Kent Howerton "Rhinestone"
Kent Howerton
By Jack Martin
Background:
Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
Birthdate: July 11, 1954
Height: 5’8"
Racing weight: 155
Parents: Allen & Peggy
Wife/Children: Lisa/Sean (16) & Derek (13)
Current Occupation: Owner – San Antonio Masonry & Tool Supply
Racing Highlights:
1973 7th Place Rio Bravo Trans-AMA (GP Class as privateer)
1974 Trans-AMA 250 Support Class Champion (5 overall wins in 8 race series)
1975 2nd Place – AMA 250 Motocross Championship (3 overall wins in 5 race series)
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1976 AMA 500 Motocross Champion (2 overall wins in 7 race series)
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1977 Motorcycle Olympiad Champion
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1979 2nd Place – AMA 250 Motocross Championship (2 overall wins in 10 race series)
250 USGP Winner
Trans-USA Champion (1overall win in 4 race series)
ABC Superbikers Champion
1980 AMA 250 Motocross Champion (6 overall wins in 7 race series)
250 USGP Winner
Trans-USA Champion (2 overall wins in 4 race series)
2nd Place – AMA 250 Supercross Championship (3 wins in 16 race series)
1981 AMA 250 Motocross Champion (5 overall wins in 8 race series; 13 of 16 motos won)
3rd Place – AMA Supercross Championship (1 win in 12 race series)
1983 2nd Place – AMA 500 Motocross Championship (1 win in 11 race series)
1984 ABC Superbikers Champion
Guild d’Or (Paris Supermotard)
Major Sponsors:
1974-77 Husqvarna (Mechanic – Eric Crippa)
1977-82 Suzuki (Mechanic –Steve Bradshaw; Greg Arnett)
1983-84 Kawasaki (Mechanic –Steve Pollos; Rick Asch)
Current Sponsors: Scott, Silkolene, MSR, Pro Circuit, Tucker Rocky, Works Connection, VP Racing Fuels and V Force Reeds
Kent Howerton has always been the lone Texan. He was the lone standout for the Husqvarna factory and it’s only American Champion when he won the AMA 1976 500 MX Championship. There have been only three non Japanese bikes that have won an AMA MX Championship with Gary Jones on the 250 Can-Am in 1974, Grant Langston on the 125 KTM in 2003 and Howerton on the Husky in 1976. Every other championship has been on a Japanese bike. Later he switched bikes to Suzuki and classes and won two straight AMA 250 MX Championships. He represented the U.S. in three straight Motocross des Nations where the team finished 2nd in 1977. He is also the only one out of a great group of riders from Texas including Wyman Priddy, Steve Wise, Steve Stackable the only AMA Champion ever from the state of Texas. They should be putting statues of him on the county court house lawns across the state. He has been the thinking man’s racer in that he is always finding a better way to ride or to develop the bike.
Bench Racer: Tell me about what some have described as the best motocross race they ever saw in the AMA 250 National at Saddleback in 1981 against Bob Hannah?
Kent Howerton: Well, Hannah thought I was playing around with him because I’d beaten him so much at the first race in Hangtown. I had gotten the flu and was sick as a dog that day at Saddleback. So when I got around him, I couldn’t pull away and that’s where he thought I was playing with him. There’s a lot more to this because he thought that I had been saying that he was never as fast as I was. I never said that. In fact, I had been asked in an interview what I thought about Hannah’s riding now that he’d come back from his injury and I said, "Well, I think he’s riding faster now than he ever has."Because he was. He was riding really good. Another part of this story is that Mark Barnett and I had this little friendly wager going on where there was a competition between us to try to win all of our races. He was in the 125 class and I was in the 250, with both of us on factory Suzukis. When I won the U.S. 250 GP at Unadilla, he’d hear about it. Barnett goes "God dang it, now I’ve gotta go out and win the 125 USGP too." It was a friendly competition between us – we were trying to out do each other. So that’s another factor that had nothing to do with Hannah. I HAD to get around Hannah to stay up with Barnett. EDITOR’S NOTE: Barnett won the first 7 races of the 8 race 125 National series in 1981. Only a broken collarbone stopped him from sweeping the series. Well, Barnett won the first 125 moto at Saddleback. So, I had to do the same thing. I forced myself to drive like that. When I got around Hannah I didn’t have any strength left, I couldn’t do anything. The place that he passed me back is what in my mind keyed everything off. There’s a part of the track that goes down right where the pits were, a real tight 180 that went back up hill. There was about a 2’ deep, sticky berm in it. Now, on the left, it’s not even on the track, he passed me coming down off of this bank and for him to get in the corner, he had to hit it at 180 degrees. So he almost stopped. He was stuck in the turn and had to turn his bike to get out of the turn. I didn’t appreciate it. The next lap I did the same thing back to him. So from that point it just escalated, and neither one of us would back off.
BR: Was that about the hardest race you’d ever run?
KH: It was the most aggressive race I’ve ever been in. I’ve never seen anything like that out of any motocross race I’ve ever seen. We did things that were literally impossible to do. We were going down these long downhills at 70 mph or more, our handlebars locked. One person seeing the good part of the track, the other person’s in the ditch flying along with him. Neither one of us would shut off. The only thing that would separate us was when we hit a bump and it broke the handle bars apart. It was literally a knock down drag out battle to each corner. I’d gotten around him and after numerous. . . I mean almost to the point where we almost killed ourselves. Going over that Magoo jump in the back, I thought it was over with and I just let my guard down, turned inside after the jump and he t-boned me. I reached for him as he went by. I grabbed a piece of his jersey and gave it my best, but I just couldn’t drag him off the bike. It would have been a real interesting story from that point on if I’d been successful. EDITOR’S NOTE: Howerton got up and repassed Hannah to win the moto. For the second moto, I was so tired after all that first moto stuff and suffering from the flu, I didn’t even think I was racing. I was just shot. I had no energy at all.
BR: One thing that Hannah has said about that season is that you had a bike that weighed 195 pounds while he was riding a 230 pound pig. You had said in an interview about supercross in 1979 that Hannah was just flying through the whoops like no one else at that time and you were asked "How does Hannah do this?." You answered that he had a super light bike and he was able to just fly across the top of the whoops, so may be there is some truth to his contention.
KH: Well, I don’t know what his bike weighed. I don’t remember what the weight really was of my Suzuki then, probably around a couple hundred pounds. I think you have to realize, too, that there’s never a year when every bike out there is equal. Somebody’s bike is always better than the other guys’ for some reason or another. In ’81, the Suzukis didn’t work well as a package; the bikes were light and the back end was good, but the front end was horrible, way too harsh. Like at Saddleback, I remember coming in there and trying to turn and the thing was bouncing so bad you almost couldn’t get any grip. But, the back end was great. Keep in mind, in ’78 Hannah had gone out on a stock bike and won races. Back then, there were guys on works bikes and he’s beating them on a stock bike. So I might have had a bit of an advantage, but the world had changed from ’78. EDITOR’S NOTE: Hannah won 6 of 11 supercrosses in 1978 and won the championship with 272 points, Marty Tripes on a Honda with 220 points finished 2nd. In the 250 National Series, Hannah won 8 of 10 races and took the championship with 410 points. Jimmy Ellis amassed 351 points on his Honda to finish second.
BR: People said that in 1980 you won everything because Hannah was injured.
KH: Well, people were saying that, but that didn’t really bother me. I had raced Bob before and he was sort of my gauge to try and see where I could go. I wanted to beat him and then when he was coming back, you know he was obviously going to be my main competition. So I was running. That was the first year I really took training seriously. I’d sometimes at night have nightmares about hearing his bike catching me and then passing me. So it just motivated me more to go out the next day and work harder. EDITOR’S NOTE: Howerton won 6 of 7 250 Nationals and won the championship with 336 points. Mike Bell on a Yamaha was 2nd with 259 points and fellow Texan Steve Wise finished 3rd with 222 points.
BR: You had won came within a whisker of being 250cc champ in ’75 and had won the 500cc championship in ’76, and yet you had never trained seriously?
