Racing’s Greats: Eddie Lawson
At the start of 1984, leading American motorcycle journalist John Ulrich wrote a thought-provoking profile of Yamaha’s new world 500 championship team leader, Eddie Lawson.
In the profile, Ulrich predicted “Eddie Lawson has within himself what it takes to be the greatest motorcycle racer of all time; greater than Kenny Roberts; greater than Freddie Spencer; greater than anyone. All he has to do is find it and use it. And he will.”
Ulrich concluded the story by predicting Honda would falter during the 1984 championship series and “Steady Eddie” Lawson would be there to win.
This was very brave stuff, because when Ulrich sat down to write the story Lawson had not won a grand prix!
Lawson did indeed win the 1984 world 500 championship. Honda and its star, Freddie Spencer, did falter. And look at Lawson’s record today. Sure, you could argue indefinitely about him being the greatest. But I defy anyone to dispute that a rider who wins four world 500 titles, including three in four years and two in a row on different brands of machinery, and all during a period of sustained works involvement, isn’t one of the greats.
Lawson has now won 30 500cc grands prix, putting him third on the all-time 500 GP winners’ list. Given two reasonable seasons to close his career (he’s already 31 years old) he could match Mike Hailwood’s tally of 37. Giacomo Agostini’s record of 68 victories will surely stand for all time, unless GP racing goes against all current trends and has a period when only one factory seriously contests the class.*
Yet for all his success, Eddie Lawson, the one-time carpenter and dirt-tracker from outer-urban Upland, California, is perhaps the least understood and most criticised of today’s leading racers. Wayne Gardner’s biographer, Nick Hartgerink, once put it very succinctly by saying the record books would be kinder to Eddie than his critics. Lawson is too shy to play the public.
The Daytona Novice race for 250 GP bikes was and still is an important benchmark in US racing. Freddie Spencer won it the two years after Lawson. Prior to the Daytona win, Lawson’s motorcycling roots had been laid in the deserts of California, on camping trips with his grandfather, with dirt-track mini-bike racing. Lawson’s father was a car racer. It’s an area Eddie sees himself going into when he finishes GP bike racing.
Lawson’s 1977 season, as an AMA Junior licence holder, saw him win nearly all the Mile and Half-Mile dirt track oval races he entered on a Yamaha 750 twin. Eddie’s team mate in those dirt-track days was his new MarlboroYamaha team mate for 1990 – Wayne Rainey. Wayne’s dad prepared the bikes.
Eddie’s road-racing career in 1978-79 saw him pitched against Freddie Spencer and Randy Mamola in the 250 class. Both were younger than Eddie (who turned 20 at the end of 1978) and were tipped by many to go further in racing.
Lawson set three lap records in the highly competitive American Motorcycle Federation races at the end of 1979. The results came just as Team Kawasaki America was looking for a number two Superbike rider to back up Connecticut flier Mike Baldwin.
Lawson’s Team Kawasaki debut was at Daytona in March 1980. His Superbike broke down. Lawson asked for a Kawasaki KR250 to ride in the 250 international race. Team Green couldn’t provide one, so it allowed Lawson to ride a new Yamaha TZ250G. Lawson won, beating Toni Mang. Mang went on to win that year’s world 250 championship. Lawson was thereafter given a KR250 and paid a $500 bonus per race win in the AMA 250 Series. He won the series.
In the next two years Lawson also won back-to-back AMA Superbike titles on the Team Green machines, now supervised by highly regarded engine man Rob Muzzy. Eddie also won the 1981 Daytona 250 international race and ’81 AMA 250 Series.
But if Lawson won the titles, another rider (Freddie Spencer) continued to get the lion’s share of publicity, thanks to American Honda’s more sophisticated publicity/advertising operation. There were times when Lawson took to the grass on the outside of the last corner to beat Spencer, but Team Honda always seemed to have an excuse when beaten.
Lawson had the most serious race accident of his career in July 1982. He was very nearly made a quadriplegic. Eddie was racing a Kawasaki KR500 in the AMA National Championship round at Laguna Seca, the round which traditionally attracted American GP stars Kenny Roberts and Randy Mamola. He’d already won the Superbike race the day before. Eddie lost the KR’s front end on a sixth-gear corner. He hit a couple of strawbales protecting a dirt bank.
