Larry Lawrence | July 20, 2016
Wes Cooley exited the road racing scene over 20 years ago and has scarcely been heard from since. The incredibly popular two-time AMA Superbike Champion finally came back to the sport this month as Grand Marshal for the AMA’s Vintage Motorcycle Days (VMD) at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. There were smiles all around.
It’s funny how often times ex-champions don’t really understand the impact they had on people during their career and such was the case with Cooley. When writer/author/vintage motorcycle expert Mitch Boehm first approached Cooley about the idea of coming back to VMD to be honored, the first reply from the ex-champ was, “That was 35-40 years ago, do you think anybody will remember me or care?” The answer of course was a resounding yes and in fact, they cared very deeply.
To understand why Cooley is one of the most beloved ex-racers in America, you have to go back to the early days of AMA Superbike racing. It was a grassroots class that emerged as a result of the more capable sportbikes that were beginning to be built during the mid-to-late 1970s. Fans clicked with the class and fairly rapidly it eclipsed Formula One in terms of popularity and factory involvement. Cooley was one of AMA Superbike’s earliest stars, riding to a pair of championships with the iconic Yoshimura Suzuki squad in 1979 and ‘80. And of all the Superbike stars of that era, unquestionably Cooley was the most approachable.
I began attending AMA Superbike races during that era and saw firsthand the way Cooley took time and was so genuine in his interaction with fans. I too was an aspiring racer and fan of Cooley and when I first worked up the courage to go up to him at Elkhart Lake in the early 1980s, he talked to me and my buddies about some of the things we witnessed him doing on the track. “Yeah, I think I saw god in that turn,” Cooley smiled when we asked him about getting sideways and nearly getting pitched off at turn six. While many riders would come out and give obligatory autographs and barely look up when doing so, Cooley was up getting pictures (pre-cellphone days) with fans, shaking hands, carrying on conversations. People went away with a smile on their face when they met with Cooley, so it was no wonder that he was always one of the riders racing fans rooted for, no matter what brand of motorcycle they personally rode.
The other aspect of Cooley was his talent on the bike. He was the first of the younger generation of Superbike riders who gradually replaced the older generation such as Reg Pridmore and Cook Neilson, who raced European machines in the classic road racing style. Cooley on the other hand, was a prototype of things to come, ripping around on ill-handling, super-powerful four-cylinder monsters like the Kawasaki KZ1000 and Suzuki GS1000, leaving big black marks accelerating out of the turns and carrying power wheelies all while waving to the crowd. Even though it may not have been the fastest way around the track, it was thrilling visually and fans came in droves to watch.
Boehm was the man behind getting Cooley to come out of hiding after all these years. And to tie it all together was collector extraordinaire Brian O’Shea, who happened to own the very Yoshimura Suzuki GS1000S that Cooley raced to the 1980 AMA Superbike Championship. If Boehm could convince Cooley to come out to VMD, he had the perfect machine for him to ride.
“I’ve been doing the vintage thing and racing since the mid-90s and so has my partner in crime,” Boehm smiled looking over at O’Shea. “Brian has a great collection of old pedigreed Superbikes that have won championships. He doesn’t just store them, he shows them and makes them run and likes to ride them occasionally and have the guys who raced them ride them. We’ve been talking for years about doing something with the legends of this class. We talked to Wes about coming out and he was good with it, Brian was good with it and the AMA was good with it, so it was kind of the perfect storm. I’m just happy we could do it at Vintage Motorcycle Days – it’s a good fit.
“The most gratifying thing about this, is we went out to dinner with Wes last night and he looked at us and said, ‘Thank you guys.’ That alone made it worth it to me.”
For O’Shea the fact that Cooley was riding a former championship-winning machine that he now owns was at the same time thrilling and nerve racking.
“Scary man, scary, you know?” O’Shea said when asked what it was like to watch Cooley pull out of pit lane on his bike. “You’re responsible. I went over that thing five times. And then everything goes through your mind – is the battery power on, is it on prime, is he going to run out of gas? And then you bump him off and you’re like, ‘Oh god, I hope he comes around.’ And then he comes around waving and it’s ‘Oh thank god! One lap down.’ It’s been exciting.”
Clean shaven and with closely cropped hair, Cooley looked a bit older, but healthy for a guy who barely escaped death in a crash at Sears Point in ’85 and has a difficult case of diabetes. Fellow Superbike racer Terry Hampton saw Wes and said, “I almost didn’t recognize you without the mullet, but then I saw you walking and I said, ‘Yep, that’s Wester.”
For Cooley, his return to the track brought back a flood of memories.
“To be real honest with I was a little apprehensive about getting back on the bike,” Cooley admitted. “I haven’t really ridden much at all in 30 years. Suzuki gave me one of the replicas they built for me, but the problem is, I want to go too fast. But once I got out here, the sounds, the smells it was like going back 40 years in time. I was happy, maybe even relieved, to find that people still remembered. To me that’s what it’s all about, whether it’s dirt bikes, riding on the street, road race or not racing, whatever it’s a family. I always appreciated people that came that viewed what I did and understood it and respected it.”
When asked if it would be years again before we saw him again, Cooley was quick to say, “No, this opens the flood gates for me now. I had to get away from it for years because I still wanted to race, but coming back and getting to see everybody after all these years and finding that a lot of folks are still huge fans of that era I raced in… no I’m going to come back to the races every chance I get now.”