John Kocinski
“I NEVER FELT LIKE IWAS GOOD ENOUGH. I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE I DID WHAT I DID.”
Notoriously private by nature, an interview with the prodigious Kocinski is a rare treat treat. To get this level of information and revelation from the former factory man and foil for Wayne Rainey (plus Kenny Roberts) is a doubly rare treat. Dig in and enjoy this, it almost never happens.
“Nothing will ever stop me. I can do whatever I want to do – there’s no limit. If I decide to do something, I’m going to do it. No one is going to stop me. That’s just my desire to want to win and to be successful. That’s what motivates me.”
This was American racer John Kocinski speaking in the January 7, 1998 issue of Cycle News shortly after winning the 1997 World Superbike Championship on the Honda RC45.
Fast forward 22 years to Beverly Hills, California, where Kocinski, now a world renowned housing developer, is thinking through a question this writer just asked him: “John, the Cycle News quote I just showed you, that was your approach to it all, wasn’t it?”
“Absolutely.”
One John Kocinski of Little Rock, Arkansas was, easily, one of the greatest, outspoken, controversial and talented motorcycle racers. In an incandescent career which ran from 1988 through 1999, Kocinski won bookend championships in the form of the 1990 250cc World Championship and the 1997 Superbike World Championship.
A winner of 13 Grands Prix (nine 250cc and four 500cc) during his globetrotting career while racing alongside such legends as Eddie Lawson, Wayne Rainey, Kevin Schwantz and Mick Doohan, Kolinski’s WSBK World Championship – which came in the twilight of his racing career – came to symbolise who he was and what he was all about.
“At that stage of the 1997 World Superbike Championship, I guess you could say that my career took a path that wasn’t really in the plan from the beginning,” said Kocinski, looking through some race coverage from that season in which he won 10 races. “My career path moved around after winning my first 250 World Championship in 1990.” In 1982, John Kocinski and his father loaded a racing motorcycle and headed to Daytona Beach, Florida to compete in the amateur races there. Dad and son, 14 years old at the time, had already been long at racing, both sharing a goal of trying to make it to the top in a sport they both loved.
“My dad got me involved in motorcycles,” offered Kocinski, who was born in Arkansas on March 20, 1968. “He was 100% supportive behind my racing, in terms of that just about every other weekend, we were in the van and going to a race somewhere.
“My dad, being the way he is, was going to support my racing no matter what. He’s been involved in motorcycle racing his whole life. When I was a kid, I sure enjoyed riding when I did ride. With our first home, we had to move out of there and out into the country because we were essentially running the neighbours crazy with racing around. We’d make a short track in the front yard and you can imagine how that would go over in a regular world where people just work at their jobs and come home and a kid is out there on a motorcycle racing around in the front yard. So we moved out to the country where we had plenty of space.
“I remember racing my first race,” continued Kocinski. “The track was called the Benton Speedbowl (note: opened in 1956). My father had to hold me up on the starting line and my feet wouldn’t even touch the footpegs. I rode with my feet on the engine cases. From there, of course, it never stopped. It just kept going.
“One of the big hurdles for myself when I was young was that Arkansas is not a place that you can say has born and bred a lot of motorcycle racers. We spent a lot of our time travelling outside of Arkansas to race and we didn’t really get any help at all and I remember it was very frustrating because it would seem like some of those other guys that I raced against had parents that either had money,
or had a way to just take off and leave for a week.
“A lot of our racing was a Saturday night deal and we’d drive home on Sunday and my dad would have to go back to work on Monday. He couldn’t take off a week at a time to go travel around. We were much more limited. It was almost like we never really made it into that clique of people, where you could say you were connected and could get more help.”
Kocinski would win the aforementioned amateur national at Daytona in 1982 and would forge on ahead to AMA 250 Grand Prix Championships in 1987, 1988 and 1989.
“My dad pretty much told me he’d help me until I was 18,” said Kocinski. “If I didn’t have a factory ride by the time I was 18, I was on my own. No one ever knew who we were, we weren’t in the loop, my father was not really big on networking and getting out there and socializing and doing all that stuff. We were just very remote.”
It was in 1986 that John Kocinski moved out to Modesto and first met Kenny Roberts and Chuck and Bud Askland, all Californians. The three men would ultimately play huge roles in Kocinski’s racing career, Chuck being the one to truly pull for John.
