MOTOR RACING : 1992 Seems Like a Very Long Year for Kiedrowski

After he won two national motocross championships in three years and his first world championship Grand Prix last year in Japan, 1992 has not been going so well for Mike Kiedrowski.

It started on a bad note New Year’s Day when he was arrested for riding his motorcycle in a “hazardous fire area” near his home in Acton. It was his fourth offense, so sheriff’s deputies hauled him into the Santa Clarita station, where he was jailed briefly and booked on a misdemeanor charge.

Two weeks later, as the reigning United States 125cc champion, Kiedrowski was in Orlando, Fla., for the opening of the AMA stadium Supercross schedule. He had finished fourth in the series last year and was looking to move up.

He was running third halfway through the race when he crashed, fell and finished ninth.

A week later he was in the Houston Astrodome, hoping to make up for his disappointing ride at Orlando, in Round 2 of the Supercross season.

He was running fourth when his engine stalled, he crashed and finished eighth.

“Things have got to get better,” Kiedrowski said as he discussed the coming Supercross at Anaheim Stadium. “Don’t they?”

Kiedrowski, 23, will be on a 250cc Kawasaki for the third round of the 16-race stadium season when 20 riders go 20 miles Saturday night on a bump-and-jump course laid out atop the baseball diamond. Shane Neely, who did the tuning when Kiedrowski won his first national 125cc championship on a Honda in 1989 and was also with him last year when he won the same title on a Kawasaki, will again be in the pits.

They have been used to better results in the past. In last year’s 18 races, Kiedrowski finished among the top five 11 times and climaxed the season by winning the Japanese 125cc Grand Prix at Suzuka on the world championship circuit.

“Looking back, what’s happened to me this year is kind of weird,” he said. “For one, if the city had let me finish building my own motocross track on my property, I wouldn’t have been riding out in Baker Canyon.”

Kiedrowski recently bought a four-bedroom home on five acres in Acton, a small town in the foothills overlooking the Antelope Valley in the northwest corner of Los Angeles County. He started building his own course to simulate Supercross conditions, but work halted when authorities discovered that he had no permit. Now he has the permit, and work is scheduled to resume Monday.

“It’s so far to the Kawasaki track in Corona that I’ve been doing most of my training nearer home, which means out in the desert,” he said. “When my own track gets finished, I’ll be better equipped.”

As for the two early-season crashes, each had a different scenario--but both ended with the same frustration. His descriptions:

--Orlando: “I had won my heat and was feeling good about the main event. I was running third, right behind Jeff Emig, when he got kind of sideways in the whoops (a series of closely spaced steep bumps called whoop-de-dos), and I hit his back wheel. There wasn’t much I could do, I couldn’t get around him. His bike filled my line, and we both crashed.”

--Houston: “They had a nasty sand pit that got me. I was fourth, with Wardy (teammate Jeff Ward) behind me. I hit the rear brake in the pit and stalled my motor. I tried to jump-start it but before I could get going, Wardy hit me. It wasn’t his fault--he couldn’t keep from hitting me--and we both went down. By the time I got going again, I was 12th. I did pretty well to finish eighth.”

Kiedrowski, a graduate of Canyon High in Canyon Country, will be moving up to the 250cc and 500cc classes once the national outdoor season begins.

“I think training on the 250s will help me later on in the Supercross season,” he said.

Kiedrowski is a second-generation rider. His father, Dan, rode with the Checkers in Southern California desert races.

“I guess I was about 4 when I rode my first cycle,” Mike Kiedrowski said. “I was always going riding with my dad, tagging along when he was racing, until I began to race at Indian Dunes (a riding park near Saugus, now closed) on a little 80-cycle bike.”

Kiedrowski won the world mini-bike championship in Las Vegas and attracted the attention of Kawasaki scouts. He joined Team Green, the factory’s amateur team, and finished second by one point to Jeff Matiasevich on a 125cc bike in the Golden State series.

“Chicken (Matiasevich) and I have been racing each other a long time,” Kiedrowski said. “We climbed up together and here we are teammates on Kawasakis. Who would have thought it when we were 12 or 13 going at it?”

Motor Racing Notes

OFF-ROAD--Parnelli Jones, whose desert racing exploits in the 1970s helped popularize off-road racing, will return to the sport this weekend in the SCORE Parker 400. Jones, the 1963 Indianapolis 500 winner, will drive a Ford Ranger mini-pickup for Bill Stroppe, his longtime driving companion. Robby Gordon, who left desert racing a couple of years ago to pursue pavement racing, will return to co-drive his father’s full-sized Ford truck in the unlimited class. The race, which will start Saturday at 11 a.m. at the Blue Water Marina on the Colorado river, will consist of three loops in western Arizona. More than 200 drivers and motorcycle riders are expected.

DRAG RACING--Suspended pro stock champion Darrell Alderman filed an appeal with the National Hot Rod Assn. to overturn a ban on driving or participating in any NHRA drag racing activities, after his guilty plea to charges of cocaine possession and distribution. The competition committee will hear the appeal on March 12, six days after a federal judge in Lexington, Ky., is scheduled to sentence Alderman. The appeal will not permit Alderman to drive in the Winternationals, starting next Thursday at Pomona Fairplex, an event he won last year.

The second annual Budweiser Warm-up will be held this weekend at Bakersfield Raceway, with drivers making their final side-by-side tuneup runs before starting the 1992 season at Pomona the following week. Top fuel champion Joe Amato, who ran the fastest elapsed time of the 1991 season--4.85 seconds--at Bakersfield, will be back, along with most of the drag racing fraternity. Professional racing will start at noon both Saturday and Sunday.

Shirley Muldowney, former world top fuel champion who had signed with PetroMoly Lubricants for a full season, is looking for a different sponsor. She is suing the company and its president, Charles German, for breach of contract, saying she received no money, either for two races last year or for the coming NHRA season. The new car she had ordered from builder Al Swindahl has since been sold to rookie driver Kim LaHaie, leaving Muldowney with no financial backing and a two-year-old car, one week away from the new season.

STOCK CARS--To no one’s surprise, A. J. Foyt’s announced retirement won’t last long. Super Tex has entered the Skoal Bandit Copper World Classic next week at Phoenix International Raceway. Foyt won the first race held at the track, in an Indy car, in 1964.

AWARDS--Jim Filice of Modesto was named motorcycling’s athlete of the year by the Motoring Press Assn. of Northern California. Filice came back from a life-threatening auto accident two years ago to win the American Motorcyclist Assn.’s 250cc Grand Prix road racing championship. . . . Two-time Indy 500 winner Rodger Ward was named to the San Diego Automotive Museum’s Racing Hall of Fame. . . . Dennis Hart, a midget builder-owner-driver of Ventura, won the Joe Lynch Memorial Award for mechanical achievement at the U.S. Auto Club’s Western States awards banquet.