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| Road Atlanta Winners 1971-2005
carruthers, rainey, shobert and gobert pepper list by dean adams
Ten Things You Should Know About Road Atlanta: 1. Road Atlanta, now the second-oldest event on the AMA Superbike schedule, hosts this weekend's AMA Superbike round. Now that Loudon/Bryar's/Laconia is off the schedule, Road Atlanta is one of the few tracks that bridge AMA racing history: all of the '70s legends like Carruthers, Roberts, Mann and Rayborn raced there, back in the day as the kids now say.2. While the track hasn't moved, obviously, over the years it has been listed as being located in both Gainesville and Braselton, two nearby small towns. Locals actually claim that Road Atlanta is located in the town of Flowery Branch. 3. While the win list above lists Superbike winners at Road Atlanta in the early 1980s, the top echelon class in that period wasn't Superbike, it was the old Formula One class, populated with nasty 500cc or larger two-strokes like the Honda RS500, Kawasaki KR500 or fire-breathing 1000cc four-stroke machines like the Honda FWS1000. Rich Schlacter from Old Lyme CT won the Atlanta F1 race in 1980. 4. Road Atlanta shares one distinct similarity with Monterey's Laguna Seca Raceway: the track is essentially a run up and down a hill. While Laguna runs counter-clockwise and features the famed Corkscrew, Atlanta's track runs clockwise. 5. Doug Polen and certainly Mat Mladin are better known as riders who have won on Suzuki machinery at Road Atlanta, the man who scored Suzuki's first win in Georgia should not be forgotten: Geoff Perry.Perry was a working racer even as a factory star, winning races here in the US, and, incredibly, jetting back to New Zealand several times a year to work as a mechanic for Air New Zealand. Why is this factory Suzuki and former race winner's name muddled in obscurity? He was dead six-weeks after his Road Atlanta win. Perry was killed in a plane crash while traveling from New Zealand to the US to race at the '73 Laguna Seca round. To this day stories are repeated about parts from Perry's bike being used on the motorcycle that Pat Hennen crashed at the Isle of Man, which is said to be the same bike Cal Rayborn was killed on in New Zealand. 6. Doug Polen won Road Atlanta on the Ferracci Ducati in 1991, but his 1990 win was actually much more impressive. Polen had crashed a Suzuki Superbike in testing at Willow Springs in February, and his left foot tangled in the chain and rear sprocket. Polen lost four toes and a chunk of his foot in the incident. What's more, he wasn't even racing in America in 1990—concentrating instead on the more lucrative Japanese F1/FIII titles. Polen flew in to Atlanta in early May from Japan, jumped on the bike and with, ahem, some track time, found a set-up. He actually dominated the race and beat Doug Chandler, Jamie James, Randy Renfrow, Dave Sadowski and the rest of the grid. And then he hobbled to a plane and flew back to Japan. That weekend in the Road Atlanta paddock Ducati maestro Eraldo Ferracci said to him, 'You pretty good, maybe you ride for me next year, eh?'. Polen, Ducati and Ferracci created a dynasty in World Superbike and US Superbike, one which began at Road Atlanta.
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