Wes Cooley
From hero to hell and back again
From starting out in the club his father ran to the AMA title to the 8-Hour at Suzuka, Wester Steven Cooley was on a path littered with greatness. And then 1985 at Sears Point happened and his life would never be the same again. This is Wes’ story.
He raced motorcycles that tied themselves up in knots. He found that extra something that all champions manage to find. He took on – and beat – the best. One big crash and 12 days later the racing was gone. The twice champ from the glory days of US Superbikes had to find his life again.
Wes Cooley was born in 1956 and it was hardly a surprise that motorcycles would become a big part of his life. Wes: “The first motorcycle that I rode was a Suzuki 80, a step through, red and white, with a small fairing in front of it. It had leading link forks that were not really, as they were more like hinges that let the wheel go up and down. I rode it out in the desert mostly, out on the trails. The next bike I got was a Hodaka 90 (chrome tank/ red frame). My dad belonged to a club called the Prospectors and we used to go out with them when they would have events. Mom wasn’t too involved with it, and my sister wasn’t born yet… Lisa is six years younger than me. Dad and I would go out and I’d get a bunch of my buddies from school to be corner workers at Willow Springs, Riverside, Saddleback, Carlsbad, El Toro… “August 4th, 1970 was my first race. I remember the date exactly, it was at Willow Springs. Dad used to work for a pharmaceutical company and he was their big stick, they would send him all over internationally to clear up some of their operations. He was gone and it was myself, my mother and Dick Pierce was helping with all the side stuff. It was like 117 degrees in the shade. We would normally have about 110 people to go racing and this day we had something like 20 people show up. Dick Pierce came up to me and asked if I wanted to try this, he had a 200cc Greeves Silverstone road racer. I said: ‘Of course, but let me go ask Mom.’
“She said ‘go ahead’ and later said I gave her every grey hair on her head from my years of racing. It all just snowballed from there, to where I started riding 350 air-cooled Suzuki twins in the production class. I got fairly good at it and people started noticing I guess. For me this whole thing with motorcycling never started out to be what it turned into. I was just having fun, and even when I started racing professionally in the AMA, it was all still just for fun. Finally it got to where dad bought me a TZ250 Yamaha racer and I started riding that. I had never thought it would be a profession by any means.” Wes was to win the season finale in 1973’s AMA Novice class at Ontario: “I loved Ontario which was a real riders’ course. “I still own the track record there in the Superbike class on the 1023’s. Eddie Lawson had beat a previous record I had, and I don’t know if it was a hair up my ass but I ended up beating his record time by a second and a half. My big break came when Pops Yoshimura had the 900 Kawasakis and Yvon Duhamel was riding for him. “Yvon lived in Quebec, Canada and I was right there in southern California. So Pops would have me test at Willow Springs, whatever he wanted have tested. Pops and I ended up with very good communication. He was Japanese and you’d think he didn’t understand English, communicating with grunts and groans. When I started the forks were right side up, there were two shocks on the back, and there was a slide and needle in the carburettor. “For 1974 I was running in Amateur class, with a new model of the TZ250. Dad found a TZ750 in Brownsville, Texas and we drove all the way there to get it. Yamaha only released the bike to certain dealers and dad got hooked up with one. I had a tuner friend who knew Donny Vesco, who was putting them together well, but we never got things really working. “My riding style fit a four-stroke better than a short powerband two-stroke. I got hooked up with Pops for the 1976 season, that first season of AMA Superbike. I was still learning.” Fujio Yoshimura: “He had just come back from New Zealand where he was racing a TZ750, I think he was 18-years-old or something like that… very young. We had Wes Cooley and Tony Murphy, the editor of Motorcyclist who was much older than Wes. Tony was a very good racer as well, with a lot of knowledge and experience with the Z1.” Buddy Parriott, second place finisher to Mike Hailwood at the 1965 USGP, had some key advice for Wes, as he recalls: “There was a gentleman named Buddy Parriott, who was racing at Willow. I wasn’t going as fast as I wanted. I asked Buddy what the trick was here and if he had any hints for me. He said one thing that stuck with me and in 1977 I finally figured out what he meant. ‘Slow down, and you’ll go faster’. I walked away thinking, ‘Slow down? This is all about speed.' What he meant was ‘slow down, and in your mind know exactly where you are going to brake, know exactly what oil spot you are going to miss. Slow down in your mind and it all goes smooth out on the racetrack.’ I would go to a racetrack and go around in my mind maybe 50 times the night before. It was very true.” At the 1976 Daytona Superbike race, the first race for the new championship class resulted in a fourth for Cooley: “The Kawasaki did not handle all that well. I remember coming off the banking at Daytona and the thing started to wobble. “It had my feet off the pegs to where Fujio was running from the edge of the racetrack towards the pit lane as I think he thought I was going to take him out. I didn’t even know where I was going to end up!” The rest of the
HE SAID: “SLOW DOWN AND YOU’LL GO FASTER. I WALKED AWAY THINKING ‘SLOW DOWN?’ THIS IS ALL ABOUT SPEED”
races were mostly handling tracks where the Kawasaki didn’t excel. The first podium in AMA Superbike came at the Superbike race at Daytona in 1977. “Finally! For me Daytona wasn’t a rider’s course, the turns were pretty basic. But horsepower made all the difference in the world at Daytona, obviously.” At the end of the season, there was a huge battle between Cook Neilson and Wes at the Riverside AMA Superbike National. Wes: “I remember beating Cook, him and I were going back and forth. The Kawasaki had a lot more power than the Ducati.” Cook Neilson: “The one shining and unforgettable moment I recall about Wes happened in the Fall of 1977. We were at Riverside, every California racer’s favorite track. Because it was fast and flowing, it was great for our Ducati – and not so wonderful for the Japanese multis, which had tons of power, and dubious handling. “Our bike had blown its main bearings the day before, in the heat race, and Phil Schilling and I had pulled an all-nighter getting it ready for Sunday’s final. Starting from the back of the field, we caught up with Wes and his Yoshimura Kawasaki about halfway through the race, at which point we hooked up from there to the flag. I remember with a lap or two to go we were side-by-side going through turn nine, a big banked horseshoe right-hander. I was on the outside; looking to my right, my head seemed to be at the same level as Wes’ boot. I remember thinking two things: first, I really hope Wes keeps that thing from getting all crazy and spinning into me; and second, this is really neat. Anyway, Wes did a great job, and ended up winning by a couple of bike-lengths.” Wes: “You know the little left-hand kink before you ran down into the banked turn nine? Every time I went through I would hit a bump that would make me start to wobble and shake me back and forth. The Ducati would handle 10 times better than the Kawasaki, and Cook was always passing me back. Then I decided I wasn’t going to back off, I made it through the turn and there was no stopping me after that.” Neilson: “It was my last Superbike race, and I think Wes’ first Superbike win. Up until that point, I hadn’t really considered Wes and the Yoshi Kawasaki to be much of a threat. Unquestionably he was a better rider than I; equally unquestionably, our Ducati was a vastly superior weapon. But on that day, Wes showed me something that I hadn’t seen before: he refused to lose. Certainly the Kawasaki was better than it had been all season – but it was still a handful of instability and mediocre braking and limited cornering clearance. But on that day Wes found something inside himself that would serve him well for years and years, that special, rare, un-definable – and essential – characteristic that all great champions possess: the ability, and the confidence, to dig just a little deeper. Wes went on to have a stupendous career in the Superbike world and after seeing up close what I saw from him at Riverside that lovely sun-washed Fall afternoon, I was not surprised.” For 1978, Steve Mclaughlin was Wes’ team-mate at Daytona, and Steve was to win the 200. Did Wes opt for the Kawasaki v the new Suzuki over reliability concerns? Wes: “Actually, I didn’t. It was all mostly Pops. I think Steve talked Pops into having the Suzuki, as Pops had a relationship with Suzuki that he never had with Kawasaki.” It didn’t last long and although there are a few versions of the split, Wes probably has it right when he says: “The Japanese are a whole different culture. Something you might laughingly say is very serious to them. Also, boasting has never been in their DNA. I think Steve talked
