Bitter enemies to great friends
Forget Rossi v Marquez or Bridewell v Irwin – the rivalry between Schwantz and Rainey was on another level
Stuart Barker
It’s now more than 30 years since Kevin Schwantz won the 1993 500GP crown, his only world title before retiring early in the 1995 season. But he won far more than races and a world title during that 1993 season – he won the friendship of the man he had hated more than any other, and who hated him just as much. The crash that paralysed fellow American Wayne Rainey ultimately led to a great alliance between these once bitter rivals.
During the 1993 season the deep hatred that had raged between Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey for years came to a sudden end in the Turn 1 gravel trap at Misano during the Italian GP.
The awful crash handed Kevin Schwantz his only 500cc world title and left Wayne Rainey permanently in a wheelchair. But it also marked the end of the most intense rivalry that Grand Prix motorcycle racing had ever witnessed.
Without the motivation of beating Rainey to spur him on, Schwantz turned his back on the sport. In retirement, the two sworn enemies would form a deep friendship that lasts to this day. The incident at Misano was a tragedy, but it was also the springboard for a remarkable friendship that neither rider would have ever imagined could have been possible.
By the start of the 1993 season, Kevin Schwantz had been racing in the 500cc Grand Prix world championship for seven years. He had won an impressive 21 races, but still had no world title to show for his efforts. He had claimed second, third and fourth-place finishes in the championship but was desperate to win it, especially since his arch-rival and nemesis, Wayne Rainey, had won three consecutive titles between 1990 and 1992.
The telling figure is that, as the 1993 season got underway, Rainey had won 20 Grands Prix to Schwantz’s 21, yet he was a triple world champion while Schwantz was still without a title. The difference? The gangly Texan crashed too often.
His wild-riding style naturally lent itself to risk-taking, but he was also having to override the Suzuki RGV500, which had always been outclassed by Yamaha’s YZR500 and Honda’s NSR500.
Schwantz was determined that 1993 would be his year: the year that he would finally get one over on the man he despised most in all the world. This wasn’t showmanship or playing to the gallery – Schwantz truly hated Rainey and the feeling was perfectly mutual. Rainey’s only purpose was to beat and humiliate Kevin Schwantz, and vice versa. Of all the many racing rivalries that had played out over the years, none was as genuinely driven by pure animosity as this one.
It was all to play for.
The rivalry between Schwantz and Rainey had started early, back in their native America in the mid-Eighties.
“I think that was when we hated each other the most,” Schwantz says. “Wayne always said that what I had all came to easy to me, and that’s part of the reason why we hated each other.
“He felt that I hadn’t spent half my life doing dirt-track racing and doing all the other stuff to get ready to go road racing and felt that it was all just given to me.
“But what I got, I earned, and then I used it to kick his ass!”
Rainey offers his own version of how the bad blood started. “You know, Kevin was a threat. He was the only guy in the US who I thought of as a competitor and someone who could race me, and I think Kevin looked at me as the established guy. I wanted to knock him off his perch. I had a plan, and I wasn’t going to let Kevin Schwantz get in the way of that plan.”
‘I had a plan, and I wasn’t going to let Kevin get in the way of that plan’
By the time Rainey moved up to 500cc Grand Prix racing in 1988, Schwantz already had some experience on the world stage, but was then in his first year as a full-time factory Suzuki rider.
“We were pretty young back then – and when we went to Grands Prix, we took that same aggression with us that we’d always had in the US,” Rainey explains.
“We weren’t sure what sort of impact we might make, and then Kevin went out and won the opening race of the season in Japan. That really pissed me off. I got sixth in my first 500GP and thought that wasn’t too bad. But then they told me Schwantz had won and I was like, ‘Shit, that’s really bad’.”
Although the pair would share wins almost equally over the next few years, Rainey took three consecutive world titles in 1990, 1991, and 1992, while Schwantz tended to win or crash and couldn’t mount a consistent title campaign.
He was determined to do so in 1993 and started the season well, winning three of the first five races while Rainey won the other two. By the summer break, Schwantz led the championship by 28 points while Rainey struggled with an over-stiff chassis. Opting to switch to a production version (as used by the ROC Yamahas) Rainey’s results got stronger and, with just four rounds to go, he had closed the points gap to three. Schwantz’s campaign hadn’t been helped at Donington when Mick Doohan wiped him out of the race.
Rainey then won in Brno while Schwantz could only manage fifth, meaning the Californian took the title lead for the first time that year. Heading into the 12th round at Misano, Rainey had 214 points to Schwantz’s 203, with only three rounds remaining. An 11-point lead looked like it might just be enough.
Back then, racing was held in the opposite direction at Misano, meaning today’s fast final corner was the first corner in 1993. Rainey was leading the race and pulling away from Schwantz when he crashed at Turn 1 and broke his spine when he was flipped by a high ridge of gravel that had been raked in such a fashion to improve safety at car races. He was paralysed from the chest down and has been confined to a wheelchair ever since.
Schwantz had finally won his title, although not in the way he wanted. Rainey, though, insisted Schwantz had won the championship fair and square.
“In 1993 I think that Kevin had really matured a lot because of all the experiences he’d had over those years in Grands Prix,” he says. “It was me who made the mistake in ’93 and it was Kevin who was the world champion.”
Without Rainey to race against, Schwantz struggled to find the motivation to carry on and, after a half-hearted campaign in 1994, he decided to pack it all in.
In watching Schwantz’s decline, Rainey realised a great truth about his rivalry with the Texan.
“What I hadn’t realised – and maybe Kevin didn’t either – was that our relationship on track was motivation for each other. We had never really thought about what it would be like if one of us left. I was told by a few people close to Kevin that he was kinda struggling with the whole thing after my crash.”
Seeing that Schwantz was dangerously uncommitted to his racing, and fearing for his former rival’s safety, Rainey decided to take action. “I knew what I had just come through, and I thought maybe I should reach out to Kevin and tell him. So I said, ‘Look, you’ve got to be all-in on this deal because you never know when your last corner is gonna be. And you gotta be prepared to accept the consequences no matter what happens. And if you’re not all-in then it’s okay not to do it - not to race any more’. And I think, from what Kevin said later, that was something he really needed to hear.
“When I was watching him racing in 1995, I could see that Kevin was not the same. He didn’t have the same intensity any more. So, we were on an plane together at some point and I was no longer a threat to him – and nor was he to me – so, somehow, we just ended up talking to each other and now we’re great friends.”
Now the best of buddies, Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey can even talk about the old days without falling out over the past. “Yeah, we talk about our rivalry a little bit,” Schwantz laughs.
“Probably the most we talked about it was when Wayne’s book came out in 1997. We all ended up at the bar one night in England, where they launched the book. There was me, Wayne, Eddie Lawson, Kenny Roberts Senior and Junior, and lots of the British riders; and we all told stories, talked about racing, and shared our memories of certain races and how things ended up.
“But yeah, it’s good to see how two guys who hated each other so much can find a way to be friends.”
‘Our relationship on track was motivation for each other’