Larry Lawrence | March 26, 2019
Archives: Journeyman Road Racer
Jeff Heino was making all the right moves. After a successful transition from motocross to road racing, he blitzed his way from novice to pro in record time and suddenly found himself mixing it up with the factory Superbike heroes, even though by all rights he had neither the experience, nor the equipment to be turning in the kind of performances he was achieving.
Archives: Journeyman Road Racer
The AMA Superbike paddock really began taking notice of this young gun from New Hampshire, when in a Superbike qualifying heat race, on a wet Seattle International Raceway, Heino, riding a Suzuki GS1000 he’d recently bought from another club racer and was still getting familiar with, ran a close second to Kawasaki’s Eddie Lawson before Honda factory rider Mike Baldwin just managed to get by him late in the heat. Even still, this almost complete unknown had qualified on the front row of an AMA Superbike race in his rookie season.
It was all a little overwhelming for Heino. He laughs when he remembers the track announcer approached.
“They came to try to talk to me, this little kid from Henniker,” Heino said. “They asked me where I was from, how’d I race with those guys, and I froze on the mic, I swear to God. I was there to race bikes, I wasn’t there to talk. I didn’t know what to say.”
But the unexpected qualifying run turned out to be bittersweet. “We got on there on the front row getting ready to race and we tried to push start the bike and it wouldn’t fire. Turns out a coil wire shorted out.”
The paddock was taking notice. This rookie from New England was running with the big boys and was no doubt fast – maybe even the next Mike Baldwin! The future couldn’t have looked much brighter for Heino at that point.
Then a couple of things stalled his rapid ascension into the upper echelons of American road racing.
First, the economy of the early 1980s suffered a major hiccup. Motorcycles stacked up in dealer showrooms and factory warehouses. Factory racing suddenly was not the top priority of the Japanese factories.
Then the AMA changed the Superbike rules. The bikes went from 1000cc to 750cc in 1983. All the money and development of those privateer riders had in their 1000cc Superbikes went down the drain.
As Heino explains it, the 1000cc formula at the time was a great equalizer. The Superbikes of that era already had more power than the chassis and tires of the day could handle, so riders didn’t really need to sink a ton of money into engine development. If they could just get a decent suspension, a good set of pipes and carbs they were in the game.
“If they would have had Superbikes stay 1000s another year, that would have been some of the best racing,” Heino said. “Because now they had the factory replicas and a lot of guys built some really good Superbikes. Everything was pretty close so it was the rider. Suzuki, Kawasaki and Honda were all pretty even. You had a lot of good bikes and anybody could win. But they changed it to 750s and that was a bummer for me, because I had a really good bike and I only got to race it maybe six races. So now all of a sudden I was starting from scratch.”
That transition from 1000 to 750cc and the distinct lack of factory seats at that point, meant that Heino went from up-and-coming factory prospect, to a blue-collar privateer racer almost overnight.
With the move to 750, Yoshimura Suzuki was caught off guard and didn’t really have a bike to compete against the staggering technology of Honda’s new VF750 Interceptor. Except here was this hungry young kid from New Hampshire knocking on the door, seeing what they could do.
“I’d hooked up with Yoshimura at the end of 1982,” Heino recalls. “And I moved out to California to pursue racing. So, my brother and I went in to talk to Fujio [Yoshimura] to find out what we could do. We wondered if we put so much into it, if they would put some into it, we could get things going and he said, ‘Yes, let’s do it.’”
With that agreement the Heino brothers essentially helped keep Yoshimura developing a Superbike in ‘83, something they had no plans to do initially. So Heino raced that bike with decent success, including a handful of top 10 finishes, a sixth at Mid-Ohio his top outing.
Heino still has that Yoshimura built 1983 Suzuki GS750ES. Turns out to be a pretty significant race bike, being the first 750cc Superbike Yoshimura developed.
Heino also scored an AMA Formula One podium at Mid-Ohio in ’83 on his own Suzuki RG500, finishing behind the factory Hondas of Mike Baldwin and Steve Wise. Yet in spite of his strong rides he was doing nothing but continuing to spend his own money, of which he was pretty much out of after two years on the pro circuit.
“I had to sit out in ’84 in the prime of my career,” Heino said. “And then in ’85 Honda was selling their RS250s, so I got one of those. I’d never ridden a 250 before. It was different. Every little movement you made was magnified. You stick your elbow out too far and the bike leans over. But I did pretty good on them.”
Well enough to finish fourth in the final AMA 250Grand Prix standings for 1985. He scored runner-up 250GP finishes at Daytona in October of’85 and again at his home track of Loudon in ’86.
Heino, like dozens of top-level racers did in the mid-1980s, found a way to actually make a little money racing, by dropping back down to the club ranks and chasing factory contingency dollars. That led into racing with one of the leading AMA National Endurance teams, Dutchman Racing.
His racing career took a hiatus when some of Heino’s past dealings with marijuana trafficking came back to haunt him. In ’93 he took a plea deal and spent a couple of years in a minimum-security federal prison in Jesup, Georgia, along with televangelist Jim Bakker. In one of his last races before going to prison Heino scored a podium in a Harley 883 road race at Daytona.
“That was it, I was riding so good,” Heino said. “I really had some of my best years coming up and then that just really screwed me. But I did my time, did what I was supposed to do, Pat Moroney set me up with a job when I got out and I stayed at his house and he got me a Harley and a GSX-R and I went back racing.
“At that point I was just so happy to be out and going to racetracks. I was just doing it by myself towing the bikes behind my car, but in my mind, I was living the dream.”
By then Heino was in his mid-30s and even though he scored some top-10 pro results, at this point he says he was doing it just for fun. A bad crash at Loudon in ’96 that broke his femur caused him to call it a career.
Today Heino is living in a comfortable house in Daytona Beach, is close to retirement from his local truck driving job. He rides regularly both on road and off. His beautiful girlfriend Tara has him eating healthy and walking with Tara and their laidback husky keeps him fit. He’s in his early 60s now, but looks younger.
“Things are good now,” Heino says. “I got lucky, I got a house, I’ve worked hard for everything I have. I’d like to get my vintage bikes together, take some time for us to travel, go hiking and camping, ride dirt bikes and just do whatever we want to do.”
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