Making His Own Tracks

Barry and Bobby. Ken Jr. and Ken.

Jason and Reg?

In the world of motorcycle racing, they are yet another pair of heavy hitters.

Like Barry Bonds and Ken Griffey Jr., the baseball sluggers following in their fathers’ footsteps, Jason Pridmore is on a fast track of success previously blazed by his father, Reg.

Jason, 27, of Ventura sped to eight victories and two second-place finishes in 10 American Motorcycle Assn. 750 SuperSport races this year to win the national championship riding for the privately financed HyperCycle Suzuki team of Van Nuys.

His father, Reg, a native of Britain who lives in Santa Paula, won three consecutive AMA Superbike championships from 1976-78. They are the first father and son in AMA history to win won road racing championships.

“I didn’t learn any bad habits,” Jason said. “He taught me right from the start.”

What makes Jason’s feat even more remarkable is that he sat out the 1995 season because of a broken right leg incurred in a motocross race.

The layoff proved to be one more aspect of racing where Reg Pridmore was able to share his experiences with his son, because he had a serious accident during the 1979 season.

“The physical side of it was that I was pretty busted up,” Jason said. “Mentally, nobody wants to be indoors for 12 months, and he’s been through that.

“Just to have someone to talk to who’d been through that made it easier.”

Said Reg: “I had no idea that he felt that way, although there were times when I’d say certain things to him and get that condescending smile that told me he knew what I was pointing at.”

Although Jason says he doesn’t remember riding a battery-powered motorcycle when he was 1-year-old, or graduating to a 50cc gas-powered model by the time he was 2, he said his father never tried to force motorcycles on him.

“Kids are naturally attracted to motorcycles,” Jason said, and the path he has followed to the top would seem to be proof.

Jason started competitive racing in motocross as a teenager, about the time his father retired from competition to teach motorcycle riding.

“When I started doing the classes, Jason was there helping me,” Reg Pridmore said.

The younger Pridmore took up golf at the same time, hacking at balls in a local river-bottom with a school friend using borrowed clubs, according to his father.

Jason still plays on the Golden State Amateur Tour with a 1.4 handicap when he’s not racing or helping his father teach motorcycle riding at racetracks around the country.

“I figure golfers play into their 60s, and racing is a young man’s sport,” Pridmore said.

Pridmore partially credits his success to helping his father teach, which he still does when not competing, because it gave him valuable practice time on the track.

He did not enter a road race until 1987, his junior year at Ventura High, when he accepted an offer to use the friend’s motorcycle to compete in a novice endurance race at Willow Springs Raceway in Rosamond.

It was one year before Pridmore would return to the six-hour endurance races at Willow Springs, winning his first race, and it wasn’t until 1990 that he raced an entire season of endurance events.

In 1992, Pridmore earned his first AMA victory and finished second in the points standings in his first full season on the 750 SuperSport tour.

Pridmore also races in the 600 SuperSport class, and entered his father’s old stomping ground in the Superbike class for the final three races of the 1997 season.

In last weekend’s season finale at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Pridmore won the 750 SuperSport race Saturday, finished third behind two factory-backed riders in a 600 SuperSport race Sunday and finished 27th in Sunday’s Superbike race when the bike developed electrical problems on the 20th of 25 laps.

Pridmore qualified 14th on the Superbike, and worked his way up to sixth before the cycle quit on him.

“One of the top runners on the Suzuki factory team told him if he ever gets on a serious bike, it would be bad news for everyone,” Reg Pridmore said.

“I trained him to be a thinking rider, and a thinking rider is a successful rider.”

Although father and son have not and probably will never formally face off in a competition, they have their opportunities to be on the track together at speed when teaching motorcycle riding.

As far as who the better rider is in the family, the pair have differing opinions.

“I have to work to get away from him,” Jason said of his father. “It’s just amazing how fast he is. He’s so smooth.”

Said Reg Pridmore of his son’s 1997 season: “I never put together a string like that. When I told him how good he’s looking, I told him, ‘You’re going to be better than your dad,’ and he disagreed. We argue about that all of the time.

“He’s a good ambassador for the sport, and that is something that’s inbred. It’s in his genes.”