Q. Vindication came in 1988. You came here on the works 88 GSX-R750, but fell early in practice, right?

A. We came here in '88 I think without doing any testing. The bike was kind of late showing up. There weren't a bunch of them, so they just sent one. At the time, all of the R&D that we'd done on the '87 was very similar to the '86 as far as engine goes. I think there were some differences in the chassis. 

But when we got here in '88, this was a different engine, the development on it wasn't as thorough as the '87 was, and the '87 was a faster bike. I went out and was having some electrical problems, off into the chicane, I just started to get on the brakes and tip the thing in and it drops a cylinder, and as it does it sucks me off into the grass getting me in, spin, highside through the chicane. I'm thinking as I'm in the air, this is exactly where I ended up last year. 

But I just had a small crack in my forearm, and Dr. Kieffer and the guys over at Halifax looked it and they said you really shouldn't ride, most people we'd cast this thing and tell you six weeks. Dr. Kieffer talked them into letting me bandage the thing up as best I could and go out and see if it didn't hurt so bad that he thought it would affect my riding, he was going to let me ride. 

And I went out and still hadn't qualified, so I had to come back and qualify the thing, about the fourth lap of qualifying I qualified at 1:55.1 which at the time was pole, and I thought that's good enough, I'm going to give my hand a rest.

That was Thursday. I think the weather was iffy that week, and maybe we didn't get to run heats, I forget. It rained all day Saturday, the Supercross was a wash. So the Camel Challenge didn't get to be the Camel Challenge. They put it in with the 200. And I think, I don't know what the other guys' tire choices were, but for us, race tire was a race tire, that we were going to do our 19 lap stint and that's what we were going to do. And I think Polen and Scott Gray and the other guys opted to run something a little bit softer that may not have the durability. Anyway, Polen won the money. But I think it was about after the fifth lap he started to kind of drift back.

Q. You and Polen put the hurt on everyone that year. He finished second. Didn't you lap up to like fifth place?

A. I lapped everybody but him. And I don't remember how far he got. The last guy that I got to lap was Bubba Shobert on the Honda. Bubba had fuel problems, vapor lock or whatever it was on the warm-up lap, and had to push the thing to get it back started again, and started half a lap behind us. 

Q. You've said that Daytona wasn't a special track to you, but was the win special? 

A. When I won my Daytona 200 it was a big deal to me, because at the time I had signed a deal to go Grand Prix racing and I felt like this was my year. 1988 could be it, or else I'm going to have to come back, I'm not going to just be able to say Superbike racing, boom, done, okay I won my last race I'm going to walk away from it. To me, it was really good. 

Q. From there you went to Suzuka and really caught the attention of the world by winning your first GP. Do you remember what you did between the races?

A. We tested the bike for the Japanese Grand Prix a month before we came here and I still felt like I was going to be able to go there and do well. The question mark was my arm, was it going to be strong enough, was it going to be fit enough to ride that Grand Prix bike for 22 laps around Suzuka. All in all, there was a big Pepsi ad that was done, I think it was the Monday and Tuesday after the 200, and I tried to do some riding there ­ a big TV commercial, and they had a Porsche, they took the frigging front end off of it so they could hold the camera in it, and Scott Gray helped with some shooting, and Polen helped with some shooting, and I decided it was more important to me to try and get my arm ready. I tried to take as much time off as I could until two weeks later when the Japanese practice starts.

Between the two races I'm pretty sure I went back to Texas. Just did as much as I could to sit there and look at it and hope it was healing. I forget if some of the doctors didn't have some ideas about things that I could be doing to help it, tried to keep it as flexible as I could. It was just up above the wrist, so it wasn't anything that I couldn't still move my wrist on. And I think maybe I had to go to Japan to do some stuff early in the week. I won $20,000 here, I don't remember what I did with it. 

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