Lonely At the Top
Lonely at the Top
RACE WATCH
Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey and Kevin Schwantz have all retired. At this point, Doohan is looking for new prey to keep himself amused on the racetrack. The 30-year-old Australian started racing just for fun, and was rapidly propelled beyond this realm by his unique mix of natural riding talent and obsessive determination. Admittedly, some of his great success can be attributed to the continuity he has maintained with Honda, fellow Aussie Jerry Burgess as team manager and the savagely powerful NSR500.
Doohan came on the GP scene in 1989 after a tremendous career at home and abroad on production-based machines. He won his first grand prix
during the next season in Hungary and placed third in the championship. For ’91 he moved up a notch, playing second fiddle to Rainey during the Californian’s prime. Overcoming near-crippling leg injuries in 1992, Doohan finally returned to his dominating ways in ’94, and did it all again in ’95. Last season, the Repsol Honda rider took nine pole positions and seven wins, to bring his total to 26 as he climbed to fourth on the all-time 500cc winners list.
The racing was seldom close, but remained tense throughout 1995. Young compatriot, ex-teammate and current neighbor Daryl Beattie, now on a Lucky Strike Suzuki, made things interesting throughout. He stalked Doohan after leading the middle stage of the championship, when the champ made errors under pressure in four consecutive races, resulting in two crashes and two lucky escapes. After these faltering rounds, though, Doohan was brilliant, finishing off the podium only once.
Doohan’s lonely days on the track and his general solitude were apparent in various outbursts to the press.
“Racing’s as boring as shit right now,” he told British tabloid Motor Cycle News in one of his darker moments. “Whaddya want me to do: Slow down and wait for the others?” he snarled in another.
These harsh words show that Doohan can be a straight shooter when his feathers are ruffled. But really, he’s a complicated yet down-toearth guy who takes life and racing one day at a time. Never comfortable with fame or hero worship (“I’m just an ordinary bloke who got lucky”), Doohan says his frequent fall-outs with the press in 1995 were the culmination of years of “stupid questions about the championship, when any damn fool who paid attention in ’92 knows that anything can happen, even when you dominate.”
This one-time swimming-pool builder is now a millionaire tax exile with a Ferrari 355 in the garage of his Monaco apartment. But it was not the prospect of wealth and fame that drove him this far. No amount of money could be worth the injuries he’s suffered in his racing career. This past winter was his first without major surgery since 1992.
It bothered him that during this past season, much of the fun was gone. “When I said racing was boring, I meant compared to 1991 when there was Lawson, myself, Wayne Gardner, Rainey and Schwantz,” Doohan says. “You didn’t have time to think about anything except trying to get to the checkered flag.”
Even Beattie proved so easy to overtake this season that Doohan sometimes rode by him without even planning to pass. But Beattie is the rival he rates highest-he’s less complimentary about some of the 500class slackers riding around out there, though he stops short of actually naming the erratically brilliant Luca Cadalora: “There’s a few guys who don’t deserve the bikes they have, the guys who rise to the occasion every now and then.”
It’s obvious that Doohan would like to see some new blood. “I think some of the young, enthusiastic World Superbike riders would like to be in grand prix. The future lies with these
racers, not a string of guys who’ve been around for years. Some riders, if they finish on the rostrum, that’s a great result. People like myself, and I believe Daryl as well, think that if you take second, you’ve lost. You know, settle for second if you’ve got to, but there’s only one winner.”
There are powerful arguments that suggest Honda’s NSR500 is the best bike in GP racing by some margin, yet Doohan came whisker-close to switching to a Yamaha for ’96. The full story has yet to be told, and Doohan does not plan to be the one to tell it. It involved an approach from fledgling 500 team owner Wayne Rainey, and later another offer from Kenny Roberts. Then Marlboro became involved (it was, after all, their money that was being bid and counter-bid), at which stage Doohan became uneasy.
“Wayne and I had been talking from early on in the season. It seemed pretty good to me-a new team, plenty of enthusiasm,” he says. “We’d got to the point of talking figures and so on, and then another offer did come in. And that’s where it all went wrong. There was mass confusion everywhere. It
wasn’t so much people fighting over me, it was just negotiations broke down within the whole infrastructure. That’s what started getting me worried. The Honda deal followed soon afterwards, and the game was over. I don’t think there’s any hard feelings. Wayne and I had a good thing going there at one stage.”
Explains the always-candid Roberts, “Yeah, I did speak to Doohan, but I do this every year. He’s a racer, and there are only a few good ones out there. He can get on the motorcycle, no matter what, and not bitch about it. And even if he does, he probably won anyway, so it doesn’t matter! We will not give up talking to him; we’d be stupid to do so.” When Doohan got wind of Honda’s new, lightweight NSR500V Twin, his eyes lit up at the thought of finding a new challenge within Honda, especially after his chance of a Yamaha ride vaporized. “It may be the future. I’ll be testing the bike soon, and if it’s good enough, I’ll be racing it,” he says. Nobody knows if the new Honda will be good enough out of the box, or whether it is destined to join the four-stroke, oval-piston NR500 and the “upside-down” 1984 NSR500 (fuel tank under the engine) in Honda’s museum of grand follies.
Doohan’s riding style is certainly adaptable enough; he’s shown that by winning on a huge variety of tracks and conditions. But who will he be racing against? “Obviously Luca, if he can ride like he rides at the end of the season all through the year. There are people who are so close, like Alex Criville, Alberto Puig and Carlos Checa. But Scott Russell-this will probably go to his head-with an off-season of testing, I think he’ll go real well this year. So far, he’s found the 500 a little bit difficult. That’s normal, the same as the 250 guys.
But he can produce the lap times,” states Doohan.
Russell, and whoever else might follow him from World Superbike, are moving in the right direction, according to Doohan. “It’s the best training ground for a 500,” he says. “I remember hopping off a Superbike onto a 500, and how physically hard-
er it was to ride on the limit, and to stay on. I looked at Eddie Lawson and thought, ‘How can you sit on it and reel off lap after lap, time after time?’ Nobody’s come directly from Superbike and started winning immediately, but Superbikes teach you more about how to ride a 500 than anything else.
“Dirtbikes are good for learning about the bike moving around, for balance and throttle control, the basic skills,” Doohan continues. “But it’s a totally different slide than a 500. You’ve got your foot out, and the thing’s fully locked up. A Superbike, whether it’s flex or whatever, is forever moving around. It’s got enough power to wheelspin. It’s a heavy thing that you’ve got to force from side to side. A 250 really does nothing wrong. So these 250 riders jump on a 500, and as soon as they push it to the point that it’s starting to buck and weave, they’re in deep trouble. They’ll try to tune that out of the motorcycle, but you just don’t get it out. You have to kind of go above that. This is where Superbike experience helps.”
Doohan returns in 1996 with a third crown in his sights. “To win championships is why you go racing,” he says. “But you’re no different from everyone else out there. You still have to compete against everybody. You’re not the ruler of some new empire. You’re here to do the same job as last year, before you were world champion.” □
Based in England, Michael Scott covers international motorcycle roadracing for a worldwide audience, edits Motocourse, a hard-cover annual, and is working with Wayne Rainey on the three-time world champ 's autobiography.