himself right out of racing that motorcycle. “When I started with Yoshimura, Pops couldn’t even afford to bring Yvon from Quebec to test the motorcycle. There was no money, they had bought a box van and I had a trailer. I would trailer the bikes behind my motorhome to several east coast races on my trailer. Suzuki and Pops hooked up because they believed in Pops, and if he asked for something from Suzuki, they did it. Heads, valves, everything and anything he needed.” Four-strokes were the future and Suzuki had hooked up with the right company. 1977 had seen Wes take sixth in the overall points… then 1978 brought fifth. Wes: “In 1979, I went to Yoshimura in North Hollywood and Fujio comes up to me and says ‘Pops wants to talk to you up in his office.’ All of a sudden the gentleman could speak English. I was shocked, we became better friends because he could understand me better than I’d previously thought he could. So, I rode with Baldwin that year at the Suzuka Eight-hours. Pops had done some motor stuff to make it last eight hours, but we couldn’t keep the clutches in the thing. Mike and I would go three or four laps and the clutch would fail. We went through all the days of practice, failures over and over. For five days they were trying all sorts of experimental stuff, springs, plates. Finally, the day before the race they put a clutch in that went the distance. It was their home ground, it was Big Time for them at Suzuka.” Another huge result for Yoshimura came in 1979, as Wes Cooley won his first AMA Superbike Championship. Wes: “I was kind of disappointed in the way it went, as it rained and they cancelled the final race at Daytona, so I was the champion. I happened to be at the top of the championship list when that happened, I was very comfortable with what I was doing and with Pops and we all worked together very well.” Freddie Spencer had been a late arrival to the series on the Kawasaki, winning the last two races. It was too little too late for Spencer and the stage was set for 1980. The Superbikes of the day were incredibly overpowered for their chassis. Wes: “It was even to the point where we couldn’t put slicks on it as it would hook up so good that it would make the frame twist and the thing would wobble. At race weekend at Willow we were out there on treaded tires. We’d throw slicks on it and it would handle terrible. Eventually, we ended up running slicks and worked on the suspension to get it handling as best we could. A small little thing could throw your lap times off really easily.” Honda had signed Spencer and their arrival was big news. Was there much to choose between your Suzuki v Lawson’s Kawasaki or Spencer’s Honda? Wes: “I think our bike was every bit as competitive as theirs. We were testing at Fuji in Japan. I had come back to the hotel where we had all split a room. Pops Yoshimura, for the first time, is drinking. You never saw Pops Yoshimura drinking, so I asked what was going on? Pops said ‘Everything is going to go bad, Honda is going to be racing next year. All the money will have to change.’ It shocked me, and he was afraid of the way this was going to change the Superbike class and the industry. He knew this was big news for Superbike racing.” Pops’ history was hot-rodding Hondas for racing in Japan, so he would know. Was Fujio drinking too? “I was kind of surprised but it wasn’t a really big surprise. But the real problem was that they took our mechanics with them. Mike Velasco, Joe Vito… both of those guys. We were the underdog and people give us big credit for the guys and what we did in that situation created a lot of Yoshimura fans. But the GS1000 had so much potential, we had the equipment. Wes was running good of course. He was very serious and was a good racer. But they were full factory efforts and we were a private team…” Don Sakakura is the current senior vicepresident of Yoshimura R&D of America, and he arrived in the midst of all this success. Don: “1980 was my first year with the company. I was straight out of a Honda/suzuki dealership, went to a motorcycle training school, but that was my first opportunity working with Yoshimura… my first opportunity to learn anything about racing. I was working with Wes’ bike as a helper to Nabe. American Honda had started their road race programme that same year, so Yoshimura lost two or three of their technicians to Honda and I was hired on along with one or two others at Yoshimura. “We used to drive around the country
