CORNER:DRUIDS // YEAR:1987 // TRACK:BRANDS Hatch // Kevin Schwantz leads Wayne Rainey //

At a time when we all thought we knew who was who and what was what, America stepped up to the Match Race plate and gave us the personal battle between the firebrand Texan and the super-cool Californian. The Match Race formula was manna to their racing ethos. Brutal and brash. Brilliance and bravado. It all came together in a combination of fairing shards and big slides. Wayne himself tells the story of how serious things were becoming in Peter Clifford’s terrific book ‘Kevin Schwantz,the World’s Champion’. “It’s true that we did have some animosity going, but that is kind of inevitable when you are racing together so hard like that. When we went to the match races, Schwantz and I started banging into each other pretty hard. I remember then thinking that if this guy wants to win that bad then he’s going to be tough to deal with. I know how much I wanted to win and it looked as though he was getting to the point of wanting to win just as much. “If we’d been smart about it we could have ended up with a whole lot more money in our pockets. A couple of the guys in the team said, ‘well why don’t you and Schwantz get together and agree who is going to win all these races and then pick up the bonus and split it with the team’. Well I wasn’t about to go over there and ask him that, and he never came to me, so we just raced. If I remember he won the first race and I took the second, so that pretty much put an end to it. “In 1987 he won five races and I won three but I won the AMA championship. He was happy that he won five races. I didn’t like the fact that he had won those five races but I had won the championship, and that is what people remember.”