on the 1983 Grand Prix circuit but undisputed ruler of Daytona.
With Spencer came the hopes of Honda, victorious in the World Championship but beaten year after year at Daytona.
Roberts rode a 680cc OW69 V-Four, the same machine he used to win Daytona last year.
Spencer entered the new Honda NSR500, a 499cc V-Four with the gas tank under the engine and the exhaust pipes running up and over the engine, draped by a fiberglass cover shaped like a eonventional fuel tank.
This was the first race for the new four-cylinder Honda, a bike Spencer will use for the rest of the year on the Grand Prix circuit.
This was also the first race for Michelin's radial-ply racing slicks, used
by Spencer and Ron Haslam. The 16-in. front tire had one ply, the 1 7-in. rear had two; the tires weighed as much as 4 lb. less than conventional raeing tires of similar size. The reduction in unsprung weight and tire inertia were big plusses for the radiais, but no one knew' how they would hold up to the special demands of Daytona because the track hadn't been available for the usual extensive testing.
Roberts' machine ran on special Dunlop slicks, conventional construction but built for Daytona.
Eddie Lawson entered on an identical Yamaha, with identical tires, according to Dunlop. So did Tadahiko Taira, the Japanese 500cc champion and a Yamaha test rider.
Ron Haslam and Mike Baldwin ran Honda NS500 V-Threes, Haslam on 16and 17-in. Michelin radiais, Baldwin on 16-in. conventional Michelin slicks front and rear.
So much for the factory teams: works Hondas vs. works Yamahas, wmrks Michelins vs. works Dunlops.
The trick is to get those factory bikes and tires to finish. Daytona is the fastest track in the country and the high banking of the oval puts tremendous loads on the tires. The race is the longest event on the Camel Pro series. Tires that work on slower tracks, in shorter races and on smaller displacement bikes (in some instances) may not work at Daytona. In the last decade tire failures have become the biggest problem: chunks fly out of the tread, tread wears down to the cord, tires go flat. Each year the engineers develop new tires, but the latest designs never seem to catch up to engine and frame development. During practice before the race the tire wars were heating up. The Yamahas with their powerful 680cc engines were spinning the rear tires and causing chunks to fall out. The Michelin radiais were running right at the limits of their designed operating temperatures.
Complicating matters is Daytona’s huge disparity in machines and riders. Behind the works bikes on the starting
grid are genuine racebikes and close-tostock streetbikes, fast privateers on TZ750s and RS500s and VF750F Superbikes, slow privateers on TZ750s and TZ350s and KZlOOOs and BMWs and Ducatis and bikes that belong in Superbike or Battle of the Twins or in a club race. Eighty men start the race, in three waves. This year, the qualifying spread between the fastest and the slow-
est was 25 sec. a lap. The fastest bikes topped 170 mph, the slowest, 120 mph. Daytona is not only the fastest race with the fastest riders, it is also a club race for riders of varied abilities.
All of which means that, to win, Kenny Roberts not only had to race and beat Freddie Spencer and the other works riders on works bikes, he had to keep his own bike running for 52 long laps, avoid tire problems, and dodge huge numbers of slower bikes, some he'd lap every fourth or fifth lap.
Roberts knew all this going into the race. He wasn't even sure why he was there, he would tell reporters later: he simply yielded to Yamaha’s intense pressure for him to do the race. No wonder, then, that Roberts seemed reluctant to practice or spend any more time on the racetrack than absolutely necessary.
Spencer qualified fastest, setting a new lap record at 1 min. 59.201 sec., on soft radiais built just for qualifying. Roberts was next fastest, on the same tires he’d race on, at 2:01.110. Haslam was third, 2:02.320; Baldwin fourth, at 2:02.582. Lawson qualified fifth at 2:03.364, with an engine down on power. An ignition problem caused a spark plug to break after one qualifying lap. He finished qualifying with the sick engine, but the qualifying time wasn’t his best effort.
Behind the factory men came Graeme Crosby, at 2:03.958 on an aluminum
Moriwaki chassis fitted with a fourstroke, 998cc Yoshimura Suzuki engine. Fastest privateer was Doug Brauneck on John Hasty’s TZ750 (2:06.951 ), followed by Miles Baldwin and his TZ750 (2:07.812), Randy Renfrow on a new RS500 V-Three Honda (2:08.007) and Wes Cooley on another RS500 (2:08.167).