“WE COULDN’T PUT SLICKS ON IT AS IT WOULD HOOK UP SO GOOD THAT IT WOULD MAKE THE FRAME TWIST”
with our van and a U-haul trailer behind. It was my first experience racing… a van with a trailer. Wes had a smaller trailer behind his motorhome. He taught me an awful lot about racing motorcycles, it was my first experience and opportunity to work with a professional racer. That and working with Pops and Fujio, I learned a lot. “But I remember that it was a lot more work than I’d imagined to do it right, and be competitive. It was always about finding more performance. If you didn’t find it, you worked harder until you did… 20-hour days, non-stop. You’d finish your equipment, get it in the truck, drive to Daytona for two-and-a-half days, run the event, drive back home and do it all over again, non-stop. We did everything. “I think the mechanics and technicians who are around now don’t realise as they didn’t have to experience a lot of that… the craft of fabrication, welding, bending metal when you needed to, building motors when you needed to, you had to know it all. It’s kind of a lost art now, really.” At Daytona in 1980, Graeme Crosby had a dominant run from the back of the grid. Fujio: “Of course in 1980 at Daytona, Graeme Crosby came from New Zealand and won… that was a big surprise. Wes had engine problems and so did Dave Aldana, we had three Suzukis entered.” It was a ‘one and done’ for Croz, and Lawson then won Talladega. Wes won at Charlotte. Wes had to win the final two races to have a shot at the title… and he did: “Eddie was leading the points going into Daytona, he had to finish 17th or better and I had to win. Eddie and I finished neck and neck in the heat race.” Fujio: “1980 was the real dramatic thing. Lawson was leading the points and Wes was running third or something like that. Spencer on the Honda had started picking up the victories. Lawson had an engine problem during his heat race and they could not manage to get his bike ready, so they swapped the motorcycle for the one David Aldana was riding. They took the numbers off the one bike and put it on the other. Luckily, Chris the photographer for Cycle News at the time, was in the infield and took a bunch of pictures. That was how they got caught.” So there were significant differences between the bikes that enabled you to tell which bike was which? Fujio: “That’s right. But Lawson had an engine problem during the race and was a DNF.” Wes: “I ended up beating Freddie in the race, I won it. Eddie’s (Aldana’s) bike broke in the race, the only one in front of me at that point of the race was Freddie.” Wes had the only motorhome in the paddock back in those days. “I’ve had diabetes for 50 years, since I was 11, and it’s not a nice disease to have with all sorts of terrible side-effects. I have to eat within a certain amount of time, and I have to eat certain things. At a racetrack you get these damn cheap hamburgers or hot dogs. Cooking in the motorhome made my disease a lot easier to control and handle. At the Suzuka Eight-hours in 1981 my blood sugar was so low, they had to fill me up with sugar.” Was it a leap of faith to hire Wes knowing about his diabetes? Fujio: “Yeah, that’s right… but that was something he was almost born with, and all he could do was to control the blood sugar levels.” Did you keep this all to yourself back in your racing days? Wes: “Yes I did. It came out recently. I’ve never sat down with John Ulrich (who Wes tried to come back with on Team Hammer in 1986) and told him what I just said here. Fujio knew… Pops knew… but I never mentioned it to anybody in the press or in the AMA. “Nabe might have known, but I don’t think most people know how a diabetic has to live. From my experience, if my blood sugar goes high, I’m usually okay with it for an hour or two. But when it goes low, and you have too much insulin in your body, you become disoriented and your motor functions go away. Your muscles use sugar to work, that’s what they feed off. One time riding a TZ750 at Riverside against Roberts, Aldana… everyone was riding TZS. I was running fourth and in the last three laps I went from fourth to 11th… I was able to not fall off and finished.” Wes started off the season opener in 1981 at Daytona. It was the best possible start for Wes and for Yoshimura (coming off two straight Daytona races and two straight AMA Superbike titles). What’s it like sitting on top of the world? Fujio: “Yeah, but we lost the championship in 1981. Right after Daytona we had a continuous string of bad luck. Those sweet memories were very short. Everywhere in the world they all talk about the Superbike racing in the early Eighties… Lawson was there, Spencer was there, Cooley was there, Aldana was there.” To say nothing of Merkel,
