A new book documents the glorious early years of American superbike racing
THE EARLY YEARS of Superbike racing in America were an extraordinary time. For ten years from the mid-’70s, production-based bikes produced spectacular racing – partly because the power output of big Japanese fours was enough to tie their chassis in knots.
Bikes bucked and weaved, with brave riders attempting to steer them using wide handlebars, while hung out in the wind. There were no fairings to spoil the spectators’ view of the machines, which looked like the bikes in your local dealer showroom.
The marketing power of the new series was sufficient that, within a few short years, manufacturers (especially Honda) were throwing huge budgets at the class – and making their production bikes more like racers to give them a track advantage.
At the start of the series, European twins like the Moto Guzzi Le Mans MkI and BMW R90/S held their own against Japan’s big air-cooled bruisers like the Kawasaki Z900 and Suzuki GS1000. By the mid-1980s, rules had shrunk engine size to 750cc, and high-tech compact liquid-cooled fours such as the Honda VF750 and Yamaha FZ750 dominated.
It was an extraordinary period of development as tuners tested the rules, using their ingenuity to make the bikes stop, go and handle better. Some amazingly talented riders came through this school of hard knocks too. And of course, the bikes looked fantastic.
Photographer John Owens documented the period in glorious black and white images that are brought together in this book. And he wasn’t just looking for action photos. Some of the best pictures are the shots of mechanics, queued up with bikes for scrutineering or cleaning down crankcases with petrol and a paint brush. Or riders like Freddie Spencer leaning back on the straw bales between practice sessions. And there are glorious details, too – lockwired oil lines and piles of discarded spark plugs.
Better still, each picture is captioned by renowned technical writer Kevin Cameron, giving real insight into the technology and the world of motorcycle racing in America at that time. Book of the year? Probably.
• 192 pages, hardback, $75 + postage superbikebook.com