When it came time to race, Lawson shot out in front, with Roberts close behind and Spencer mired in traffic. Eddie Lawson is a hard braker, but when Roberts let off the brakes and shot past on the inside entering Turn Two on the second lap, he made it look easy. Lawson repassed Roberts that lap, Roberts passed again, and the pair pulled far in front of the field, turning laps in 2:02. It looked like the Yamahas would just run away.
But by the fifth lap Spencer was clear of traffic and closing. Haslam was fourth, ahead of Baldwin and Crosby. Next were Renfrow, Cooley and Rich Schlachter, their RS500s running in close formation. The first TZ750s ridden by Brauneck, Miles Baldwin and Dan Chivington were behind them, ahead of Taira.
As Spencer caught Roberts, Lawson shot out in front and pulled away. Just as sudddenly, Spencer was on Lawson, then past. Spencer ran hard, at 2:01 and 2:00, and the race looked to be run.
It wasn’t.
Roberts, in third, seemed off the pace. He said later that the insanity of racing hard through endless, unpredictable traffic made him seriously consider pulling into the pits, actually think about quitting. Something wouldn’t let him, though, he said, and he figured that if he was out there he might as well try to win.
Roberts caught up in a flash, raced and passed Spencer, the pair running through traffic as if linked, a yellow-andblack-and-red-and-white chain on wheels, lashing through the slower riders on any line that was handy.
Spencer’s Honda felt the blistering pace first. The over-the-engine exhaust pipes cracked and began to leak (as they had in practice), the bike got slower and Spencer hotter as the paint on the pipe cover softened and ran from the heat. His leathers stuck to the paint, and heat billowed in his face when he tucked in. To make matters worse, the clutch started to slip.
Meanwhile, at the front of the chain, it seemed as if Roberts was chosing his lines, his approach to corners, his acceleration points to conserve momentum and save the tire. His path through certain corners changed, his entry speed up, his apex later, his acceleration delayed until the bike was more upright.
Roberts and Spencer both pitted for gas, and still Roberts led.
But Spencer wasn't alone in his problems. When Lawson pitted for gas, his crew spotted a slit in the rear tire, probably the result of running over debris. The tire was changed quickly: Lawson’s 40sec. pit stop was fast for changing tires, long for refueling, and he lost ground. >
The stop put Lawson behind Baldwin and Haslam but only temporarily. About the time hard-charging Lawson, burning off turns in wonderous drives, regained third place, Baldwin pitted with a fringe of tire cords spinning off his rear Michelin. The tire blew off its tread at the start/finish line and put Baldwin into a lurid slide and spectacular save. That was lap 28, earlier than Baldwin would have normally pitted for his second gas stop, but the Honda crew filled his tank and figured he could finish on the gas he took on.
It was Spencer’s turn for tire trouble next. After his second gas stop he pitted with fluffs of abraded cord bunched up on one side of his damaged slick. Michelin technicians quickly covered the tire with a shirt and carted it away; Spencer rejoined the race as quickly as his mechanics could change the rear wheel, but Roberts was long gone, safe in first.
Lawson came in next, this time with chunks missing from the tread of his second rear tire.
Roberts finished his race at the same pace he started: 2:02, 2:01, 2:03 on the last three laps. He won by 1 min. 23.98 sec., three-quarters of a lap ahead of Spencer.
Roberts, who also won the 200 in 1978 and 1983, didn’t finish this race happy. Promptly after the finish he told the press that he'd never race at Daytona again. The traffic was too bad, he said, the bikes too fast. It wasn’t racing, not like on a 250. You can’t turn on the gas when you want to, Roberts explained, because the 500s (and his 680) had so much power they just spun the rear tire and headed off in any direction they wanted to. It was just too much, he said.
No cords showed on Roberts’ tire, although Taira, who worked his way up to fifth behind Haslam and Lawson, finished with his rear tire worn into the cord on one side. Schlachter was sixth, the first privateer, Crosby seventh with fading brakes, Cooley eighth and hurting with a shoulder injury from a crash during qualifying. Renfrow didn't finish, having crashed in the chicane early on. Brauneck finished well back after an impossibly long stop to change front tires (he didn’t have a spare wheel) after a flat. Miles Baldwin’s TZ broke its sprocket bolts and ended up parked in the infield. Nick P.ichichi was ninth.
Mike Baldwin's RS ran out of gas on the front straight, on the last lap. His crew ran out and helped him push across the finish line. That’s illegal, so Baldwin was docked a lap, and moved from sixth to tenth in the official results.
