Jeremy Cook W
ayne Rainey may never have raced a BMW, but he is a legend in the racing com- munity nonetheless. He
won races on Kawasakis, Hondas and Suzu- kis, but his best seasons (and three consecu- tive world championships in the early 1990s) were aboard a Yamaha YZR500. Rainey’s racing career changed after a
back-breaking crash in 1993 that paralyzed him from the chest down. He shifted to managing a motorcycle racing team and races to this day aboard a hand-controlled superkart. He lives in Monterey, California, in a house with a view of his favorite track, Laguna Seca. “I had a lot of success there as a racer, and
I’ve lived in the area since 1993—almost 24 years. It’s home, and that’s my home race- track, so it’s impossible to not say it’s my favorite. Laguna Seca appeals to me for a variety of reasons. Everyone always told me when I started out, ‘Just wait until you race at Laguna Seca,’ and it didn’t disappoint. I’ve won a lot of races there, by far more than
64 BMW OWNERS NEWS February 2017
any other. Having my home Grand Prix there was one of the highlights of my career. If you can win your home Grand Prix there’s nothing that can top that. Winning in front of your fans, family and friends is special. I can count on my hand how many tracks I didn’t like. For example, I was never a big fan of Donington Park, but I won my first Grand Prix there. So there’s not many I don’t like.” After heavy criticism and a very public
dispute in 2013 over coverage of AMA Superbike events that conflicted with FIM events, the AMA turned over commercial rights to road racing to a group led by Rainey; this led directly to the establish- ment of MotoAmerica, which held its first races in 2015. The first season’s nine races were chased by nine races in 2016, and 2017 will see 10 race weekends at tracks across the USA from New Jersey to California and from Wisconsin to Georgia. Rainey says he’s partial to the Superbike just because it’s the class that
class, not helped build his career and win his
championships, but also because it’s MotoAmerica’s headline event and “the bikes are the fastest, the most powerful and that’s where the very best riders and teams should be.” He’s of the opinion that riders who want to make a career of racing have to rise through the class structure, but their goal needs to be the Superbike class. One of his goals for MotoAmerica is to find riders who dominate at every level and in every class. When it comes to his other goals for
MotoAmerica, Rainey says the aims haven’t changed much since 2014. “We want to give our racers an opportunity to race in a series that is competitive and one that helps raise their game to the point where they can compete in any series in the world. I think we have racers now that are capable of going to the next level, and our goal continues to be to make this series good enough for that to happen. I think you can see how far we have come in the first two seasons of MotoAmerica, so we have to continue to push, continue down the same path and get
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