“This team owner said he had bought a Yamaha TZ250 from Los Angeles. I told him, ‘Man, I’d like to ride that thing.’ So he brought the bike to our next race in Pocono and I couldn’t believe it. It was what he actually said it was. I started looking at it closer and I noticed that it had some Bud Askland pipes on it. It was like a dream. It was like, ‘ Wow! This is everything that I’ve always wanted.’
“We ended up winning that endurance race, and afterwards I flew home to Arkansas and I got in my old beat-up pick-up truck and drove to St Louis, Missouri and met the truck. We stopped on the side of the freeway and unloaded the TZ and put it in my truck and drove back to Little Rocky. I was so excited about that bike that I think I looked more in the rearview mirror going home than where I was going. I got home and took that thing all apart and checked it over.
“From there, I went to the first national at Mid-ohio and it was like a dream,” continued Kocinski, on a roll. “I took fourth place. Fourth place! I couldn’t believe it. It was unbelievable. I mean a privateer going to a national back in the day and be able to make the top 10 was a heroic feat. I mean this was back when Rainy was there and Randy Renfrow. It was a stacked house. I felt like I had won the national. We only made two or three nationals that year because that’s all we could afford to do.
“My leathers were red, my boots were blue and my helmet was silver. It was just a conglomeration of whatever we could find. I was such an ugly sight with all the different colours and just stuff everywhere. Nobody knew who I was. I remember Wayne Rainey saying, ‘Man, we didn’t know who he was, but he was hauling the mail.’ The second national I ever went to, I won it on that TZ.”
Through the period and now an integral part of Team Roberts, Kocinski was racing incessantly and loving every minute of it.
“Look, I was just a kid living the dream. For me, it was like, ‘What more could I ask for?’ I was excited about the whole deal and probably didn’t understand much about it. I didn’t care. I was there to ride and to ride for Kenny and the team and stuff like that. It was a lot of fun, but it was not an easy life, but I could understand why it was the way it was. I didn’t care. All of that was irrelevant to me. It really was. It didn’t even bother me. I wanted to learn to be better at what I did and that’s all I cared about. Kenny would make fun of me and laugh at me, but if they thought that was going to break me down, well hell, I knew I’d be okay.”
Undaunted by Roberts and encouraged by the Askland brothers, Kocinski kept at it and continued to learn and excel, rapidly gaining confidence along the way.
“I had so much self-doubt, but Kenny made me start to believe that I was good enough,” pointed out Kocinski. “The real element, though, was Bud Askland and what he brought out in me was that it didn’t matter if I was good enough. For him, I had to be great. For the whole time I was there from 1987, 1988 and 1989, Bud and I would travel to the races together, we’d share a hotel, Bud liked coffee, so I’d go out and get him some coffee and I’d go back sit in the garage with him and watch him work on the bike.”
In 1989, Kocinski stunned the racing world when he went out and won the opening round of the 250cc World Championship Road race Series at Suzuka City, Japan.
“I wasn’t going to give up,” said Kocinski on defeating world champion Sito Pons by 1.022 seconds, in the April 12, 1989 issue of Cycle News: “I didn’t care what I had to do to win, I wasn’t going to give up.”
That sounds familiar.
One year later and at 22 years of age, John Kocinski of Team Marlboro-yamaha was 250cc World Champion.
“That one year running that 250, wiped out people,” said Kocinski. “I guarantee you that anyone who was there that year
will remember it for as long as they live. I remember Bud telling me it was the most dramatic thing he has ever dealt with in his entire life. It was unbelievable. I’m telling you, it hurt a lot of people. To win it was huge. To win that thing was so huge. What was even more crazy is that I remember that I called my dad from Australia afterwards and told him I had won the world championship. Do you know what the first thing he said was? ‘What? How far did you win the race by?’ “
Kocinski went into the 1990 off-season as a champion and very much looked forward to backing up his 250 title come 1991.
“I wanted to go back in the 250 class and compete because I had won it and I wanted to go back and win it again. I was on a mission. As exhausting as that season was, we’d finally stumbled upon some things with the chassis and with the engine performance and I just couldn’t wait to get back because I was going to start off in a much, much better position. It was like, ‘Okay, now let’s really have a go at it.’”
