Larry Lawrence | September 5, 2018
Archives: Celebrating Canada’s First Superbike Race
It was a reunion 40 years in the making. Last month Floridian John Long was invited to a round of the Canadian Superbike Championship at Canadian Tire Motorsport Park (formerly known as Mosport) to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the series and Long’s victory in the championship’s first race.
Archives: Celebrating Canada’s First Superbike Race
“It was humbling to be invited,” Long said of the commemoration. “They were very gracious putting all that together. Funny story – the bike I rode 40 years ago was in a BMW museum in Germany and the reunion organizers were in contact about getting the bike shipped to Mosport for the anniversary celebrations. The Germans said, ‘Yes, we’ll send you the orange superbike that won Daytona.’ And the Canadians kept saying, ‘No, we don’t want that one. We want the red, white and blue one with the number 36 on it.’ And they kept saying, ‘Why do you want that one?’ They had to explain three or four times that they wanted that one because it won the very first Canadian Superbike race.”
Back in 1978 Long was battling for the championship in the burgeoning AMA Superbike Championship. Ultimately Long tied on points with Reg Pridmore, but lost the title in a tie-breaker. At the end of the season he, and many of the other AMA road racing stars, headed from Laguna Seca (the final AMA round), cross country to Mosport (about an hour east of Toronto) to race a round of the FIM Formula 750 Championship.
Veteran Long, at the time a columnist for the long-defunct Cycle Guide magazine, was in the middle of everything during that September forty years ago. He raced his own Longevity Racing Yamaha TZ750 in the F750 World Championship event, a Yamaha TZ250 in the typical support class, and then piloted a BMW in the Superbike races. He entered nearly all the races at Mosport that weekend.
Long still has memories of hitting the track at Mosport 40 years ago.
“As far as that Mosport race goes, the main thing I remember is how much I hated the BMW that weekend,” laughed John Long when asked about his victory in the first-ever Canadian Superbike race at Mosport forty years ago, aboard the now-legendary G.S. Tuning BMW R90S flat twin.
“No matter what we did, we couldn’t get down a straight without a big weave,” explained the Florida native, still active in racing with his son. “I decided I couldn’t win that race, because I couldn’t go the back straight wide open. I thought I had the corners covered pretty well, I had raced there a number of times, but that weave was a real problem.”
No one knew about a Superbike race at Mosport until the pre-entry forms arrived in the mail. The class was growing fast in the U.S., but there were hardly any actual modified Superbikes north of the border.
Contrasting with the mostly stock “Superbikes” entered in Canada’s first Superbike race, on Long’s BMW, there was almost nothing stock on the white-with-motorsport-striped R90S that he brought straight from Laguna to Mosport. The frame was modified and braced, the shaft drive-containing swing arm was heavily reworked, and shocks were specifically built at Koni.
The engine was a wonder, with reworked inlet ports for the Dell’Orto Carbs and huge efforts to keep the power plant narrow for ground clearance. Heads held two plugs per cylinder, with Bosch total-loss CDI (rare) and four coils. Pistons were by Venolia, cams by Crane, and the intake valves sourced from a Chrysler Hemi.
The main talking point of the big, bad BeeMm was the front forks, complete with standard era racer mod alloy Lockheed brakes. The calipers mounted to an anti-dive linkage, a big plus for a bike that struggles not to drag chassis parts and cylinder heads when raced by a Pro like Long – remember, hardly anyone “hung off” back in the day!
A pair of custom rocker arms pivot from the outside the axle of the stock, long travel BMW forks, linked to the lower crown by a ball joint and pushrod originally used in a Cummins Diesel truck. The result is level braking at all angles of lean, a goal BMW would eventually chase with their production flat twins.
So Long headed to Mosport, a busy drive in just four days, with his AMA Superbike loss fresh in his mind. Once he got to Mosport, however, he was much too busy tuning four separate bikes to worry about what might have been.
Now Long was facing a very fast Canadian in Lang Hindle.
“I had ridden against Hindle and his Lester Wheels Kawasaki Endurance team at a race in Florida, I think we were second behind them,” remembers Long. “He was one of those ‘Iron man of superbike’ type guys. I think he sometimes had three steering dampers on his Kawasaki!”
Hindle was running away with the race on his Kawasaki Z-1, a parts bike built for the race at Action Kawasaki, where Hindle worked as Service Manager. Unfortunately, a coil failure stopped the Kawasaki rider with a lap to go: “most of that bike was from 1973, and the parts were old!”
Long meanwhile rode a cautious race, mostly by himself just behind Hindle. “It turned out the frame had a big crack in one of the gussets under the tank, it must have happened at Laguna,” explains Long. “During the race, I experimented – I tried sitting up on the gas cap, sitting as far back as I could get on the seat, locking my elbows, all these things to try and get up that straight wide open without a tank slap.
“I didn’t really know any of the other people in the race, we just got the thing running and went out. It’s funny, it was so traumatic, it was the worst ride. I couldn’t wait to get off that BMW at Mosport. Before that, most of our year, it had really surprised people. After that, I rode it for some new owners, we won the first Battle of the Twins Championship. But it never ran as well as in 1978.”
Little did Long know at the time, but he made history with that race. That race was the beginning of what would eventually become the Canadian Superbike Championship. Appropriately enough the bike that won CSBK race 1 at Mosport this year during the anniversary, was another BMW, this one ridden by Ben Young.
This story was co-authored by Colin Fraser.
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For more information about the Canadian Superbike Championship go to: https://www.csbk.ca/