Not many people are aware of the informal classification given to riders who have excelled in every form of dirt track and who have also won a road race. It's called the Grand Slam Club. Joining the Grand Slam Club requires a rider to win a race in each of the following divisions: half-mile dirt track, mile dirt track, short track, TT, and road race.

Just winning an event in each of those dirt track classifications is tough. And the rider who does all that has to win a road race, too. Very few riders have done so and, in the eyes of many, they are the elite of AMA racing sect, which used to award just one championship based on the results of both dirt track and road race finishes.

At this time, just four riders are hot-shoe-carrying members of the Grand Slam Club: Dick Mann, Kenny Roberts, Doug Chandler, and Bubba Shobert

Riders at the moment who have a shot at joining the Club are: Nick Hayden, Tom Hayden, Jay Springsteen, Chris Carr, Larry Pegram, and Scott Parker.

Out of those, Carr and Nick Hayden have the best shot at a Grand Slam. Hayden has everything but a Mile win. Carr is close, too: he's won miles, half-miles, short tracks, and TTs (he IS the Prince of Peoria, after all). A road race win (in the premier class) eluded him while he rode for the Harley-Davidson team (although he remains the only person to put a VR1000 on the pole of a Superbike race). Pegram has a decent shot, has the elusive road race win, but needs a short track and a TT win to complete the package. Springsteen came closer to winning a road race than most people realize: he placed in the top five in the Daytona 200 way back when. It would be difficult to do so now, but one learns to never say never about Springsteen. Parker has never shown much interest in roadracing. Other than to say that he wishes now that he'd become one, simply because you can make infinitely more money roadracing on the national level than you can at the same level in the turn-left series.

The very talented and very deceased Ricky Graham would have had a great shot had he continued racing Superbikes (he did so on and off, starting with riding one of Rob Muzzy's Kawasaki's in 1987 at Daytona). Graham raced an 883 Sportster, too, in the mid-1990s.

The Grand Slam was a goal of many roadracers at one point, but they just did not have the same success on the dirt as they did on the asphalt, even though they spent the majority of their formative years racing dirt track. Riders that fit this description are Wayne Rainey, Eddie Lawson, Kevin Schwantz, Freddie Spencer, Mike Hale and many others.

As the years pass, the Grand Slam Club seems to be increasingly forgotten. It shouldn't. It is probably the hardest damn club to get into in motorcycle racing.