MARK GARDINER
GARY SCOTT PUT THE NEEDLE INTO THE 70'S GRAND NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP, WINNING FEW FRIENDS ALONG THE WAY
Gary Scott, the bad boy of the AMA
‘SCOTT SIMPLY REFUSED TO GIVE BACK HIS FACTORY BIKES TO HARLEY-DAVIDSON’
Gary Scott was a rookie AMA Expert in 1972, the same year as Kenny Roberts. Yet Scott handily outscored Roberts en route to being named Rookie of the Year. Scott finished second overall in ’73 and ’74, too.
Harley-davidson’s racing manager Dick O’brien signed Scott as one of Harley’s five-rider factory team in 1975, alongside Mert Lawwill, Rex Beauchamp, Corky Keener and Greg Sassamann. (Sassamann was later injured, and Jay Springsteen was drafted in as replacement.)
O’brien never issued team orders. Each factory rider had his own tuner, and those intra-team rivalries were ferocious. Gary Scott continually bitched that he and his tuner, Bill Werner, weren’t getting parts as good as more senior team members. It couldn’t have hurt them that badly, because at the end of the year it was Scott who earned the number 1 plate.
Tuners will forgive almost anything of a winning rider. So it really meant something when Bill Werner told O’brien at the end of the year that he was not interested in tuning for Scott the next season. Werner, fiercely competitive himself, didn’t mind working for a demanding rider, but Scott was downright mean. “I won’t knock someone down on purpose – I haven’t got to that point,” Scott once told a reporter, adding: “yet”. Another Grand National Championship regular wasn’t so sure. “Gary could shoot you right between the eyes, shrug and walk away and never even think about it,” that guy told a reporter – but only after the journalist promised not to name him. Werner was spared working a second season for Scott, because Gary insisted his number 1 plate should come with a huge pay rise – a demand that Harley-davidson refused to meet. O’brien rewarded Werner by assigning him to tune for Jay Springsteen, who had pretty much the complete opposite personality.
Meanwhile, Scott set out to defend his title as a privateer. Freed from his Harley contract, he set up a Triumph for TTS and built a short tracker with a Yamaha TT500 motor. He found a road racing sponsor who set him up with a Yamaha TZ750. On the mile and half-mile tracks that made up most of the championship, he stuck with XR750S. In fact, he simply refused to return his factory bikes from the previous year. O’brien could have forced him to give the XRS back, but he knew that Harley would get some good publicity value out of Scott. Any grudging truce between those two was broken once and for all when O’brien refused to sell him the updated cams and pushrods Harley’s race shop developed over the off-season. Scott knew the AMA rule book inside out; he arrived at the AMA’S impound tent after the first mile race of the year with a $3500 cheque in hand, and claimed the motor of winner Rex Beauchamp. O’brien was livid.
It was a three-way fight for the 1976 championship between Scott, Jay Springsteen and Kenny Roberts. One of the road races was at Riverside, near LA; Scott missed the start of his heat race, although he was still allowed to start the National. The Yamaha factory team ‘suggested’ that Skip Aksland file a protest against Scott, claiming he shouldn’t have been eligible to start the National.
Scott, furious, promptly claimed Kenny Roberts’ TZ750 motor and Aksland’s protest was ultimately disallowed, so Yamaha’s ploy backfired.
The defining race of the season was probably the San Jose mile. Roberts’ Yamaha was not quite competitive, and Springsteen’s Werner-tuned Harley was faster than Scott’s. Werner celebrated his rider’s win in a local bar that night, but shouldn’t have turned his back on Gary Scott in the men’s room, because the next thing he knew, he’d been sucker-punched. It took several stitches to close his split lip.
I have a friend who was a regular on the Grand National Championship circuit in the years Scott raced. When I mentioned that I might try to look Gary up, he said, “Oh really? Well if you find him, don’t mention my name!”