KH: Early on, I didn’t train, but I tried to understand what was going on. A lot of people didn’t know back then. All of the guys that had been racing before us wouldn’t share their information because we’d become a threat to them. It wasn’t until after those guys retired that they started revealing some of the information. I had trained at the Tibblin School when I started with Husky. But, if you have never trained before, the first time you start training you notice you’re tired all the time and it takes a while to get over that period and start getting the benefits from it. I started running. I almost gave up. I said "God, I’m so tired." You should do all that stuff in the off season, not when you’re racing. But I noticed that with Hannah, I would get out in front and pull away. Then about half way through the race, here he comes. He had that endurance that most guys didn’t have. Well, as I started training and got my endurance up, it wasn’t that hard to beat him then ‘cause I had a little bit more speed. Bob didn’t have a lot of natural talent to ride the bike. He wasn’t technically the best rider, but he made up for that because of his tremendous desire to compete and his physical conditioning. He also had excellent reflexes. I remember following him at Southwick and being dumbfounded when I saw the lines that he was taking because it didn’t take that much effort just to go a few feet out of the way and miss all the bumps. Bob was just point and shoot, one corner to the next corner, no matter what was there. But he was so strong that he could just hang onto the bike. I mean, there’s not many people who have that kind of desire. You know, that’s the difference that makes one rider reach beyond another because you can give that other person the best bike, he can be in the best shape in the world, he can have everything going his way, but if he doesn’t want to win and the guy next to him does, he’s gonna beat him. He’ll find a way. Bob’s natural ability and speed weren’t that great, but he overcame it because of his good endurance and his determination.
BR: It seems that Hannah could not accept that you were faster than he was – that you were beating him.
KH: I don’t know what it was. At Mt. Morris, it was kind of an interesting deal. We had a pretty good first part of the race, battling. He was riding pretty good, and I was riding pretty hard. I was thinking, "You know, to ride at this speed is gonna be pretty intense for 40 minutes." Then Bob backed off and I took off. Then something happened and he caught up to me and we started racing all over again. Below the scoring tower there was this drop off in to a left handed berm. I had the good line where you could rail around the berm. Bob tried to pass me on the inside. I said, "This ain’t gonna work." I wasn’t gonna back off. I wasn’t gonna give him my line. So we hit. Knocked both of us down and I was looking at him, shaking my head, "What is wrong with you?" He was all panicked, trying to get on his bike and get it started. He took off. Everybody was yelling at me "Get him, get him, get him" and I was just real calm. I picked up my bike. I walked around and looked at it. I got to the front, straightened the handlebars out. I took the time to look around to make sure everything was all right. Then I took off, reeled him in and won the race. I could do that then. I had that much confidence in myself. I was in good shape. My bike was working good. There was no way I was going to let him win. EDITOR’S NOTE: Counting Supercross, Trans-AM, Trans-USA, 125-250-500 National MX wins the total is Kent Howerton with 32 wins and Bob Hannah with 70.
BR: In fact, you only lost 3 motos out of 16 that year.
KH: Yeah, Bob got really pissed off at me in Colorado at the last national race. All I wanted to do was secure the championship. I didn’t really care. I let Donnie Hansen by in the first moto. Then Hannah caught up to me and I just waved him by at the mechanics’ area. That pissed Bob off so bad he flipped me the bird. I did it in front of the mechanics so that there would be witnesses that I let him go. I just wanted him to know "I’m not racing, I don’t want to race with you." We’d done that deal once, I wasn’t gonna do it again. EDITORS NOTE: Howerton won 5 of 8 Nationals overall and compiled 389 points for the championship. Hannah won the other 3 Nationals and finished second overall with 345 points.
BR: What do you think that made you a champion?
KH: I had a strong desire to compete, to not give up. I had a certain amount of natural ability, the physical ability. I think I had a good combination. Early on, I didn’t have the experience or the people to tell me how to do it. Once I figured out the formula of winning there was nobody that could even come close.
BR: How did you figure out the formula?
KH: The first championship is the hardest one to win. First of all, just to win a national is very hard because if you haven’t done it, you don’t know what to do or what to expect. When you’re winning it, you think everything’s gonna happen. You think all kinds of things are gonna break on the bike or whatever. Until you get that one out of the way, it’s really tough. Winning that first championship is really nice and once you get that off your chest you can just relax and savor that feeling for a while and then you gotta say, "Okay, what am I gonna do now? Go out and win another one? Why am I gonna win another one?" So as I stepped back and kind of looked at things, I could see how hard and how much work everybody around me had put into winning a championship. So it gave me just as much pleasure in winning the race to see all the engineers, the mechanics and everybody else involved in the race, to see them get something from it besides just what I got out of it.
BR: Did you take a lot of satisfaction then in developing bikes, too?
KH: I did, I enjoyed it. I always had this curiosity of how things work. When I rode at Husky that’s something that they didn’t really want their riders doing. They relied on their engineers. They told me, "You just ride the bike and leave that to us."
BR: Is that why you left them after the ’77 season?
KH: Well, the reason I ended up leaving was that they couldn’t make the bike stay together. There were a lot of problems with the design. They had problems with metal fatiguing and I couldn’t finish races. I’d get in a race and lead and then the bike would break. So I just told them, "I can’t ride for you guys again, I don’t have confidence in the bike. That’s it." I started looking and talking to other teams and initially nothing came of it because nobody really understood why I was finishing the way I was. The fact was, I wasn’t getting much support from Husqvarna.
BR: In fact, you left Husqvarna before you had another ride.
KH: I was confident that no matter what, I was gonna find something. If I had to go buy a bike and go race it myself, I would do it. I’ve always been a person that wants to prove himself. Even with my contracts, I was reluctant to have 2 or 3 year contracts because I said "If I’m good enough, I’m gonna get it."
BR: You only sought short term contracts as a way of keeping yourself motivated?
KH: Not really. I just felt that if I deserved to be there, then the offers would be there and if I didn’t, then I shouldn’t be doing that any more. In fact, when I finally retired from riding for Kawasaki, they had a contract for me. But I was hurt, I had bad knees and I was losing a little bit of interest. I still enjoyed doing the development work and I still helped Kawasaki a little bit after I quit. But I remember where I decided to retire. It was at Washougal, I was sitting in a lawn chair between motos and just thinking, "Man, I really don’t want to get up." I was just sitting there in my old dirty motocross clothes thinking "I’ve been this way for such a long time. I want to do something different." I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I needed a change.
BR: It probably never entered your mind to just ride the motocross season like McGrath did in reverse later with his supercross career.
KH: I probably could have. I talked to Kawasaki a little bit about that and they were kind of leaning towards letting me ride more of what I wanted to ride in ‘85. In the end, I just wanted to do something different. Around that time, Steve Burns approached me about buying into VP Racing Fuels. I did that with the idea that it would give me time to decide what I really wanted to do. I did that for a while and then sold my interest in VP and did a bunch of different things.
BR: I’m interested in knowing what you did after you retired.
KH: I tested tires, both for cars and motorcycles, for a friend of mine, Brian Long. He asked me if I’d be interested in doing tire testing and I just really enjoyed it. Brian and I were independent so we would test the tires for all different kinds of tire manufacturers. I did the high performance part. I had some qualifications for doing that because I had my car racing license. The first thing that we did was working with Cooper Tire & Rubber. That was kinda neat to be able to do a job and have them teach me how to do it. Most people want to hire you for what you know. With my motorcycling experience, I had the ability to feel things out and then to translate that into words. What they were really looking for was somebody that could be an evaluator; take a product out, try it and say what was wrong with it or what was good about it.
BR: I heard that you hit a turkey at speed once.
KH: That was testing for Standard Rubber Products, which Cooper ended up buying. We were testing wind seals like around your doors. Anything that would transmit noise – they would instrument a vehicle for sound, go out and make runs in it at different speeds. That creates your baseline. Then, they fully taped the vehicle, all the seams, and would have us make a run. They would then analyze that data, modify the vehicle, then send us out to test each modification. What had happened was, when you start a run you can’t change the speed because you’ve got all your instrumentation on, to lift off the throttle would ruin a run. It was an 8 ½ mile oval and it takes a while to get around it to start another run. I had come around a tight part of a turn and saw the turkey take off. It looked like he was gonna fly to the left. At the last second, he changed and went to the right. At 100 miles per hour, I didn’t have a lot of time to react. I just lifted my foot off the pedal and the turkey hit the windshield – went through the windshield and hit me in the face. The windshield wiper was flapping and the turkey was flapping. I closed my eyes, but was able to grab the bird with one hand. I shoved it down between the front seat and the dash and pulled the car slowly to the inside ‘til I got it stopped. It was kinda intense ‘cause, you know, I’m going 100 mph and suddenly I have to close my eyes and go through a turn while hanging on to a wild animal.