Yet it wasn’t to happen as Marlboro-yamaha had made a collective decision to exit the 250 championship and graduate Kocinski to the
Team Roberts Yamaha YZR500 programme.
“Kenny said: ‘We’re not having a 250 team next year. We’re doing away with that. You’re going to ride the 500 and I was kind of taken by it. In fact, it was unbelievable to me. Furthermore, Eddie Lawson left the team and Kenny took Bud Askland away from me.
“That was the problem. Kenny’s loyalty was to Wayne. So Kenny moves me up when I don’t want to be moved up. I wanted to stay in the 250s because I wanted to win another year. I wanted to win another year and then maybe think about moving up. Also, though, when they plugged me in there, Kenny’s mindset was, ‘Hey, run around and just do like everybody else does.’ My mindset was, ‘Hey, I’m here and I’m here to win.’ Already before that year started, it was disaster because I wanted to win because no one would expect that of me.”
Kocinski raced extremely well in the 1991 500cc World Championship, running to five podium finishes including a win at the season finale at Malaysia. Nonetheless, to John anyway, it wasn’t what it all appeared.
“At the first race of the year at Suzuka, I was right there with all of them,” reflected
Talk a boa bout ta photo photograph aph be in being wo rt hot ha thousand words! To the left, team boss Kenny Roberts; nearest camera on the right, team manager Paul Butler; in the middle is John looking like he’s getting a telling off (or getting ready to fight his corner) after a Japanese GP session on the 250. Tension.
THAT LAGUNA RACE WAS AWESOME. EVERYBODY WAS ON IT. IT WAS A FULL-ON CLEAN WIN. IT WAS SUPER-SPECIAL TO WIN. I TELL YOU, THE FOLKS AROUND ME THERE AT CAGIVA ARE WHAT REALLY MADE IT SPECIAL FOR ME.”
Kocinski, who despite placing fourth overall in the title fight, wasn’t very pleased with the then reality of his 500cc surroundings.
“I was not very happy about that race because Yamaha had developed the first-ever electronic suspension. They wanted to have somebody race on it to see how it would perform over race distance. They sure didn’t give it to Wayne Rainey to try out. They gave it to me. To be honest with you, that was a race where I took fourth and I was very frustrated. It was my first 500cc race in the dry and I was basically wheel to wheel with Schwantz, Doohan, Rainey, Gardner and myself. You figure that I would be happy about that, but I was not happy at all. I figured that if I’d had the standard Ohlins shock, I would’ve had a shot to win it. I knew there was going to be a big problem with that sort of thing. I mean, I was there to win and I just thought, if I have the right support, I can win. There was that sort of a thing that went on. And the way that I wanted the bike was not the same as Wayne wanted it and, of course, they flowed Wayne through the whole season.
“We go into the 1992 year and Wayne is world champion and I’m second,” continued Kocinski. “I was there and I wanted to win and, of course, I ended up getting put in the position of the third wheel because Kenny’s allegiance was to Wayne. Kenny or somebody at Yamaha should have said, ‘Hey man, we can’t support you the way we want to, so perhaps we should look at some other avenues here.’ None of that was said. 1992
was the same story. I struggled with the chassis and so on and so forth.
At the end of the year the team came up with another chassis and I won the last race of the year in South Africa. Still, I was very frustrated, I was not happy at all. I was ready to go home, I was done. I was just going to walk away from racing. It was hopeless, I had lost all faith and belief and I didn’t trust much that was said.”
Kocinski started the 1993 season on a Lucky Strike Suzuki RGV250 and placed an impressive second overall at round one in Australia. The following six rounds saw Kocinski running consistently and comfortably within the top five before the American called time on the relationship with the Japanese brand and made the mid-season switch to Cagiva and its GP500.
“Well, I’ll tell you what happened in 1993,” answered John when I asked about what was a pretty damn radical change. “The Cagiva thing, we made contact with them and they were super-excited about it so we went to a test in Barcelona because they were struggling with results from Doug Chandler and Mat Mladin. We did a couple-day-test on standard tyres and I went out there and after changing up the engine position and a bunch of things on the bike, we got rolling with it and were running around there with a time that would have put us either on pole position or on the front row.
“Cagiva was over the moon. They couldn’t believe it because these guys were struggling bad. All of a sudden after two days we had the thing running. They were so over the moon and couldn’t wait to sign me for the rest of the year. They were ecstatic.”
