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Sand-tire Psych-out (1979) |
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A tricky tire from tricky Jim
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►When Jim Weinert rolled
his Kawasaki to starting line for the Oakland Supercross, no one figured that
the strange tire on his bike's rear wheel was anything more than another
psych-out scheme from the acknowledged master of such trickery. The rubber
itself was a smooth sand tire purchased in a retail store and distinguished by
tall transverse ridges spaced every four inches around its circumference. It
looked slippery. It looked like it belonged on a dune buggy. Everyone laughed.
As soon as the starting gate dropped, however, Weinert
disappeared into the middle distance, his passage marked by a huge roostertail
more appropriate to a hydroplane than a moto-crosser. Weinert led every lap of
his qualifying moto and every lap of the final. Suddenly everyone figured that
the sand tire was more than a trick to distract them from the neck brace Weinert
was wearing after he pulled a muscle the previous day. ► |
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◄After the race,
Weinert naturally was asked to comment on the advantage his tire might
have given him, but he replied only, "Well, it didn't help much at all,
but it sure psyched-out the competition." Some racers thought the tire
offered a traction advantage, others thought the roostertail discouraged
passing because it obscured the vision of following riders.
But
more interesting than the speculative benefits of the sand tire was the
way in which motocross riders scrambled to imitate Weinert, searching
for that elusive edge over the competition which separates the winners
from the losers. Two weeks after Oakland, Yamaha's Mike Bell won the
Seattle stadiumcross with a conventional rear knobby tire from which the
center two knobs had been sliced from every other row. Meanwhile, a
racer on the Florida Winter-AMA circuit had already used a sand tire to
win a race on one of Florida's sandy motocross tracks. The six-paddle
tire on his 125cc bike may have delivered more traction than he could
exploit, but the tire benefited him in another way—a competitor dicing
him for the lead swallowed a mouthful of sand from the paddle tire's
roost and had to fall back.
It's
no wonder that Weinert was unwilling to commit himself about the sand
tire's advantages in front of 30,000 people at the Oakland Coliseum.
Secret weapons—even if they're just a psychological gambit—don't stay
secret very long in the hypercompetitive world of professional
motocross. As Weinert's own experimentation with a sand tire proved,
racers will try anything to win—but if you're already interested in
buying a psych-out tire, forget it. The AMA has banned it.—Michael
Jordan■ |
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Competition 
