From cowboy to king
There’s only one motorcycle racer who gets called ‘King’. Not the sport’s most successful racer Giacomo Agostini, nor its favourite darling Valentino Rossi. Motorcycling’s only sovereign racer is King Kenny Roberts, the Californian cowboy who changed Grand Prix racing forever when he hit Europe in the late 1970s.
Roberts – who was a proper cowboy, training Tennessee Walkers – transformed road racing both on and off the track. He brought with him a new style of riding, straight from the dirt ovals of the United States where riders kicked their machines sideways and rode them like bucking broncos, digging steel shoes into the ground and churning up clouds of choking dust through the turns.
The Continentals never saw them coming. In an age when a new kind of horsepower – two-stroke power – was many years ahead of the available traction, the Europeans hadn’t worked out that this was the way to ride a 500. They were still swooping neatly through the corners, wheels nicely in line, just as gentlemen Geoff Duke and John Surtees had done in the ’50s.
There was nothing so well-mannered about Roberts’ road-racing technique – he wrung his bike’s neck and hung on like grim death, knee scuffing the Tarmac, rear tyre spinning and bouncing off the kerb. It may not have been pretty but it was the future. Roberts won the 500 crown at his first attempt in 1978, overcoming reigning champion Barry Sheene, and went on to make it a title hat-trick. After his revolution, 17 of the next 20 premier-class world titles were also won by former dirt-track racers.
Roberts’ radical technique wasn’t appreciated by everyone, of course, especially when it was under development in the mid-70s.
“Back home, the craziest road racer we had at the time was Art Baumann,” he recalls. “I’d started sliding the bike around – I’d be in a foot and a half drift, my knee became like my steel shoe. Baumann came into the pits and said ‘you’re going to kill yourself, you’re the craziest sonofabitch I’ve ever seen in my life and you’re goin’ to die!’. I thought I was in big trouble because if that guy says I’m crazy, I’m f****** dead. That’s how it all started.”
The dirt-track circuit where Roberts first learned his trade was a school of the hardest knocks – a redneck circus travelling from town to town, risking life and limb for a few hundred bucks a night. Yet it seemed a lot fairer to him than the Grand Prix scene. Not long after he arrived in Europe Roberts started agitating for a better deal. He wasn’t happy that promoters were getting filthy rich while most of the riders were struggling to survive, both financially and physically, competing on lethal circuits for a pittance.
“The old promoters and the FIM [Federation Internationale de Motocyclisme] treated us like shit,” he says. “It was just wrong, they had everybody by the balls, so I told Sheene and the guys we should organise our own international races.”
Roberts’ rival World Series – launched at the 1979 Silverstone GP when he had his unforgettable duel with Sheene – never came to fruition. “But we got close enough to scare them. After that it was like heaven, we turned it around from not being able to talk to the promoters about safety to being able to talk to them. They increased prize money by 300 per cent and everyone knew what they were paying, so you didn’t have to play with the promoter’s balls to get 500 bucks more. The whole mafia thing went away.”
After retirement, King Kenny went into team management. His Marlboro-backed Yamaha squad was the first bike outfit to make serious use of data-logging and other groundbreaking technology and won a hat-trick of 500 titles with Wayne Rainey. Roberts always looked to Formula 1 for inspiration, so when he tired of running motorcycles made by someone else, he started building his own at a small factory in Britain’s F1 belt. In 2003 he hired F1 genius John Barnard, in the hope that he might revolutionise motorcycle racing again. More of which at a later date…