Schwantz, Shobert, Russell, Chandler, Polen, and Rainey across the following decade… The good fortune that was there for Cooley in 1979-80 seemed to abandon the effort in 1981. Wes: “Don’t ask me why. I couldn’t probably tell you. If something went wrong, it was normally Wes’ fault, not Yoshimura. It was just going from one race to the next, trying to do the best I could. Looking back, I should have started working out, as far as improving my physical strength. When I started riding for Kawasaki in 1983, they put me through a training programme and I realised that was what I should have been doing for the years before.” Yoshimura had certainly done their part: “In 1978 we were running off-the-shelf stock frames at Suzuka (when Wes won the Eight-hours with Baldwin). For 1980, Crosby and I were needing a little bit more steering head angle and needed a little more weight up on the front of the motorcycle. Overnight they changed the steering head angle on the bike, and built new shorter hand-beaten aluminum tanks… overnight… and we practiced on it two days before the race. I was astounded.” Cooley again won the Eight-hours at Suzuka in 1980, securing a legendary position for himself and the Suzuki in the race. The amount of work that Yoshimura put into the bikes was simply unbelievable given the size of the team. Don Sakakura: “A production motorcycle back then required so much time, resources, and labour to build the things. They needed completely gusseted chassis, new swingarms… nothing was really used other than the casting of the engine. Everything else was replaced because they just weren’t durable enough to hold up. We had works-level KYB suspension for the GS, we had quite a bit of factory support back in the day. The timing was very good, as racing was growing and was very popular.” There was an ‘S’ model replica that followed this success along with the two AMA titles. The Wes Cooley replica was a bikini faired machine that resembled the Yoshimura racer, and it was a huge honour. Wes: “It was beyond an honour. Agostini had a replica bike named after him, and so did Eddie. I was still big in Japan and most of them got sold there as I had won that Eight-hour race at Suzuka.” What did you think when they came out with the GS-1000S race replica? Fujio: “I wasn’t informed or anything like that. The colouring is different, instead of the red and white it had the blue and white like the racer, the RG500. Wes is still very popular in Japan with his replica helmet.” Brand loyalties were huge in the day with some of the best riders in the world on bikes similar in appearance to those you could buy off the showroom – the classic ‘win on Sunday, sell on Monday’ scenario. Wes: “I almost rode for Honda, I turned down a contract that was almost double my Suzuki contract, but I turned it down and was loyal to Pops.” Wes ran in the Trans-atlantic Match Races as well, and Team Cooley left an impression. Steve Mclaughlin: “When I was promoting the Superbike concept with Robert Fearnall of Donington Park we re-started the Match races. Wester crashed on the first day of the races, at end of the day I went to the hospital. One of Wester’s high school friends was a stuntman who did Lee Majors’ stunts in The Six Million Dollar Man TV show... a big guy! I sent him with Wester in the morning and got to the hospital in late afternoon. The stuntman was with Wester, who was on a stretcher and hadn’t seen a doctor yet. The stuntman, who of course had Hollywood insurance and was used to super service, was freaking out, to which I asked him to calm down and let me see what I could do. “The British national health system has a pretty bad reputation which in the mid-eighties was really pretty bad and this was a holiday weekend, so after 20 minutes of intense discussions they basically said they would get to Wester when they did. Well, the stuntman went to the reception desk where there was a microphone and announced to the whole hospital: ‘If my friend didn’t get a doctor in the next 60 seconds he was going to take the hospital apart brick by’…. Well, we got service but they discharged Wester with what turned out to be some serious back injuries and they when we got to Heathrow the hospital had called BA and told them Wester couldn’t fly. Sometimes it’s not good to threaten the hospital.” Wes: “I rode in 1983 with Wayne Rainey, on the Kawasaki as Suzuki had decided that their 750 wasn’t going to be competitive. In the next to last race at Willow Springs, Wayne could win the title by winning the race, but I was actually going a little faster, as it was the home track for me. Gary Mathers wanted me