The local hospital discharged Lawson and Kawasaki issued a press release saying he was only bruised. But by the time he reached his mother’s home he was in agony and suffering temporary paralysis. He’d cracked his C-7 vertebrae and a piece of broken bone was touching his spinal cord. Thankfully, the piece of broken bone moved back away from the spinal cord and Eddie recovered.
Lawson returned to racing in September 1982, after missing two Superbike rounds. He said the accident was his fault – he’d chosen too soft a front tyre. He rode like he hadn’t been away to wrap up his second AMA Superbike title.
Eddie Lawson made his grand prix debut at Hockenheim, in the 1981 West German 250 GP. He qualified 13th (three places behind Australia’s Graeme Geddes), but retired from the race with a broken crankshaft.
Lawson’s next grand prix appearance in March 1983 saw him firmly in the big time and firmly in the sights of most of Europe’s motorcycle press.
Yamaha had signed Lawson as number two 500 rider to Kenny Roberts. In a new move for Yamaha, Giacomo Agostini’s Marlboro Team Agostini was made the official Yamaha factory team. Bringing in an American Superbike rider with no 500 GP experience riled the Europeans. Remember, two Italians had won the 1981 and ’82 world 500 championships. The European motorcycle press wanted a European, and all Italy wanted an Italian. But Lawson turned out to be better than all those touted as ‘better deserving’ of the ride.
Lawson started the season in a hurry. He finished second to Kenny Roberts in the Daytona 200, then qualified second fastest for the opening GP at Kyalami (South Africa), 0.04 of a second behind Spencer. “Eddie was fastest for much of practice, then Freddie pipped him in the last session. He might have gone on in that vein, but the Japanese came along and told him to ease back, because it was his learning year,” Lawson’s Australian mechanic, Dave “Radar” Cullen said.
Kenny Roberts retired from GP racing at the end of 1983, leaving Lawson to take over as Yamaha’s number one. Roberts concedes in his book Techniques of Motor Cycle Road Racing that he didn’t think Lawson had progressed very much in ’83. “But in Eddie’s own quiet little way he’d progressed quite a lot, he just wasn’t willing to show it at the time, and he kept on getting better slowly,” Roberts wrote.
Yamaha made some changes too. It built its first crankcase reed-valve V-four racer, which made the bike a little easier to start and easier to ride than the ’83 disc-valve job. The team stayed on Dunlop tyres.
According to Dave Cullen, Yamaha again had the second best bike and the second best tyres. Lawson sometimes raced with an English-made front tyre and a Japanese-made rear.
Yamaha did, however, have a rider who didn’t crash, wheels which did not fall apart and a motorcycle with a fuel tank on top of the engine. Honda had built a new V-four with the fuel tank under the engine, thereby giving it some quirky handling. It also had a carbonfibre rear wheel collapse during practice for the opening GP and a rider (F. Spencer) who seemed to take a long time to come back after mid-season injury.
So Lawson won the 1984 championship against the odds and predictions (except Ulrich’s). No other rider in the last 14 years has won a world 500 title on Dunlops. Eddie’s main opposition in the points table came from former Suzuki rider Randy Mamola, who leased a pair of Honda NS500 triples for the season. Mamola ran on Michelin’s radial tyres and had Mike Sinclair as head mechanic. The championship table ended up: Lawson, Mamola, Raymond Roche, Spencer. The race wins went five to Spencer, four to Lawson and three to Mamola.
I met Eddie Lawson for the first time late in the 1984 season, when he was still under pressure to wrap up the title. It didn’t stop him doing an interview then and there. Some regular GP journos however complain about his level of co-operation. I found Eddie shy and intense, but thoughtful and possessed of a dry humour – so dry you sometimes didn’t realise he was taking the piss out of himself. He took a little while to warm to his subject with someone he didn’t know.
The ‘Fast Freddie Factor’ was the biggest peeve Eddie raised that day. He was pissed off that wherever Freddie lost that year, an excuse came out. Eddie felt he would have won anyway in the opening wet race at Kyalami. And having seen the 1984 Salzburg race, I had to agree his Austrian GP victory was definitely fair and square.