And on Sunday, September 12, 1993 at Laguna Seca in Monterrey, California it all came right for Kocinski when he went out and shockingly won the 500cc United States Grand Prix.
“That Laguna race was awesome. Everybody was on it. It was a full-on clean win, it was super-special to win. I tell you, the folks around me there at Cagiva are what really made it special for me. So we finished out the whole year and we signed with Cagiva full-time for 1994. I had absolutely nothing but admiration for Claudio [Castiglioni] and John Franco. They were very good people and they had hearts of gold. Boy, racing was in their blood. I have such wonderful memories from Cagiva. I have nothing but respect for all those people.”
1990 was the time of mountain bikes in the paddock and rolled-back polyester sleeves in the Dutch paddock.
IF KENNY WAS REALLY FOCUSED AND HAD THE SKILLS TO HELP ME, BETWEEN HIM AND BUD ASKLAND, I JUST DON’T KNOW HOW MUCH DAMAGE WE COULD HAVE DONE IN THE 500CC CLASS.”
AT THE FIRST RACE OF THE YEAR AT SUZUKA, I WAS RIGHT THERE WITH ALL OF THEM. I WAS NOT VERY HAPPY ABOUT THAT RACE BECAUSE YAMAHA HAD DEVELOPED THE FIRST-EVER ELECTRONIC SUSPENSION...”
THEY WANTED TO HAVE SOMEBODY RACE ON IT TO SEE HOW IT WOULD PERFORM OVER RACE DISTANCE. THEY SURE DIDN’T GIVE IT TO WAYNE RAINEY TO TRY OUT. THEY GAVE IT TO ME.”
Despite the success Cagiva and Kocinski shared in 1993, at the end of the season, the Italian brand called time on racing, thus leaving John Kocinski out in the cold.
“Cagiva pulled out at the end of 1994 and there were no factory rides available,” said Kocinski. “I wasn’t going to races to fill out the field. There were no good opportunities, so I took time to travel and went to the University of Salt Lake in Utah and worked with physical and mental trainers there, trying to stay sharp with everything.”
1996 would see John Kocinski back in racing with a full-on factory ride with Ducati. Once again, and it what was becoming something of a regular fashion for him, Kocinski showed up at the series opener in Misano, Italy and swept to the pole and both race wins.
“I had never been to World Superbike and had never ridden a Ducati and I had a year off,” explained Kocinski. “I went to the first World Superbike race and I won both rounds the first time out. I thought, hell, that’s a nice way to start. We were looking good. We were rolling.”
In the end, Kocinski won three more races and placed third in the final WSBK standings.
Team infighting ultimately drove Kocinski away from Ducati at the end of the season, but not before he had signed-on to ride a Castrol Honda RC45 in the World Superbike Series. Honda and Kocinski would end up being a perfect marriage, John winning nine races on his way to the second world title of his career.
“It was a great year and there was never any tension or anything like that within the team. It was wonderful. I had people behind me in the company that had racing in their blood; I had people in the company that wanted to win as bad as I wanted to win; I had people there who were going to support me any way they possibly could. It was a dream. That year with Honda was a great year. I really enjoyed it. Everybody on the team did a beautiful job. Each person had their job. Not everyone was trying to be the jack-of-alltrades. Everything rolled really smooth. Honda was on a different level.”
And did the production-based world title mean as much to him as the 250cc championship he won on the 250 back in 1990?
“Oh yeah,” answered Kocinski adamantly. “It did because I’d gone a span of time there with no championship and I guarantee you that everyone had written me off and said
I’d never win again. We tried hard. When I went to Honda, all that goofiness went away and we were able to work with some real professional people. Honda tried four or five years to win that championship and they did it with a lot of different riders. It was a good combination and I am very proud that I was involved in that project to win that championship for Honda.”
Reigning champion Kocinski would leave the World Superbike Championship at the conclusion of 1997 to resurface in the 500cc World Championship garage as a member of the Sito Pons Movistar Honda team where he placed 12th in the World Championship. One year later, and for all intents and purposes, John Kocinski would wind down his world class career with legendary tuner Erv Kanemoto and Honda.
“There was no wind down to my career,” declared Kocinski of the 1999 season. “I did the last season with Erv. Erv is one of the great tuners and one of the great people from America who ever went over there. He accomplished a lot himself. I really enjoyed the time I spent with him. Unfortunately, we were underfunded and had no support from HRC. It was a tough situation because I like to win and I know Erv does, so to be where we were was not really where we wanted to be.