BR: What are you doing for a living now?
KH: Rick Bostic, a friend of mine, and I recently started a business, San Antonio Masonry & Tool Supply, offering masonry and tool supplies based on his background in that business. What we offer is our service for our customers. They call and tell us what they need at different job sites. We then have our trucks loaded up and we drop those materials off all over the San Antonio area. It has grown tremendously, to the point that we are now seeing monthly sales of over a million dollars. So it’s just grown and we’ve gone through all the growing pains that a company has when it grows that fast.
BR: Let’s talk about how you got started racing motorcycles. I’d be real interested in knowing what racing was like in Texas when you started.
KH: When I was fifteen or so, my dad was a salesman in Colorado. One of his customers had a motorcycle, a little Suzuki dual purpose bike, and asked me if I wanted to try it. He taught me how to ride it on the Platte River. So he let me use it, but it wasn’t mine. That was the bad thing, because then I was trying to figure out, you know, how could I keep on riding. For my 16th birthday, I had worked cutting grass and other jobs. My parents bought me a Kawasaki 100 Trail Boss. So I started riding and that thing just fell apart. So I learned how to work on bikes just to try to keep it running. When we moved to Texas there was a guy named Jimmy Dubose that saw me riding out at this place called 700 Acres. He had a brand new Yamaha 125cc AT-1. Jimmy kinda liked tinkering with his bike, so he would work on it and then bring it down to 700 Acres. He asked me to take his bike out and tell me what I thought about it. I mean, compared to mine, which was a pile of crap, it was wonderful! He came back a week later and he had a 21" front wheel on it. "Go try this, see if that’s any better." So that went on for a little while, with him improving his bike with an expansion chamber or a new set of pegs and me testing it for him. So he asked me one day, he said, "You wanna race it?" I said "Sure, why not?" I didn’t even know what races were.
BR: You’d never been to one?
KH: I’d never been to one. We went to Sayers Motorsport Park. I rode in practice and planned to ride amateur. But Jimmy said, "You know, I’ve been watching you out there and you’re going pretty good. You might want to ride the expert class. You get money for that." I said to him, "Hey, that sounds good, I don’t have no money." I finished third. I was a pretty distant third, got pretty tired and had cramps.
BR: Who finished in front of you?
KH: A guy named Steve Stackable. I think second was Gary Bigley out of Austin. After that, we ran two more races with me finishing second in the next one and then winning the third. So my way of understanding that was, if you win, you must be better than everybody else. There was a real rude awakening when I couldn’t win the next one.
BR: Was there anyone else then in Texas that was real competition for you and Stackable?
KH: Well, there was Wyman Priddy. I didn’t like to travel so I didn’t see him much, but when I did race against Wyman he was difficult to beat. He was always first off the start. He just had a really strong desire to win. I raced against him at a race in Dallas one time and I mean it was almost like a knock down drag out fight. I went over to him afterward and said "Wyman, why are you trying so darn hard?" Wyman says, "Because my wife needs a new pair of tennis shoes." Wyman was one of the nicest guys I ever met. Steve Wise would also come up from the Rio Grande Valley and race with us. He was quick! He had a lot of speed and was smooth.
BR: How’d you come to ride the Nationals. I know that you rode the old Tex-AMA series here at Rio.
KH: I went out to Hang Town and Baymare in California in 1974 on my Husky. I did pretty decent finishing in the top five in my first race. I actually ended up winning the last National in Louisiana that season as a privateer. I remember it was really a strange feeling out in California for that first race because I went out there with a guy named Bill Davis. I’m walking around in the pits and all these people are wanting my autograph. I’m thinking to myself, "Why do they want my autograph?" When you’re just a fast local in Texas, people don’t ask for your autograph. When I asked, they said "Oh we’ve been reading all kinds of things about you." It turns out that Davis had been talking to Cycle News and Pete Szylagyi at Motocross Action magazine. So we had some pretty good coverage and people were reading about it, so they were real excited to see me. Everybody in Texas was used to me.
BR: That first year when you won the New Orleans National, that was on a bike that you built from Marty Tripes’ old frame after he left for Can Am, right?
KH: Husky threw that frame away! We got it out of the trash.
BR: Well, what happened? In ’74, Tripes was right in the thick of the championship on a Husky and Can Am hired him away for the last race or two. It seemed to me that Can Am was trying to buy a championship or insurance for a championship.
KH: Right. If Can Am had all of the top guys that had a chance of winning, they were a shoe in. EDITOR’S NOTE: Gary Jones won with 600 points, Marty Tripes finished 2nd with 576 points and Jimmy Ellis finished 3rd with 430 points. All of them finished the year racing the Can-Am motorcycles, which made for good advertising. Jeff Smith, Can-Am Racing Director and two time World 500cc MX Champion, learned from Billy 'The Pig' Nilsson that you don't play 'Ping Pong' in winning championships.
BR: Gary Jones was leading the points towards the end of the season, but he hadn’t won any races that year. He was staying on top of the points, but he wasn’t winning. I think Tripes was probably winning more. He wasn’t as consistent, but was a threat for the championship.
KH: All Marty had to do was decide " I think I feel like winning" and he could go out and win.
BR: Was Tripes the best American talent that you’ve ever seen.
KH: I really haven’t seen that much natural talent in anybody else. You know, Ron Lechien had a lot of natural ability. There have been other guys out there with natural talent, too, but Marty was just unbelievably talented. I remember one race, in Ohio on a hard dusty track. I finished 11th in the first moto and Marty finished behind me. After the moto, we were just kinda sitting there talking about the race. I said to him, "Marty, you know, I don’t know why you are back sliding around with me back here. All you gotta do is just go ride up to the front. Marty says, "Really?" I blurted back to him, "Man, you can win any race you want." He had so much natural talent, it’s not even funny. And so I just kinda forgot about it. I came in after the last moto I said, "Well how’d you do?" "Oh I won."
BR: With all that talent, I wonder what it was about Tripes that wouldn’t let him put it all together for a championship?
KH: The thing I’ve noticed with people that have a lot of natural ability is they have a hard time focusing. I think people that have had the worst of things tend to stay more focused.
BR: That’s one thing Hannah said in a recent interview. He said "If I’d had a rich dad, I never would have become what I did. I had to work."
KH: Some of his motivation came from that and some of my motivation came from that, too. I was very poor growing up and it’s very difficult, you know, just to keep a bike going. I was very fortunate that I had dealers that liked me. I was really a shy kid. I didn’t like to talk, but people liked me anyway. When I worked for the Yamaha shop, the owner's wife told me, "Whatever you do, don’t change". I said "Well, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m gonna change. At least I’ll try not to."
BR: That reminds me of an interesting thing you said back in ’77 after you had left Husky, but didn’t have another ride yet. You said "You know what, it’s not the money. I’ve got just about everything I ever really thought I needed materially As long as I can pay for the house and give my wife the things we need, that’s really all I’m worried about." Have you been able to maintain pretty much that same perspective for the last 30 years?
KH: I think so. I’m not materialistic. I buy things for Lisa and myself. I bought me a new Honda 450 because I enjoy the technology and the freshness of the bike. I don’t go and buy a car to impress the people in the neighborhood. And luckily my wife, Lisa, is a lot like I am. We’re very happy. We’ve got a very good family, we’ve got good kids and that’s all we want. Just to be happy. Being materialistic like having a lot of money doesn’t make you happy. It can create so many problems. What we’re trying to do is encourage and support our two boys. They’re both interested in different things now. Our older son, Sean, is interested in music. He enjoys school. He’s very smart. The younger one, Derek, is interested in motorcycles. We’ve really enforced school on him. It’s really important to get a good education. Now, both of them are making straight A’s. It’s the first time Derek’s ever made straight A’s. I tell him, "Now you can see, you can do anything you want. You do motorcycles because you want to. Enjoy it. But you have that education as a back up." We just try to teach them to be fair and honest, to treat other people as they want to be treated. It seems to be working. They’re pretty good. Oh, Derek’s a little bit of a ham – he likes people to watch him.