Fast Freddie came back with an all-new V-four in 1985 and won, despite Yamaha’s switch to Michelin tyres. The race win scoreline was seven to three. Lawson’s wins came in the season opener at Kyalami, the Yugoslav GP and the season closer at Misano. Winning the last race of the season (an important psychological boost for riders and teams) became a Lawson speciality. He did it four times in a row from 1985 to ’88.
Lawson’s opposition in 1986 came from Wayne Gardner, who incidentally had told local journalists in the off season that beating Eddie would be “no problem”, the man to beat was team mate Fred!
Everything I’ve read and talked to people about regarding the 1986 500 season convinces me Lawson would have won that year even if Spencer had been fit. Wayne Gardner was one of those people. He told me Freddie wouldn’t have won on the 1986 Honda.
Spencer made a brief comeback at Salzburg. But according to Kel Carruthers, his enthusiasm to ride the rest of the season was pretty much sunk when Lawson passed him going up the hill on the first lap.
Lawson – after the race – told Motocourse editor Peter Clifford, “I thought Spencer would pull in with his wrist, but I wanted to be leading when he did; I didn’t want the old story of ‘I only won because Spencer stopped’.” Lawson’s confidence was sky high – he meant to make it his year.
Roberts also observed in his aforementioned book that unlike Eddie, Freddie wouldn’t keep pushing his talent a little further each year. “His attitude to racing was different. He just sat back and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got the best bikes, I’m wonderful, I’m faster than everybody else’. And it didn’t work because the other guys kept clawing away and working on themselves to go faster.”
If Lawson has had a bad year (in his terms), it was 1987. He went home to California after 1986 happy, but aware Honda had a serious new challenger for his crown in Wayne Gardner and mildly concerned that Yamaha was slow in readying its new bike for pre-season testing. On the positive side, he knew 1987 would see an end to push starts in GP racing, so he would never again qualify fastest for a race and be 33rd into the first corner.
“The new Yamaha will have to run faster, because you just know Honda is making its bike faster,” Lawson said in one pre-season interview. He also noted that Yamaha engineers seemed to have a fixation on extra cooling and getting more air around the engine. First pictures of the new Yamaha showed what Lawson was talking about. The bike looked to be all cooling ducts. And when he rode it he reckoned his pet complaint about bottom-end carburation still hadn’t been fixed.
Motocourse editor Peter Clifford had observed in 1986, “the top racers are so evenly matched in riding ability that confidence can often be the deciding factor”. The appearance of a fast new Honda, ridden by a guy who reckoned it was simply his year coupled with the race track performance of the new Yamaha put a big dent in Lawson’s confidence at the beginning of 1987. The new Yamaha was slow and its big radiators affected the weight distribution, which in turn affected how quickly it turned into corners.
Lawson was not only beaten in early season races, he lost a stack of vital championship points with an incorrect choice of tyres in Japan and an engine which wouldn’t run cleanly in Austria, even after his mechanics changed the spark plugs on the grid. To top things off championship wise, Lawson fell off early in the French GP at a very wet Le Mans circuit.
The frustration soon showed. Michael Scott writing in Motorcycle Grand Prix Year 1987/88 said, “Lawson gave several displays of practiced mastery, but also lapsed dangerously close to petulance when beaten. He must have regretted that he hadn’t soldiered on after his pitstop for (new) tyres in Japan, for even one point there would have put him second rather than third in the championship.”
A golden rule in motor sport is when you can’t win the title, at least beat the blokes with the same machinery. Wayne Gardner won the title, and Randy Mamola pipped Lawson by a point for second place and the honour of best Yamaha finisher.
Gardner won seven GPs, Lawson five and Mamola three, two of those in the rain. Eddie’s saving grace was that when new parts arrived mid-season, he provided Gardner with opposition befitting a twice world champion. For the record, it might be added that Lawson finished ahead of Mamola in seven out of the nine dry races in which both finished. He also won the Dutch GP, at the fifth attempt – and in the damp.