After that, I literally just quietly walked away.”
Upon his walkabout, John Kocinski took a good and long look at what would be his new post-racing life and thought it all through. Having thrown everything he had at traveling the world in an effort to be the very best motorcycle racer on Planet Earth, he was a bit of a lost soul, looking for, well, answers to his immediate and near future.
“I had taken a couple of years trying to figure out that void and what I was going to do to replace it – I’d spent 25 or 30 years of my life doing nothing but being basically focused on racing. Then, here you are now starting at ground zero, but how are you going to start at ground zero and meet that level of success you had in racing? How is that going to work? What’s it going to be? It took two or three years to understand that. That’s not an easy thing to just have an answer for.”
The answer was real estate. Having sold
a few high-end homes in Southern California during the closing stages of his racing career, Kocinski found how much the process interested and motivated him, thus he started up a real estate business in Beverly Hills, California.
“I was also enamoured by Beverly Hills and just how the houses meant so much to people, and the level people would go to to build their houses, and the materials they would use,” explained Kocinski of his current lot in life.
“After spending time driving around trying to educate myself, the next step was to try and find an architect who could find something that was a true expression of my feelings. It wasn’t something I could express myself freely the way that I wanted to. This was something that I needed to do in order to fill that huge void that I’d just walked away from and that was racing.”
Out there on the front line buying up and selling mansions, Kocinski has plenty of home owners’ anecdotes to share.
“There was an area up in Beverly Hills called Gardens Gate,” he started. “It was a very exclusive area and I had purchased some land there, and literally in six or seven months, sold it to Eddie Murphy for double what I had paid for it. I moved on from there and bought another house in that same area and had redone it and it was actually featured in Architectural Digest. That was a pretty cool accomplishment because Architectural Digest is not an easy magazine to get a feature into.
“I knew that if I could stand on a piece of property and say to myself open and freely that I knew that it would be something that would capture the world, it would work. Through this process I was in this area called Beverly Park and I passed by this home that was being built and I literally slammed on the brakes, threw it in reverse and backed my car up and jumped out of my car and said to myself, ‘This is it!’
“So I had to con my way through security. You can’t just walk onto these job sites! I met the superintendent and said, ‘Hey, I’d like to find out who deigned this home. The guy gave me four phone numbers. I had one number and called it on December 24 – Christmas Eve – and nobody was there and I just left a message for the architect and his name was Rick Robertson. The next day Robertson called me. I was blown away. I talked with Rick and he came up the very next day and I met with him and it was almost like that Bud Askland relationship. It was magic from the first moment and I knew that Robertson was like Bud Askland.
“Those pictures that I sent over to you, that’s a Robertson designed home that we built. The actual designs and the actual way the property comes off, it’s everything inside of me just speaking. This guy was my communication guy to explain my creativity and my vision. This whole thing is a freedom of expression for me and all I want to do is
“CAGIVA WAS OVER THE MOON. THEY COULDN’T BELIEVE IT BECAUSE THESE GUYS WERE STRUGGLING. ALL OF A SUDDEN AFTER TWO DAYS WE HAD THE THING RUNNING.”
just create landmark calibre properties that will be here for generations and still have that presence and level of sophistication that is like no other.”
As history has taught us, John Kocinski was a brash motorcycle racer who wanted to win so badly that he certainly brushed a few people’s hair back along the way. Supremely talented, and to a few, difficult to deal with throughout his career, Kocinski is quick to point out that it was the people around him and who supported him along the way that made him a world champion.
“The people around me are who made me who I am,” he nodded. “I didn’t think that I was good enough. The people around you are so critical and that’s what is going to make or break you. Kenny is the one who started to make me believe that I was good enough. Kenny could steamroll people, but he helped me believe in myself. If Kenny was really focused and had the skills to help me, between him and Bud Askland, I just don’t know how much damage we could have done in the 500cc class.
“I’ll tell you, for me, losing was painful,” Kocinski adds in conclusion. “You’d see people get beat and then you’d see them out that night at a party. I couldn’t relate to that. How can you party when you just got beat? And that feeling, it would last to the next race. Not the next practice, but the next race where you could redeem yourself. Winning was everything.”