BR: Is it difficult to coach your son?
KH: He’s been pretty good because everybody’s told him, "Listen to your dad, he knows what he’s talking about." Whereas, there’s a lot of dads that may know good technique, but they don’t have the past to show their kids that they really do know what they’re talking about. So he knows that I’m pretty much right. Cause I’ve been there and I’ve done it. He’ll get a little frustrated and a little cocky sometimes and I’ll just say, "That’s fine, you can figure it out". He’ll come back a little later and say, "Now, how did you do that?".
BR: Will you do the full NMA, Loretta Lynn stuff yet?
KH: We went to a qualifier last year and I think that he was a little disappointed because he didn’t realize that there are so many fast kids. He thought he was gonna do better. Then this year, we went to the first regional at Whitney. He did pretty good there, but he broke his wrist a week or two after that. We ran a qualifier at Cycle Ranch, but that’s about it. So we decided to just take the year off and just ride to have fun. I watch him and I can see how he’s progressing. I don’t want him to progress too quickly. I want him to have a little bit of time between those experiences to really understand them and to let it settle into his system. I could have him go a lot faster and I could have him working a lot harder. But if he’s gonna make it a profession, he’s young, he’s got a long road ahead. I don’t want him to get burned out. He’s progressing at a faster pace and he’s faster than anybody that he started with riding with. I don’t want him to go out there and train and don’t want him to go practice 3 times a week right after he comes home from school. If he wants to ride the TTR, fine we’ll ride the TTR. But if he doesn’t want to ride, we don’t ride. I watched Danny Storbeck and his younger brother grow up at the races around here. Danny’s dad had a lot of money. So he would buy the box van, hire the mechanic… everything. The whole nine yards to go out there and compete. But, you know, it was too hard on Danny and I think that’s why Danny doesn’t have any desire to ride now. EDITOR’S NOTE: Storbeck won 5 amateur championships at Loretta Lynn’s in ’82 and ‘83. He did not make much of an impact at the National level though, with his best finish being a 7th in the 250 series in ’86. He would later become infamous for landing on Rick Johnson at the Gainesville National in 1989, which resulted in the wrist injury that ultimately ended Johnson’s career.
BR: You work with Heath Voss the current World SUpercross Champion?
KH: Heath is from Minnesota. He was coming down and Rusty built him a supercross track to ride on. The Yamaha shop here kinda got me hooked up with him. They asked me to go out and talk to him, try and work with him a bit. He’s a really nice kid. So I went out and met him – he hardly rode at all, he ended up talking most of the time. Heath can talk. Heath doesn’t necessarily have great natural ability, but he’s got very good timing. I think that’s why he’s better at supercross because it is more timing, where outdoor racing is more momentum. I was always better outdoors because every time I got on a track I wanted to get the bike up to speed. When the bike started slowing down is when I didn’t like it. I love having that bike dancing around at high speed. That’s where I’m happy. When I’d go to supercross races, it’s like I’d just get going and…there’s a jump … I’d get it going again … ah, there’s a turn … I’d think "They need to straighten this thing out!"
BR: What psychologically do you think you had that allowed you to become a champion?
KH: I don’t know how to describe it. Steve Burns, my ex-partner with VP Racing Fuels, told me one time, "You’re abnormal". I always tried to be normal because, you know, when you’re a young kid going through school, you’re always trying to fit in with everybody. So when he told me I was abnormal, I took it kind of as an insult. But Steve said "No, no, no. You don’t understand. You’re abnormal in that what you do is so different than anybody else. Not many people have that ability to do what you do. "I started thinking about it. "Why does that make me different than everybody else?" I don’t why. I think you see that in all the champions once they quit racing, whether it’s Marty Smith or anyone that won a national championship, you can still see it.
BR: Can you teach the championship secret?
KH: Mark Barnett used to always ask me "What’s it like to win a championship?" "Mark, I can’t tell you, but you will know when you win it." That’s the best advice I could give him. When he finally won his first championship in 1980, he comes bouncing over to me all excited and said, "Man, I know what you mean now. You can’t tell nobody." When I would do my motocross schools, there was an interesting problem there because you have so many different people, from kids to older people, of different types of backgrounds. Some are very well educated, some are not. So when you’re trying to teach them something, you first have to make ‘em understand what it is they’re trying to learn. Then you have to try to figure a way that they can understand that dynamically so that they can apply it. What I found was that you really have to watch ‘em and you can kind of tell when one is hanging in there with you and one is drifting off. You just try to say things to trick ‘em, make ‘em think about it in a different way because what one person understands, another person may not be able to understand it that way.
BR: Do you still teach school schools?
KH: I haven’t had the time. I don’t want to do it unless I can do it right. I started out doing that in the Husky school with World Champion Rolf Tibblin. I learned from him. I thought, "He wants me to go teach with him? I don’t know how to teach. I’m not too sure what I’m doing myself." But then listening to Rolf, listening to other people teach and taking driving classes it taught me a lot about the dynamics of riding a motorcycle and how to teach them Riding a motorcycle is so different than any other thing that you do because it’s so dynamic. There are so many forces in combination happening at a certain time. When you really realize that, you start breaking the forces down, you realize that it’s amazing.
BR: In 1980 every 250 National was won by a Texan with you winning all the races but the one Steve Wise won at Red Bud. It has been over 20 years since you, Stackable and Wise were at the top and no Texan has gotten there since. Why do you think that is?
KH: I don't know the answer to that. We went through an economic depression and lost a lot of tracks locally. Without the tracks there won't be as many riders to challenge each other and rise to the top.
BR: Do you think it has made any difference that there hasn’t been a significant outdoor race in Texas in over 15 years?
KH: I think it has. When I was growing up here we had some stuff going on. We had Nationals here at Rio, at Whitney and in San Antonio. We had the Tex-AMA warm up series in the spring and Trans-AMs in the fall.
BR: Weinert was the first American to win a Trans AM right here at Rio Bravo.
KH: Yeah, I finished seventh. I was just dumbfounded. I did it on a Husky that I bought with money I won from the TLC at Whitney. That was an interesting race.
BR: It was all mud. I remember helping Sylvain Geboers over the fence when his Suzuki drowned out.
KH: Before the race, Gunnar Lindstrom came over and talked to me because apparently they’d gotten some news of me just riding locally that I was pretty good. Gunnar was a neat guy. He came over and said, "Now look, you know, this is your first big race. I want to give you a little bit of advice. These guys, this is what they do. They’re fast." He says "When they start lapping ya, don’t let that bother you. You just hold your line, race your line and you race your race. Don’t let that worry ya." So I ended up finishing 7th".
BR: No one lapped you?
KH: Well, I got lapped. I remember when Weinert and a couple other guys went by me, but it was so muddy that you could hardly tell who was who. I was a good mud rider. I have some kind of natural rhythm for riding in the mud. Early in my career, the equalizer was to have a mud race. I just prayed every time I was at a race for it to rain. It wasn’t my favorite conditions, but that’s where I would do the best.
BR: Speaking of favorites, what was your favorite track.
KH: There were some good tracks back then. My best track – I liked Unadilla. To me that was the essence of motocross. Where you had natural terrain, grass growing on the hills . . . I got a chance to race in Europe a little bit, got to ride in Japan and Costa Rica. Got some world experience.
BR: When you were at your peak in ’80, ‘81, no American had won a world championship in Europe. Was that ever a goal for you?
KH: To me, most of the emphasis was to be a national champion. I did want to be world champion, but there was always a conflict for me because I hated to travel. So any time off, I wanted to stay home. Riding the Grand Prix series would have been a huge commitment for me. I was not the kind of outgoing person that could adapt to big a difference in customs.
