Number One Again!
NUMBER ONE AGAIN!
RACE WATCH
After five years, Scott Parker brings the Grand National Championship home to Milwaukee
CAMRON E. BUSSARD
SCOTT PARKER HAD FELT PRESsure before; you don't race professionally for nine years without it. But he had never felt pressure like this. Uncertainty haunted Parker going into the penultimate dirt-track national at Ascot because neither he, nor anyone else, was sure of the point standings.
That was because the other contender for the title, Bubba Shobert, had filed an appeal with the AMA when one of his wins was disqualified following a post-race inoection that showed his factory-supported Honda 750 had been a pound-and-ahalf too light. So with two races to go. Parker didn't know whether he was 16 points ahead of Shobert should the disqualification stand, or four points behind if Shobert’s win was reinstated. In either case, Parker could ike no chances, and new at Ascot that he *o ride a conservahis Harleyíe famous ^at race would decide the championship.
Parker’s win at Ascot that night made the AMA’s decision on the Shobert appeal almost meaningless. All he had to do was show up and finish the last race at Sacramento, and the championship would be his. Shobert, of course, still had a mathematical chance to win the championship for the fourth time in a row—a feat that hadn’t happened since Carroll Resweber won four championships between 1958 and 1961—but his hope rested on three things: He had to win the final race, he needed a favorable ruling on his appeal and Parker had to dnf.
In light of even the slightest possibility that the championship could elude him, the last thing that Parker wanted to do was to get overconfident. “You just couldn’t get away from that appeal,’’ he says. “I must have talked to a million and one people about it, and the pressure kept building. I tried to ignore it, but just couldn’t get it off my mind. I can’t imagine what it was like for Bubba.’’
Putting even more pressure on Parker was the realization that for the last two seasons, he had come in second to Shobert and Honda; finishing second once again would be bitter consolation for Parker and the Harley-Davidson team he has been a member of since 1982. Harley had not won a championship dirt-track title in five years—the last time by Randy Goss in 1983—but it finally looked like its bike and rider were going to bring the championship back to Milwaukee.
Parker had put himself in that posi> tion because in the first part of the season, he had jumped out to a large points lead; but then Shobert and the hard-charging Chris Carr, Parker’s teammate, began whittling away at the lead. “I was always on the box (victory podium), but it seemed like every race, Bubba and Chris were making up ground. I was doing everything I could, but I couldn’t get away from those guys,” he says. “I even had to ride one race with my throttle stuck wide open, using the kill button to slow down. I got sixth, but that was a tough way to race. Then, at the Indy Mile, things fell into place.”
Parker says that if he had to race on one track it would be Indianapolis. He won his second-ever national there, so it was only fitting that after winning Indy this year, he and tuner Bill Werner began to believe this was the year that they would win the championship. “Bill had the bike working great,” says Parker, “and we kept charging after that. We never gave up.”
Parker credits Werner with much of his success the past several years. Werner’s riders have won more than 50 national races, and he has tuned his way to five national championships. A quiet, intensely focused man at the track, Werner believes that dependability will win out over absolute horsepower in the end. “He knows how to get more power out of these engines,” says Parker, “but he wants the bike to finish. You have to be there race in and race out to win a championship.”
Winning that championship has been Parker’s dream since his professional career began in 1979 when he was but 17 years old. He had been racing motocross and dirt-track up until then, but he went with dirttrack racing because, he says, “I saw more money in it at the time.” He comes from the same area of Michigan in which Bart Markel and Jay Springsteen both live. Both are Harley legends and inspirations to Parker. “There was a track right there in Auto City, with races every week, and that’s where it all started,” Parker says.
Parker’s pursuit of the championship ended at Sacramento. Some of the pressure had been taken off when, the night before the race, the AMA denied Shobert’s appeal, thereby giving Parker the championship before the final race of the season. Still, Parker had a point to prove, and he went out and soundly beat Shobert by over four seconds.
The dirt-track scene has changed considerably since the end of the season. Parker is the Number-One rider, but Shobert will not be back to challenge him next season. Ending months of speculation and rumors, Shobert will be going to Europe to contest the World Championship GPs, and American Honda will be his sponsor. So, with Honda’s racing budget going to support Shobert, the chances are slim that there will be a Honda factory dirt-track team to contest the nationals next season.
“The whole season is up in the air, what with Bubba going to Europe next year,” says Parker. But he is confident that the sport isn’t fading away, and that it won’t become a Harley-only show. “Some people say that dirt-track is dying, but at every race we probably average 8000 people. As long as you have a show where five or six guys are going at it for 25 miles, you will have people who pay to see it. It’s that good of a show. And I just can’t see Honda not having those bikes out there.”
Even with Shobert out of the picture, Parker still has some tough competition next season. “Chris Carr will be my biggest challenge next year. He > was right with us this year, but he had a few bike problems. If not for that he would have been in the hunt. The great thing about him is that he has this fire, and if there is a race anywhere, Chris is ready.” Other riders who Parker thinks will put up a fight are Ronnie Jones, Dan Ingram and past-champion Ricky Graham.
Parker also sees tough battles off the track in the next few years for himself and dirt-track racing in general. For one thing, he is displeased with the way that the AMA runs the program. “The AMA wants 50 riders to show up and 50 riders to make money. That’s a great idea, but it doesn’t work,” says Parker. “You have to have the top guys make money or the whole sport will fizzle out from the top. If the top 10 guys can’t make a living at this, they will have to do something else.” He also realizes the need for riders to have significant outside sponsorship, but says that the dirt-trackers have too little to offer potential sponsors. He explains, “You can offer some newspaper coverage and magazine exposure, but television is where it’s at, and right now, we don’t have it.”
Then, when Parker compares the current grass-roots support for roadracing, drag racing and motocross with dirt-track, he gets concerned. He believes that riders are participating in those forms of racing instead of dirt-track because they can walk into a dealership and buy a competitive motorcycle. “You can’t buy a dirttrack bike,” he says. “You first have to get a motor, then a chassis, then a machinist to put it all together. The average guy just can’t do this.”
In spite of the difficulties ahead, Parker is ready to assume the mantle of leadership in the sport, and is firmly committed to it. He wouldn’t mind giving roadracing another shot—he raced at Daytona in 1986, finishing third in the Twins GP class—but he realizes that at 27 years of age, he is a bit too old to get serious. “I’m gonna keep racing dirttrack until I can’t make any money. If the young kids coming up aren’t whipping my ass, I’ll stick around. Look at Steve Morehead: He just had his best season ever, and he’s 32 years old.”
Now that Parker has achieved his goal of winning the national championship, he is setting his sights higher for next season. “I want to win the most nationals in one year. (Bubba Shobert currently holds the record at 10.) And if I can do that, I should have a pretty good chance of winning another championship.” And he thinks winning that second championship will be easier than the first.
“Everybody says it’s harder to race with the Number-One plate, but that was something I tried to get for years. Nothing could be harder than that.”