to finish second, so I did. They compensated me for it, so it was okay. What I did was good, it just happened and it’s great that I did good and did good for my team-mates. My whole point was that if you won a race, basically what you were trying to do for the manufacturer was sell their product. By winning events, I did what the company wanted me to do. If people wanted to believe in me and be fans of mine; that was up to them… that wasn’t up to me. There were things like ‘Cooley’s Corner’ and all kinds of crazy stuff.” Steve Mclaughlin: “Probably the best story was after Wester had a big crash, I think post-yoshimura. He was really having a hard time getting back in the groove and he asked me what he could do to try to get his mojo back. My direction to him was: don’t bathe or shave for seven days before the race. He followed instructions and won the race.” It all came completely unwound at Sears Point in 1985. Wes: “We were all running up front for the lead, and battling back and forth. Fred Merkel and I had different compounds for the tires. Mine ended up lasting better but then the race got red flagged and Fred was able to change tires to new ones for the restart and I was trying to hold the lead. The next thing I knew it was 12 days later in the hospital. It was Wes’ fault, most of the time when I fell off it was my fault, most of it was told to me by others. It’s the body’s way of saying it doesn’t want to remember.” It was a huge accident in turn one at Sears Point and it was pretty much a career-ender. It didn’t stop Wes from trying to come back the following season. “All the other times I had fallen off, I was able to get back in the saddle and perform at a decent level. But I had bruised the spinal cord a little bit and I lost all the grip in my hands. It never came back, those little muscles in your fingers atrophy so fast… and they are so small, you can never work them back to where they were. Also, the nurses said that I should have been dead as my injuries were like what happens if you ride into a dirt wall at 140mph. “God let me live, get up, and get back around instead of taking my life away. My mental status also has a lot to do with it and I just had to step out of it. When I watched the bikes, it was still in my blood, I still like that adrenaline. The best way was to just get up and walk away, and that’s what I did. I lived in Ramona on a golf course (golf… the hardest damn game I ever did play) until Nancy and I got divorced. My whole life came apart after the accident. I dropped out of motorcycle racing, I had nothing to do with it for 30 years. It frustrated me not to be able to ride like I used to. I had broken 27 bones in my racing career, which is unfortunate, as it means I was on the ground way too much. My career was ended in a quick fashion.” He was no longer Wes Cooley, motorcycle racer, and that was a tall order for him to come to grips with and ended in a spiral of substance abuse. Wes: “I should have just gone out when I was on top, instead of trying what I tried. My dad had 185 acres in Bend, Oregon and I was there for over nine months where I managed to get my head back on straight instead of covering up everything. “Before I signed with Pops, I was a pre-med at UC Irvine, it always interested me. My significant other, Melody Rose, got accepted into an Idaho nursing programme.” That opened the door for a career in medical devices for Wes: “I enjoy working with people, I work on the surgical floor. When people are in the hospital with a broken hip or tib/fib, I can tell them that I know EXACTLY what that feels like. You have to make them feel comfortable, because nobody wants to be in a hospital. I enjoy seeing people get up, walk out, and hopefully never see them again.” Wes was the 2016 Grand Marshall of Vintage Motorcycle Days at Mid-ohio and was shocked to get an overwhelming response. “If I made that kind of impression when I was racing… I’m still in awe of that. It was 40 freaking years ago! Accidents or
“IF MY FRIEND DIDN’T GET A DOCTOR IN THE NEXT 60 SECONDS HE WAS GOING TO TAKE THE HOSPITAL APART”
not, I am very grateful for what I was able to achieve in my motorcycle days.” Steve Mclaughlin: “Wester was and is a very nice and straight person whose empathy is so great he has lots and lots of fans… deservedly so and it good to see him back.” Wes: “There’s only one thing you leave when you die, and that’s your reputation, and hopefully I’m doing alright at that.”