By Jack Martin
Background:
Birthplace: Wichita, Kansas
Birthdate: July 11, 1954
Height: 5’8"
Racing weight: 155
Parents: Allen & Peggy
Wife/Children: Lisa/Sean (16) & Derek (13)
Current Occupation: Owner – San Antonio Masonry & Tool Supply
Racing Highlights:
1973 7th Place Rio Bravo Trans-AMA (GP Class as privateer)
1974 Trans-AMA 250 Support Class Champion (5 overall wins in 8 race series)
1975 2nd Place – AMA 250 Motocross Championship (3 overall wins in 5 race series)
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1976 AMA 500 Motocross Champion (2 overall wins in 7 race series)
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1977 Motorcycle Olympiad Champion
Team USA - Motocross and Trophee des Nations
1979 2nd Place – AMA 250 Motocross Championship (2 overall wins in 10 race series)
250 USGP Winner
Trans-USA Champion (1overall win in 4 race series)
ABC Superbikers Champion
1980 AMA 250 Motocross Champion (6 overall wins in 7 race series)
250 USGP Winner
Trans-USA Champion (2 overall wins in 4 race series)
2nd Place – AMA 250 Supercross Championship (3 wins in 16 race series)
1981 AMA 250 Motocross Champion (5 overall wins in 8 race series; 13 of 16 motos won)
3rd Place – AMA Supercross Championship (1 win in 12 race series)
1983 2nd Place – AMA 500 Motocross Championship (1 win in 11 race series)
1984 ABC Superbikers Champion
Guild d’Or (Paris Supermotard)
Major Sponsors:
1974-77 Husqvarna (Mechanic – Eric Crippa)
1977-82 Suzuki (Mechanic –Steve Bradshaw; Greg Arnett)
1983-84 Kawasaki (Mechanic –Steve Pollos; Rick Asch)
Current Sponsors: Scott, Silkolene, MSR, Pro Circuit, Tucker Rocky, Works Connection, VP Racing Fuels and V Force Reeds
Kent Howerton has always been the lone Texan. He was the lone standout for the Husqvarna factory and it’s only American Champion when he won the AMA 1976 500 MX Championship. There have been only three non Japanese bikes that have won an AMA MX Championship with Gary Jones on the 250 Can-Am in 1974, Grant Langston on the 125 KTM in 2003 and Howerton on the Husky in 1976. Every other championship has been on a Japanese bike. Later he switched bikes to Suzuki and classes and won two straight AMA 250 MX Championships. He represented the U.S. in three straight Motocross des Nations where the team finished 2nd in 1977. He is also the only one out of a great group of riders from Texas including Wyman Priddy, Steve Wise, Steve Stackable the only AMA Champion ever from the state of Texas. They should be putting statues of him on the county court house lawns across the state. He has been the thinking man’s racer in that he is always finding a better way to ride or to develop the bike.
Bench Racer: Tell me about what some have described as the best motocross race they ever saw in the AMA 250 National at Saddleback in 1981 against Bob Hannah?
Kent Howerton: Well, Hannah thought I was playing around with him because I’d beaten him so much at the first race in Hangtown. I had gotten the flu and was sick as a dog that day at Saddleback. So when I got around him, I couldn’t pull away and that’s where he thought I was playing with him. There’s a lot more to this because he thought that I had been saying that he was never as fast as I was. I never said that. In fact, I had been asked in an interview what I thought about Hannah’s riding now that he’d come back from his injury and I said, "Well, I think he’s riding faster now than he ever has."Because he was. He was riding really good. Another part of this story is that Mark Barnett and I had this little friendly wager going on where there was a competition between us to try to win all of our races. He was in the 125 class and I was in the 250, with both of us on factory Suzukis. When I won the U.S. 250 GP at Unadilla, he’d hear about it. Barnett goes "God dang it, now I’ve gotta go out and win the 125 USGP too." It was a friendly competition between us – we were trying to out do each other. So that’s another factor that had nothing to do with Hannah. I HAD to get around Hannah to stay up with Barnett. EDITOR’S NOTE: Barnett won the first 7 races of the 8 race 125 National series in 1981. Only a broken collarbone stopped him from sweeping the series. Well, Barnett won the first 125 moto at Saddleback. So, I had to do the same thing. I forced myself to drive like that. When I got around Hannah I didn’t have any strength left, I couldn’t do anything. The place that he passed me back is what in my mind keyed everything off. There’s a part of the track that goes down right where the pits were, a real tight 180 that went back up hill. There was about a 2’ deep, sticky berm in it. Now, on the left, it’s not even on the track, he passed me coming down off of this bank and for him to get in the corner, he had to hit it at 180 degrees. So he almost stopped. He was stuck in the turn and had to turn his bike to get out of the turn. I didn’t appreciate it. The next lap I did the same thing back to him. So from that point it just escalated, and neither one of us would back off.
BR: Was that about the hardest race you’d ever run?
KH: It was the most aggressive race I’ve ever been in. I’ve never seen anything like that out of any motocross race I’ve ever seen. We did things that were literally impossible to do. We were going down these long downhills at 70 mph or more, our handlebars locked. One person seeing the good part of the track, the other person’s in the ditch flying along with him. Neither one of us would shut off. The only thing that would separate us was when we hit a bump and it broke the handle bars apart. It was literally a knock down drag out battle to each corner. I’d gotten around him and after numerous. . . I mean almost to the point where we almost killed ourselves. Going over that Magoo jump in the back, I thought it was over with and I just let my guard down, turned inside after the jump and he t-boned me. I reached for him as he went by. I grabbed a piece of his jersey and gave it my best, but I just couldn’t drag him off the bike. It would have been a real interesting story from that point on if I’d been successful. EDITOR’S NOTE: Howerton got up and repassed Hannah to win the moto. For the second moto, I was so tired after all that first moto stuff and suffering from the flu, I didn’t even think I was racing. I was just shot. I had no energy at all.
BR: One thing that Hannah has said about that season is that you had a bike that weighed 195 pounds while he was riding a 230 pound pig. You had said in an interview about supercross in 1979 that Hannah was just flying through the whoops like no one else at that time and you were asked "How does Hannah do this?." You answered that he had a super light bike and he was able to just fly across the top of the whoops, so may be there is some truth to his contention.
KH: Well, I don’t know what his bike weighed. I don’t remember what the weight really was of my Suzuki then, probably around a couple hundred pounds. I think you have to realize, too, that there’s never a year when every bike out there is equal. Somebody’s bike is always better than the other guys’ for some reason or another. In ’81, the Suzukis didn’t work well as a package; the bikes were light and the back end was good, but the front end was horrible, way too harsh. Like at Saddleback, I remember coming in there and trying to turn and the thing was bouncing so bad you almost couldn’t get any grip. But, the back end was great. Keep in mind, in ’78 Hannah had gone out on a stock bike and won races. Back then, there were guys on works bikes and he’s beating them on a stock bike. So I might have had a bit of an advantage, but the world had changed from ’78. EDITOR’S NOTE: Hannah won 6 of 11 supercrosses in 1978 and won the championship with 272 points, Marty Tripes on a Honda with 220 points finished 2nd. In the 250 National Series, Hannah won 8 of 10 races and took the championship with 410 points. Jimmy Ellis amassed 351 points on his Honda to finish second.
BR: People said that in 1980 you won everything because Hannah was injured.
KH: Well, people were saying that, but that didn’t really bother me. I had raced Bob before and he was sort of my gauge to try and see where I could go. I wanted to beat him and then when he was coming back, you know he was obviously going to be my main competition. So I was running. That was the first year I really took training seriously. I’d sometimes at night have nightmares about hearing his bike catching me and then passing me. So it just motivated me more to go out the next day and work harder. EDITOR’S NOTE: Howerton won 6 of 7 250 Nationals and won the championship with 336 points. Mike Bell on a Yamaha was 2nd with 259 points and fellow Texan Steve Wise finished 3rd with 222 points.
BR: You had won came within a whisker of being 250cc champ in ’75 and had won the 500cc championship in ’76, and yet you had never trained seriously?