To make a sweeping generalisation, Lawson and Gardner swapped roles in 1988. It was Gardner’s turn to complain about his machine, because it was not only inferior but unreliable, and Lawson’s turn to score seven race victories in a season and take the championship.
The difference in situation was there, however. Lawson at one point had a 40 point lead in the championship – equal to two race wins. Two races later, in Yugoslavia, he put his lead in jeopardy by tangling with a slower rider during practice and breaking his shoulder. Eddie was able to finish the 1988 season the same way he had in 1986 and ’87, by winning two of the last three races.
And then came the bombshell. Eddie Lawson was joining Honda. To put it more accurately, Eddie Lawson had become tired of Yamaha and his team and asked Honda for a place, which Honda was smart enough to give him.
The 1989 season is fresh in our minds so I won’t repeat the details. Lawson won a further four GPs and his fourth world title – and that after starting the season in pretty ordinary form with a broken bone in his wrist and an underdone motorcycle.
At the tracks Lawson was perceived in 1989 as a bit more crafty and something of a rider politician. Most reckoned he led the Misano boycott – but then he is the 500 class’s number one. He’d certainly lost nothing in his ability to play the psych game. Take Le Mans, where he turned around to Kevin Schwantz on the dais and said, “Thanks for letting me win”, so third placed Rainey would wonder if he and the Texan were conspiring!
Off the track Lawson continued to enjoy the company of his mates (including new friend Michael Doohan) and just about anything that went fast – road bikes, quick road cars, midget speedcars, race cars and power boats.
So what is his ‘crime’ with the critics? That he’s somehow not great because he hasn’t dominated an era the way Geoff Duke, John Surtees, Mike Hailwood or Giacomo Agostini did? And this at a time when people complain about the way the McLaren team dominates Formula One cars, winning damn near all the races in a season. Kenny Roberts reckons there are now more fast guys with fast equipment in the play than ever.
Perhaps Eddie’s problem is that he has a similar, serious ‘I’m here to win races’ modus operanti to Surtees. Or that he’s never been a big-talking Yank, a PR smoothie like Spencer, a kick ’em in the arse take me as I am character like Roberts or a joker like Mamola (which might partly explain why Lawson has won titles and Mamola hasn’t).
For 1990 Lawson has moved back to Marlboro-Yamaha. This may perhaps prove that for all the talk in the press about Eddie being short on co-operation with the press and not a good PR man, the most important thing for sponsors is to have someone who can capture television attention by running at the front. And that’s something Eddie Lawson does well.
But perhaps rising star Kevin Schwantz should have the last word for now on Eddie Lawson. Schwantz last year told Michael Scott, “Eddie does his practice, he does his race, and besides that he doesn’t really care about the sport. It’s just that he goes out there and does exactly what he knows he can do, never any more, never any less. I respect somebody who can set a bike up, then ride it that consistently.”
By Don Cox. Two Wheels, February 1990
Eddie Lawson’s 1990 season was hampered by injury and he finished seventh in the 500cc championship, won by Wayne Rainey. He did win the Suzuka Eight Hour in that year on a Yamaha FZR750R. In 1991 and 1992, Lawson raced for Cagiva, finishing sixth and ninth respectively, with his last win (and the first for Cagiva) being the 1992 Hungarian GP. He retired from GP racing at the end of the 1992 season, but won again at Daytona in 1993.
He took up open wheeler car racing in the US, and progressed to the 1996 CART (Indycar) season, driving a Lola T96 for Galles Racing, where he finished twentieth.
*Valentino Rossi now holds the record for the most 500cc/MotoGP wins with 89, from Agostini (68), Marc Marquez (56), Mick Doohan (54), Jorge Lorenzo (47), Casey Stoner (38) and Mike Hailwood (37), with Lawson tied on 31 with Dani Pedrosa.
Circus Life is Don’s account of the exploits of a bunch of young Australian motorcycle racers who followed the GP circuit as privateers through Europe in the 1950s. It’s beautifully written, forensically researched and accompanied by some amazing photographs. Don discusses Circus Life with Jay Leno on Jay Leno’s Garage here, and you can order a copy of Circus Life here.
