Fred Merkel, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz and Freddie Spencer, what do these riders have in common? They all had places at or near the top of the AMA Superbike win list when the series offered just a single Superbike race per weekend.

With the majority of the AMA Superbike rounds now double events, the all-time win list will one day begin to diminish the accomplishments of riders like Doug Polen, Mike Baldwin and Scott Russell, more riders that never raced a double in their lives. For these riders there never was a "tomorrow"; they never got a second chance. They didn't have the ability to treat the first race like a race-practice, fix all their set-up problems and do well in the second event. Back then, the "second" race was trying to be the first guy to get the last stand-by seat on the plane home.

Flyin' Fred Merkel's name topped the AMA Superbike win list for more than a decade with his legendary 20 wins, and the only rider to eclipse him was Canadian-living in Vegas Miguel DuHamel.

In the late-1990s through 2002, Mat Mladin and Nick Hayden leapt through the all-time win list with double wins—example: Mladin was 12th on the list in 1998. Now he challenges DuHamel for the all-time class king title; meanwhile the new régime at the AMA seems unconcerned about classifying the wins as singles or doubles on the all-time list. Nobody is saying Mat doesn't belong there, just that it might have taken him longer to get to the top if he'd raced single race events in the late 1980s.

It's slightly ambiguous to put Miguel DuHamel at the top of this single win list—DuHamel beat Merkel's record with a win in the first race at the first double race weekend ever held in AMA Superbike history (Road Atlanta 1998). But, because it was record-breaking, and DuHamel scored it in the first race of the weekend, I included it.

Single Race Win Record (1976-1998)