MOTOR RACING : When There’s a Cycle, Roeseler Has to Ride It

Larry Roeseler is like a little kid in a toy store who wants one of everything. When he sees all those motorcycle races going on, he wants in all of them.

Wayne Rainey is the world road-racing champion; Jeff Stanton beat the world’s best in motocross and four of the world speedway semifinalists are Americans--but Roeseler, a little-known 34-year-old rider from Hesperia, may be, in his own way, the best of them all.

Roeseler is certainly the busiest and the most versatile.

This year, he is riding in the SCORE desert racing series, the International Six-Day Enduro qualifying series, the national Hare and Hound series and the national Enduro series, in addition to various high-profile races such as the Virginia City Grand Prix, the Blackwater 100 in West Virginia and the Pikes Peak hill climb in Colorado.

On about 45 weekends a year, Roeseler is racing--and usually winning--on a variety of Team Green Kawasaki machinery.

He also faces some harrowing experiences--such as the time he was leading in the Baja 1,000 when he crested a rise at about 90 m.p.h. and ran into the front of a VW van tooling up the road in the opposite direction.

“I was lucky,” he said. “I was flat out when I hit. I flew right over the top of the van, and all I got out of it was a broken ankle. The bike was absolutely totaled. The (van) drove off with a few dents in the front end.”

Or the time he ran into a cow that wandered across the course. “You’d be surprised how sturdy cattle are built when you run into one,” he said.

Or the time his riding partner, Dan Smith, fell after 200 miles of the Baja 1,000, and Roeseler had to ride the remaining 750 miles to La Paz without him. “I was on the bike for more than 11 straight hours,” Roeseler said, “and it took me two weeks to recuperate. After that, I started getting three guys for the 1,000.”

Roeseler teamed with Ted Hunnicutt of Moorpark and former motocross champion Danny LaPorte of Redondo Beach to win their third consecutive Baja 1,000 last year.

“You feel a whole lot better when you go home at night if there’s been three of you riding from Ensenada to La Paz,” Roeseler said with a grin.

Of all the victories, Roeseler relishes the 1989 Baja 1,000, the first one he, Hunnicutt and LaPorte won, best of all.

“I rode the last 350 miles, all at night,” Roeseler said. “Forty miles from the finish, the chain broke. It was way out in the middle of nowhere. I had about a 30-minute lead, but I didn’t have any tools. I had a tiny flashlight that I put in my mouth and made do with a pocket knife, a nail file and some tape. I made like McGyver out there and got it fixed enough to get to the Kawasaki pits and get a new chain.

“It was about 3 a.m. when I came over that last ridge and saw the lights of La Paz and realized how close we’d come to going down the drain, and how far we’d come as a team. I had won before, but it was the first big win for Team Green, and I got real emotional riding those last few miles.”

Roeseler said he is winding down his motorcycle career and hopes to step into auto racing in the next year or so, but this year he is showing no signs of backing off.

As defending class champion in SCORE, he won the Parker 400, the San Felipe 250 and the Baja 500 and is second behind Team Green teammate Garth Sweetland with two events remaining--the Nevada 500 on Aug. 10 and the Baja 1,000 in November. He was a member of the winning team in the Baja 500 for the eighth time and also has won the Baja 1,000 six times.

In the International Six-Day Enduro, he won a four-day enduro in Oklahoma and a two-day event in Idaho and finished second in Oregon, but he is skipping the final two dates because he is not entering the world championship.

Roeseler went to 12 consecutive ISDE competitions in Europe and won nine gold medals, two silvers and one bronze. An International Six-Day Enduro is an Olympic-type competition in which entries from 20 nations compete for six days, each riding about 1,000 miles of demanding terrain. This is the ISDE’s 64th year, making it motorcycling’s oldest amateur event.

“It’s something like a rally when it’s held in the woods and something like a desert race when it’s held on the flat, and it’s something like trials when it’s over a rocky surface in a stream bed,” Roeseler said. “One thing it’s not: it’s not a spectator sport.”