KH: Early on, I didn’t train, but I tried to understand what was going on. A lot of people didn’t know back then. All of the guys that had been racing before us wouldn’t share their information because we’d become a threat to them. It wasn’t until after those guys retired that they started revealing some of the information. I had trained at the Tibblin School when I started with Husky. But, if you have never trained before, the first time you start training you notice you’re tired all the time and it takes a while to get over that period and start getting the benefits from it. I started running. I almost gave up. I said "God, I’m so tired." You should do all that stuff in the off season, not when you’re racing. But I noticed that with Hannah, I would get out in front and pull away. Then about half way through the race, here he comes. He had that endurance that most guys didn’t have. Well, as I started training and got my endurance up, it wasn’t that hard to beat him then ‘cause I had a little bit more speed. Bob didn’t have a lot of natural talent to ride the bike. He wasn’t technically the best rider, but he made up for that because of his tremendous desire to compete and his physical conditioning. He also had excellent reflexes. I remember following him at Southwick and being dumbfounded when I saw the lines that he was taking because it didn’t take that much effort just to go a few feet out of the way and miss all the bumps. Bob was just point and shoot, one corner to the next corner, no matter what was there. But he was so strong that he could just hang onto the bike. I mean, there’s not many people who have that kind of desire. You know, that’s the difference that makes one rider reach beyond another because you can give that other person the best bike, he can be in the best shape in the world, he can have everything going his way, but if he doesn’t want to win and the guy next to him does, he’s gonna beat him. He’ll find a way. Bob’s natural ability and speed weren’t that great, but he overcame it because of his good endurance and his determination.
BR: It seems that Hannah could not accept that you were faster than he was – that you were beating him.
KH: I don’t know what it was. At Mt. Morris, it was kind of an interesting deal. We had a pretty good first part of the race, battling. He was riding pretty good, and I was riding pretty hard. I was thinking, "You know, to ride at this speed is gonna be pretty intense for 40 minutes." Then Bob backed off and I took off. Then something happened and he caught up to me and we started racing all over again. Below the scoring tower there was this drop off in to a left handed berm. I had the good line where you could rail around the berm. Bob tried to pass me on the inside. I said, "This ain’t gonna work." I wasn’t gonna back off. I wasn’t gonna give him my line. So we hit. Knocked both of us down and I was looking at him, shaking my head, "What is wrong with you?" He was all panicked, trying to get on his bike and get it started. He took off. Everybody was yelling at me "Get him, get him, get him" and I was just real calm. I picked up my bike. I walked around and looked at it. I got to the front, straightened the handlebars out. I took the time to look around to make sure everything was all right. Then I took off, reeled him in and won the race. I could do that then. I had that much confidence in myself. I was in good shape. My bike was working good. There was no way I was going to let him win. EDITOR’S NOTE: Counting Supercross, Trans-AM, Trans-USA, 125-250-500 National MX wins the total is Kent Howerton with 32 wins and Bob Hannah with 70.
BR: In fact, you only lost 3 motos out of 16 that year.
KH: Yeah, Bob got really pissed off at me in Colorado at the last national race. All I wanted to do was secure the championship. I didn’t really care. I let Donnie Hansen by in the first moto. Then Hannah caught up to me and I just waved him by at the mechanics’ area. That pissed Bob off so bad he flipped me the bird. I did it in front of the mechanics so that there would be witnesses that I let him go. I just wanted him to know "I’m not racing, I don’t want to race with you." We’d done that deal once, I wasn’t gonna do it again. EDITORS NOTE: Howerton won 5 of 8 Nationals overall and compiled 389 points for the championship. Hannah won the other 3 Nationals and finished second overall with 345 points.
BR: What do you think that made you a champion?
KH: I had a strong desire to compete, to not give up. I had a certain amount of natural ability, the physical ability. I think I had a good combination. Early on, I didn’t have the experience or the people to tell me how to do it. Once I figured out the formula of winning there was nobody that could even come close.
BR: How did you figure out the formula?
KH: The first championship is the hardest one to win. First of all, just to win a national is very hard because if you haven’t done it, you don’t know what to do or what to expect. When you’re winning it, you think everything’s gonna happen. You think all kinds of things are gonna break on the bike or whatever. Until you get that one out of the way, it’s really tough. Winning that first championship is really nice and once you get that off your chest you can just relax and savor that feeling for a while and then you gotta say, "Okay, what am I gonna do now? Go out and win another one? Why am I gonna win another one?" So as I stepped back and kind of looked at things, I could see how hard and how much work everybody around me had put into winning a championship. So it gave me just as much pleasure in winning the race to see all the engineers, the mechanics and everybody else involved in the race, to see them get something from it besides just what I got out of it.
BR: Did you take a lot of satisfaction then in developing bikes, too?
KH: I did, I enjoyed it. I always had this curiosity of how things work. When I rode at Husky that’s something that they didn’t really want their riders doing. They relied on their engineers. They told me, "You just ride the bike and leave that to us."
BR: Is that why you left them after the ’77 season?
KH: Well, the reason I ended up leaving was that they couldn’t make the bike stay together. There were a lot of problems with the design. They had problems with metal fatiguing and I couldn’t finish races. I’d get in a race and lead and then the bike would break. So I just told them, "I can’t ride for you guys again, I don’t have confidence in the bike. That’s it." I started looking and talking to other teams and initially nothing came of it because nobody really understood why I was finishing the way I was. The fact was, I wasn’t getting much support from Husqvarna.
BR: In fact, you left Husqvarna before you had another ride.
KH: I was confident that no matter what, I was gonna find something. If I had to go buy a bike and go race it myself, I would do it. I’ve always been a person that wants to prove himself. Even with my contracts, I was reluctant to have 2 or 3 year contracts because I said "If I’m good enough, I’m gonna get it."
BR: You only sought short term contracts as a way of keeping yourself motivated?
KH: Not really. I just felt that if I deserved to be there, then the offers would be there and if I didn’t, then I shouldn’t be doing that any more. In fact, when I finally retired from riding for Kawasaki, they had a contract for me. But I was hurt, I had bad knees and I was losing a little bit of interest. I still enjoyed doing the development work and I still helped Kawasaki a little bit after I quit. But I remember where I decided to retire. It was at Washougal, I was sitting in a lawn chair between motos and just thinking, "Man, I really don’t want to get up." I was just sitting there in my old dirty motocross clothes thinking "I’ve been this way for such a long time. I want to do something different." I didn’t know what it was, but I knew I needed a change.
BR: It probably never entered your mind to just ride the motocross season like McGrath did in reverse later with his supercross career.
KH: I probably could have. I talked to Kawasaki a little bit about that and they were kind of leaning towards letting me ride more of what I wanted to ride in ‘85. In the end, I just wanted to do something different. Around that time, Steve Burns approached me about buying into VP Racing Fuels. I did that with the idea that it would give me time to decide what I really wanted to do. I did that for a while and then sold my interest in VP and did a bunch of different things.
BR: I’m interested in knowing what you did after you retired.
KH: I tested tires, both for cars and motorcycles, for a friend of mine, Brian Long. He asked me if I’d be interested in doing tire testing and I just really enjoyed it. Brian and I were independent so we would test the tires for all different kinds of tire manufacturers. I did the high performance part. I had some qualifications for doing that because I had my car racing license. The first thing that we did was working with Cooper Tire & Rubber. That was kinda neat to be able to do a job and have them teach me how to do it. Most people want to hire you for what you know. With my motorcycling experience, I had the ability to feel things out and then to translate that into words. What they were really looking for was somebody that could be an evaluator; take a product out, try it and say what was wrong with it or what was good about it.
BR: I heard that you hit a turkey at speed once.
KH: That was testing for Standard Rubber Products, which Cooper ended up buying. We were testing wind seals like around your doors. Anything that would transmit noise – they would instrument a vehicle for sound, go out and make runs in it at different speeds. That creates your baseline. Then, they fully taped the vehicle, all the seams, and would have us make a run. They would then analyze that data, modify the vehicle, then send us out to test each modification. What had happened was, when you start a run you can’t change the speed because you’ve got all your instrumentation on, to lift off the throttle would ruin a run. It was an 8 ½ mile oval and it takes a while to get around it to start another run. I had come around a tight part of a turn and saw the turkey take off. It looked like he was gonna fly to the left. At the last second, he changed and went to the right. At 100 miles per hour, I didn’t have a lot of time to react. I just lifted my foot off the pedal and the turkey hit the windshield – went through the windshield and hit me in the face. The windshield wiper was flapping and the turkey was flapping. I closed my eyes, but was able to grab the bird with one hand. I shoved it down between the front seat and the dash and pulled the car slowly to the inside ‘til I got it stopped. It was kinda intense ‘cause, you know, I’m going 100 mph and suddenly I have to close my eyes and go through a turn while hanging on to a wild animal.
