Motor Racing : Earnie Adams Will Try for Motorcycle Jumping Record at Long Beach

At Friday night’s second round in the $40,000 National Championship Series for speedway motorcycles at Veteran Stadium in Long Beach, 24 of the participants will be trying to go the fastest. For the 25th, however, speed will rate second to distance.

That man is Earnie Adams, a 30-year-old Tennessean who will attempt to beat the distance record for motorcycle jumping. The mark he is shooting for is 176 feet 4 1/2 inches set in 1981 by Gary Wells of Phoenix.

Adams, who will jump during intermission, will begin his attempt from the stadium parking lot, sail over a 10-foot wall at the scoreboard end, and, he hopes, land on a ramp inside the quarter-mile oval.

“The key is speed,” Adams said. “On the first jump, I’ll be going about 65 m.p.h. By the last jump, I’ll be doing 90. The wall makes this jump especially tricky.”

Adams will ride a Honda CR 480 and uses a takeoff ramp 12 feet high and 72 feet long. Despite careful preparation and calculations, however, Adams says he is scared every time he attempts a jump.

“I start getting butterflies in my stomach about an hour before the show,” he said. “Once the bike starts, I really get hyped. But after the first jump I usually calm down. Most stunt men only attempt one jump. I do five jumps just to calm me down.”

As a youngster, Adams and his friends in his hometown of Shelbyville, Tenn., used to take their bikes to a field, where they built mounds and pretended they were Evel Knievel.

“One day I opened my big mouth and said that I was going to jump cars just like Evel did,” he said. He performed his first jump, over 10 cars, in 1979 in a field on his uncle’s farm outside Shelbyville.

“We built a dirt ramp and smoothed a landing area,” he said. We charged $5 and must have had 350 people there to watch. Everything was fine until it came time for me to do it. I bet I must have gone around that ramp 20 times and some of the people were getting impatient, figuring I was going to back out.

“Finally I just wound it up and let her rip. Somehow, I made it.

“Looking back, it’s a wonder I didn’t kill myself. I had some buddies who were budding engineers and they offered to help me come up with some formulas. But, at the time, I didn’t figure I needed any of that stuff. I guess I was pretty cocky.”

He lost all of his cockiness with his first crash.

“I hit the landing ramp and dislocated my heel and got the heck beat out of me,” he said.

During his recuperation he decided that maybe he had better let his friends help him and that he should go about his business more scientifically.

“I guess I have made about 550 jumps and I have only crashed two other times,” he said. “Both came when I thought I knew more than (the engineers) did.”

If he succeeds Friday night, will he be satisfied?

“No way,” Adams said. “The record would be nice, but what I really want to accomplish is to jump the fountain at Caesars Palace Hotel in Las Vegas.”

Attempting that feat severly injured both Knievel and Wells when they tried and failed. Since then, the hotel has not allowed anybody else to try.

“I’m hoping the record might help me to change their minds,” Adams says.

And if it doesn’t.

“Well, dreams die hard,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to have to sneak in there some night to do it, but I probably would.”

SPEEDWAY MOTORCYCLES--A surprising leader and a quarter-mile track will be featured Friday night at Long Beach. Gary Hicks, a 17-year-old from Riverside who just graduated from high school, is the leader with 19 points after the first round at Inland Motorcycle Speedway. U.S. Champion Bobby Schwartz and Mike Faria, both with 18 points, are tied for second, followed by Steve Lucero at 15, Robert Pfetzing at 14, and Northern California’s Bart Base at 11. Veteran Alan Christian will need a strong showing at Long Beach if he hopes to be among the 15 qualifiers for the final, Oct. 3 at Orange County Fairgrounds. Christian has qualified for every final since 1978, but scored only two points in the first round. . . . Saturday night, Round 3 of the series will be contested at Victorville. Other qualifiers are scheduled at Auburn, Aug. 15; Ascot South Bay Speedway, Aug. 27 and Costa Mesa, Sept. 11. . . . Tonight, Faria, absent the past two weeks, will try to slow Schwartz at Ascot’s South Bay Speedway. Faria is one of only two riders this year--Sam Ermolenko is the other--to beat Schwartz, who has won 17 of 19 scratch mains at the Gardena track.

SPRINT CARS--Eddie Wirth will try for his second straight victory and third in the last four races in Saturday night’s Parnelli Jones Firestone-California Racing Assn. sprint car races at Ascot Park. Wirth’s victory last week was No. 118 for car owner Alex Morales, who trails all-time CRA winning car owner Bruce Bromme by 10. John Redican, was runner-up to Wirth last Saturday and maintained his consistency. In the last 12 races, Redican has nine finishes in the top five, three of them victories. Defending champion Brad Noffsinger, Bubby Jones and standings leader Mike Sweeney of Carson are the other top threats in the 30-lapper. Speaking of Sweeney, he will put a wing on Frank Lewis’ sprinter Friday night and challenge the top Northern California drivers at Kings Speedway in Hanford, where the seventh race in the Golden State Sprint Car Championship Series will be held. Steve Kent of Fresno leads Campbell’s Brent Kaeding, 221 points to 208, in the series.

STOCK CARS--Point leader Ron Hornaday Jr., who won his fifth main event of the season last week, will try to put a little more distance between himself and his NASCAR modified rivals in Saturday night’s 40-lapper at Saugus Speedway. Sportsman cars and street stocks also are on the program. . . . Friday night, the hobby stocks, foreign stocks and jalopies will race at Saugus. . . . Don Wright Jr., who has been relatively quiet since winning a track championship as a rookie in 1985, will be gunning for his third straight win when the pro stock division of the Curb Motorsports-Winston Racing Series continues Sunday night at Ascot Park. Also scheduled are races for bomber, Figure 8 and oval cars, full-bodied hobby stocks and compact hobbies. . . . Mark Norris and Ron Brown will continue their battle for the standings lead in Saturday night’s 30-lap main event for NASCAR super stocks at El Cajon Speedway. Sportsman, street and bomber cars also are on the program.

MIDGETS--The United States Auto Club’s Western States series moves to the third-mile Santa Maria Speedway Saturday night with Fresno’s Rusty Rasmussen continuing his challenge to point leader Sleepy Tripp. Rasmussen’s victory last Sunday night at Ascot Park moved him past Wayne Bennet into second place. Tripp has a 66-point lead. . . . The three-quarter midget division has the week off. The race originally scheduled for Saturday night at Ventura has been reset for July 24.

OFF-ROAD--If one is good, two must be better. That apparently is Mickey Thompson’s theory, since he has stretched his annual one-night Off Road Championship Gran Prix at the Coliseum into a weekend affair featuring dirt drag racing, mud bog drags, a war of monster trucks and races for ATVs and Odysseys. Parts of the Gran Prix track that will be used Saturday night will be redesigned overnight for Sunday’s three-hour program that begins at 1 p.m.

MOTOCROSS--The Continental Motosport Club’s California Summer Series continues Sunday at Carlsbad Raceway. The following Friday night, the action moves to Ascot Park.

DRAG RACING--Firestone-Centerline team competition races will be held Sunday at Riverside International Raceway.