Although Roeseler has won nine gold medals, that doesn’t mean he has won nine times. In the ISDE, gold medals are given to any rider who scores within 10% of the winning total.

“The riding is very technical, compared to a Baja race, where the riding is very fast,” Roeseler said. “ISDE riders average between 25 and 30 m.p.h. In Baja, we average 55 to 60 and top out (at) 118 on pavement.

“The toughest part is that only the rider can work on his bike and no major changes can be made. They give you 10 minutes before the start each day to do all your work, like cleaning the chain and sprocket, changing the rear tire and the air cleaner, little things like that, but it’s tough. The bikes are impounded at the end of each day’s running. The only way you can get more time than the 10 minutes in the morning is to finish early and get started in the few minutes before your time is up. Of course, if you’re late, you’re penalized one point for every second.”

This year, instead of going to Europe for the ISDE, Roeseler will ride in Wally Dallenbach’s charity event, the Colorado 500.

“One of the hardest things this year was deciding which series I should focus on,” Roeseler said. “I can’t do them all because of schedule conflicts, so I’m concentrating on SCORE and the Hare and Hound (a series of seven desert races, all 100 miles or longer). I won SCORE last year and the Hare and Hound in 1989. This year I’d like to win them both.”

He has won five of seven Hare and Hound events this season but trails KTM rider Danny Hamel with two races remaining.

The Virginia City GP, five laps of a 25-mile loop around and through the northern Nevada town, is Roeseler’s favorite. He was won it five times in a row. In his first Pikes Peak climb, Roeseler finished first in 500cc and fourth overall.

He also won a six-hour race in Japan that he said almost made him dizzy.

“We ran seven-mile laps for six hours, and I won by four laps,” he said. “It would have been worse, but I stopped for a flat tire and lost a couple of laps while the crew and I were messing around.”

Roeseler has been riding since he was 5, when his father, Earl, who was a District 37 desert champion in 1955, put him on a minibike with a lawn mower engine.

“The first time I rode it, I ran into a brick wall, fell off and scraped myself on some gravel,” Roeseler said. “It really scared my dad more than it did me.”

SPORTS CARS--Brian Forester, a child star in the TV series “Partridge Family,” will drive for Team Los Angeles this weekend in the American City Racing League series at Willow Springs Raceway. Forester, a Skip Barber driving school instructor at Sears Point, will join Bill Stevens as Los Angeles drivers in the series for Ford-powered Sports 2000 spec cars.

Chip Hanauer, who took up racing in the Firestone Firehawk series after retiring as national unlimited hydroplane champion, scored his first victory last week in Portland, Ore. He and P. J. Jones drove a Toyota MR2 Turbo to victory in the three-hour race.

MOTOCROSS--Rex Staten, 36, laid claim to being the winningest MX rider in U.S. history when he won his 550th race last Sunday in the vet pro class of the Continental Motosport Club’s weekly series at Glen Helen Park in San Bernardino. Staten, once one of the country’s top riders, has been racing since 1970.

MOTORCYCLES--After a week off for the Orange County Fair, speedway racing will return to Costa Mesa this week for a rare Saturday night program at the fairgrounds track. Former national champion Kelly Moran, who is captain of the Bellevue team in the British League, will make an appearance at local tracks this week. . . . New Zealand sidecars and four-wheeled ATVs will augment the weekly speedway racing program next Wednesday night at Glen Helen Park.

STOCK CARS--Street stocks will headline the Saugus Speedway show Saturday night, with Figure 8, hobby stock and jalopy races also scheduled. . . . Super modifieds will share the program with Western Racing Assn. vintage cars Saturday night at Cajon Speedway. . . . Dirt cars will race Saturday night at Santa Maria Speedway. . . . Street and mini stocks are scheduled for Friday night at Ventura Raceway. . . . Mesa Marin Raceway in Bakersfield has scheduled a non-NASCAR-sanctioned race for Southwest Tour cars, the Coca Cola 100, for Saturday night.