BR: What are you doing for a living now?
KH: Rick Bostic, a friend of mine, and I recently started a business, San Antonio Masonry & Tool Supply, offering masonry and tool supplies based on his background in that business. What we offer is our service for our customers. They call and tell us what they need at different job sites. We then have our trucks loaded up and we drop those materials off all over the San Antonio area. It has grown tremendously, to the point that we are now seeing monthly sales of over a million dollars. So it’s just grown and we’ve gone through all the growing pains that a company has when it grows that fast.
BR: Let’s talk about how you got started racing motorcycles. I’d be real interested in knowing what racing was like in Texas when you started.
KH: When I was fifteen or so, my dad was a salesman in Colorado. One of his customers had a motorcycle, a little Suzuki dual purpose bike, and asked me if I wanted to try it. He taught me how to ride it on the Platte River. So he let me use it, but it wasn’t mine. That was the bad thing, because then I was trying to figure out, you know, how could I keep on riding. For my 16th birthday, I had worked cutting grass and other jobs. My parents bought me a Kawasaki 100 Trail Boss. So I started riding and that thing just fell apart. So I learned how to work on bikes just to try to keep it running. When we moved to Texas there was a guy named Jimmy Dubose that saw me riding out at this place called 700 Acres. He had a brand new Yamaha 125cc AT-1. Jimmy kinda liked tinkering with his bike, so he would work on it and then bring it down to 700 Acres. He asked me to take his bike out and tell me what I thought about it. I mean, compared to mine, which was a pile of crap, it was wonderful! He came back a week later and he had a 21" front wheel on it. "Go try this, see if that’s any better." So that went on for a little while, with him improving his bike with an expansion chamber or a new set of pegs and me testing it for him. So he asked me one day, he said, "You wanna race it?" I said "Sure, why not?" I didn’t even know what races were.
BR: You’d never been to one?
KH: I’d never been to one. We went to Sayers Motorsport Park. I rode in practice and planned to ride amateur. But Jimmy said, "You know, I’ve been watching you out there and you’re going pretty good. You might want to ride the expert class. You get money for that." I said to him, "Hey, that sounds good, I don’t have no money." I finished third. I was a pretty distant third, got pretty tired and had cramps.
BR: Who finished in front of you?
KH: A guy named Steve Stackable. I think second was Gary Bigley out of Austin. After that, we ran two more races with me finishing second in the next one and then winning the third. So my way of understanding that was, if you win, you must be better than everybody else. There was a real rude awakening when I couldn’t win the next one.
BR: Was there anyone else then in Texas that was real competition for you and Stackable?
KH: Well, there was Wyman Priddy. I didn’t like to travel so I didn’t see him much, but when I did race against Wyman he was difficult to beat. He was always first off the start. He just had a really strong desire to win. I raced against him at a race in Dallas one time and I mean it was almost like a knock down drag out fight. I went over to him afterward and said "Wyman, why are you trying so darn hard?" Wyman says, "Because my wife needs a new pair of tennis shoes." Wyman was one of the nicest guys I ever met. Steve Wise would also come up from the Rio Grande Valley and race with us. He was quick! He had a lot of speed and was smooth.
BR: How’d you come to ride the Nationals. I know that you rode the old Tex-AMA series here at Rio.
KH: I went out to Hang Town and Baymare in California in 1974 on my Husky. I did pretty decent finishing in the top five in my first race. I actually ended up winning the last National in Louisiana that season as a privateer. I remember it was really a strange feeling out in California for that first race because I went out there with a guy named Bill Davis. I’m walking around in the pits and all these people are wanting my autograph. I’m thinking to myself, "Why do they want my autograph?" When you’re just a fast local in Texas, people don’t ask for your autograph. When I asked, they said "Oh we’ve been reading all kinds of things about you." It turns out that Davis had been talking to Cycle News and Pete Szylagyi at Motocross Action magazine. So we had some pretty good coverage and people were reading about it, so they were real excited to see me. Everybody in Texas was used to me.
BR: That first year when you won the New Orleans National, that was on a bike that you built from Marty Tripes’ old frame after he left for Can Am, right?
KH: Husky threw that frame away! We got it out of the trash.
BR: Well, what happened? In ’74, Tripes was right in the thick of the championship on a Husky and Can Am hired him away for the last race or two. It seemed to me that Can Am was trying to buy a championship or insurance for a championship.
KH: Right. If Can Am had all of the top guys that had a chance of winning, they were a shoe in. EDITOR’S NOTE: Gary Jones won with 600 points, Marty Tripes finished 2nd with 576 points and Jimmy Ellis finished 3rd with 430 points. All of them finished the year racing the Can-Am motorcycles, which made for good advertising. Jeff Smith, Can-Am Racing Director and two time World 500cc MX Champion, learned from Billy 'The Pig' Nilsson that you don't play 'Ping Pong' in winning championships.
BR: Gary Jones was leading the points towards the end of the season, but he hadn’t won any races that year. He was staying on top of the points, but he wasn’t winning. I think Tripes was probably winning more. He wasn’t as consistent, but was a threat for the championship.
KH: All Marty had to do was decide " I think I feel like winning" and he could go out and win.
BR: Was Tripes the best American talent that you’ve ever seen.
KH: I really haven’t seen that much natural talent in anybody else. You know, Ron Lechien had a lot of natural ability. There have been other guys out there with natural talent, too, but Marty was just unbelievably talented. I remember one race, in Ohio on a hard dusty track. I finished 11th in the first moto and Marty finished behind me. After the moto, we were just kinda sitting there talking about the race. I said to him, "Marty, you know, I don’t know why you are back sliding around with me back here. All you gotta do is just go ride up to the front. Marty says, "Really?" I blurted back to him, "Man, you can win any race you want." He had so much natural talent, it’s not even funny. And so I just kinda forgot about it. I came in after the last moto I said, "Well how’d you do?" "Oh I won."
BR: With all that talent, I wonder what it was about Tripes that wouldn’t let him put it all together for a championship?
KH: The thing I’ve noticed with people that have a lot of natural ability is they have a hard time focusing. I think people that have had the worst of things tend to stay more focused.
BR: That’s one thing Hannah said in a recent interview. He said "If I’d had a rich dad, I never would have become what I did. I had to work."
KH: Some of his motivation came from that and some of my motivation came from that, too. I was very poor growing up and it’s very difficult, you know, just to keep a bike going. I was very fortunate that I had dealers that liked me. I was really a shy kid. I didn’t like to talk, but people liked me anyway. When I worked for the Yamaha shop, the owner's wife told me, "Whatever you do, don’t change". I said "Well, I don’t know, I don’t think I’m gonna change. At least I’ll try not to."
BR: That reminds me of an interesting thing you said back in ’77 after you had left Husky, but didn’t have another ride yet. You said "You know what, it’s not the money. I’ve got just about everything I ever really thought I needed materially As long as I can pay for the house and give my wife the things we need, that’s really all I’m worried about." Have you been able to maintain pretty much that same perspective for the last 30 years?
KH: I think so. I’m not materialistic. I buy things for Lisa and myself. I bought me a new Honda 450 because I enjoy the technology and the freshness of the bike. I don’t go and buy a car to impress the people in the neighborhood. And luckily my wife, Lisa, is a lot like I am. We’re very happy. We’ve got a very good family, we’ve got good kids and that’s all we want. Just to be happy. Being materialistic like having a lot of money doesn’t make you happy. It can create so many problems. What we’re trying to do is encourage and support our two boys. They’re both interested in different things now. Our older son, Sean, is interested in music. He enjoys school. He’s very smart. The younger one, Derek, is interested in motorcycles. We’ve really enforced school on him. It’s really important to get a good education. Now, both of them are making straight A’s. It’s the first time Derek’s ever made straight A’s. I tell him, "Now you can see, you can do anything you want. You do motorcycles because you want to. Enjoy it. But you have that education as a back up." We just try to teach them to be fair and honest, to treat other people as they want to be treated. It seems to be working. They’re pretty good. Oh, Derek’s a little bit of a ham – he likes people to watch him.
BR: Is it difficult to coach your son?
KH: He’s been pretty good because everybody’s told him, "Listen to your dad, he knows what he’s talking about." Whereas, there’s a lot of dads that may know good technique, but they don’t have the past to show their kids that they really do know what they’re talking about. So he knows that I’m pretty much right. Cause I’ve been there and I’ve done it. He’ll get a little frustrated and a little cocky sometimes and I’ll just say, "That’s fine, you can figure it out". He’ll come back a little later and say, "Now, how did you do that?".
BR: Will you do the full NMA, Loretta Lynn stuff yet?
KH: We went to a qualifier last year and I think that he was a little disappointed because he didn’t realize that there are so many fast kids. He thought he was gonna do better. Then this year, we went to the first regional at Whitney. He did pretty good there, but he broke his wrist a week or two after that. We ran a qualifier at Cycle Ranch, but that’s about it. So we decided to just take the year off and just ride to have fun. I watch him and I can see how he’s progressing. I don’t want him to progress too quickly. I want him to have a little bit of time between those experiences to really understand them and to let it settle into his system. I could have him go a lot faster and I could have him working a lot harder. But if he’s gonna make it a profession, he’s young, he’s got a long road ahead. I don’t want him to get burned out. He’s progressing at a faster pace and he’s faster than anybody that he started with riding with. I don’t want him to go out there and train and don’t want him to go practice 3 times a week right after he comes home from school. If he wants to ride the TTR, fine we’ll ride the TTR. But if he doesn’t want to ride, we don’t ride. I watched Danny Storbeck and his younger brother grow up at the races around here. Danny’s dad had a lot of money. So he would buy the box van, hire the mechanic… everything. The whole nine yards to go out there and compete. But, you know, it was too hard on Danny and I think that’s why Danny doesn’t have any desire to ride now. EDITOR’S NOTE: Storbeck won 5 amateur championships at Loretta Lynn’s in ’82 and ‘83. He did not make much of an impact at the National level though, with his best finish being a 7th in the 250 series in ’86. He would later become infamous for landing on Rick Johnson at the Gainesville National in 1989, which resulted in the wrist injury that ultimately ended Johnson’s career.
BR: You work with Heath Voss the current World SUpercross Champion?
KH: Heath is from Minnesota. He was coming down and Rusty built him a supercross track to ride on. The Yamaha shop here kinda got me hooked up with him. They asked me to go out and talk to him, try and work with him a bit. He’s a really nice kid. So I went out and met him – he hardly rode at all, he ended up talking most of the time. Heath can talk. Heath doesn’t necessarily have great natural ability, but he’s got very good timing. I think that’s why he’s better at supercross because it is more timing, where outdoor racing is more momentum. I was always better outdoors because every time I got on a track I wanted to get the bike up to speed. When the bike started slowing down is when I didn’t like it. I love having that bike dancing around at high speed. That’s where I’m happy. When I’d go to supercross races, it’s like I’d just get going and…there’s a jump … I’d get it going again … ah, there’s a turn … I’d think "They need to straighten this thing out!"
BR: What psychologically do you think you had that allowed you to become a champion?
KH: I don’t know how to describe it. Steve Burns, my ex-partner with VP Racing Fuels, told me one time, "You’re abnormal". I always tried to be normal because, you know, when you’re a young kid going through school, you’re always trying to fit in with everybody. So when he told me I was abnormal, I took it kind of as an insult. But Steve said "No, no, no. You don’t understand. You’re abnormal in that what you do is so different than anybody else. Not many people have that ability to do what you do. "I started thinking about it. "Why does that make me different than everybody else?" I don’t why. I think you see that in all the champions once they quit racing, whether it’s Marty Smith or anyone that won a national championship, you can still see it.
BR: Can you teach the championship secret?
KH: Mark Barnett used to always ask me "What’s it like to win a championship?" "Mark, I can’t tell you, but you will know when you win it." That’s the best advice I could give him. When he finally won his first championship in 1980, he comes bouncing over to me all excited and said, "Man, I know what you mean now. You can’t tell nobody." When I would do my motocross schools, there was an interesting problem there because you have so many different people, from kids to older people, of different types of backgrounds. Some are very well educated, some are not. So when you’re trying to teach them something, you first have to make ‘em understand what it is they’re trying to learn. Then you have to try to figure a way that they can understand that dynamically so that they can apply it. What I found was that you really have to watch ‘em and you can kind of tell when one is hanging in there with you and one is drifting off. You just try to say things to trick ‘em, make ‘em think about it in a different way because what one person understands, another person may not be able to understand it that way.
BR: Do you still teach school schools?
KH: I haven’t had the time. I don’t want to do it unless I can do it right. I started out doing that in the Husky school with World Champion Rolf Tibblin. I learned from him. I thought, "He wants me to go teach with him? I don’t know how to teach. I’m not too sure what I’m doing myself." But then listening to Rolf, listening to other people teach and taking driving classes it taught me a lot about the dynamics of riding a motorcycle and how to teach them Riding a motorcycle is so different than any other thing that you do because it’s so dynamic. There are so many forces in combination happening at a certain time. When you really realize that, you start breaking the forces down, you realize that it’s amazing.
BR: In 1980 every 250 National was won by a Texan with you winning all the races but the one Steve Wise won at Red Bud. It has been over 20 years since you, Stackable and Wise were at the top and no Texan has gotten there since. Why do you think that is?
KH: I don't know the answer to that. We went through an economic depression and lost a lot of tracks locally. Without the tracks there won't be as many riders to challenge each other and rise to the top.
BR: Do you think it has made any difference that there hasn’t been a significant outdoor race in Texas in over 15 years?
KH: I think it has. When I was growing up here we had some stuff going on. We had Nationals here at Rio, at Whitney and in San Antonio. We had the Tex-AMA warm up series in the spring and Trans-AMs in the fall.
BR: Weinert was the first American to win a Trans AM right here at Rio Bravo.
KH: Yeah, I finished seventh. I was just dumbfounded. I did it on a Husky that I bought with money I won from the TLC at Whitney. That was an interesting race.
BR: It was all mud. I remember helping Sylvain Geboers over the fence when his Suzuki drowned out.
KH: Before the race, Gunnar Lindstrom came over and talked to me because apparently they’d gotten some news of me just riding locally that I was pretty good. Gunnar was a neat guy. He came over and said, "Now look, you know, this is your first big race. I want to give you a little bit of advice. These guys, this is what they do. They’re fast." He says "When they start lapping ya, don’t let that bother you. You just hold your line, race your line and you race your race. Don’t let that worry ya." So I ended up finishing 7th".
BR: No one lapped you?
KH: Well, I got lapped. I remember when Weinert and a couple other guys went by me, but it was so muddy that you could hardly tell who was who. I was a good mud rider. I have some kind of natural rhythm for riding in the mud. Early in my career, the equalizer was to have a mud race. I just prayed every time I was at a race for it to rain. It wasn’t my favorite conditions, but that’s where I would do the best.
BR: Speaking of favorites, what was your favorite track.
KH: There were some good tracks back then. My best track – I liked Unadilla. To me that was the essence of motocross. Where you had natural terrain, grass growing on the hills . . . I got a chance to race in Europe a little bit, got to ride in Japan and Costa Rica. Got some world experience.
BR: When you were at your peak in ’80, ‘81, no American had won a world championship in Europe. Was that ever a goal for you?
KH: To me, most of the emphasis was to be a national champion. I did want to be world champion, but there was always a conflict for me because I hated to travel. So any time off, I wanted to stay home. Riding the Grand Prix series would have been a huge commitment for me. I was not the kind of outgoing person that could adapt to big a difference in customs.
