No Place Like Home for Rainey : Motorcycle racing: Foreign riders bash Laguna Seca Raceway, but the world champion is building a house nearby.

America-bashing often has been used to attract attention throughout the world, be it in politics, business or sports. Motorcycle racing is no exception.

Australian rider Kevin Magee, after falling and suffering a head injury last year at Laguna Seca Raceway, near Monterey, blasted the track as being too dangerous and called on his fellow road racers to boycott the only United States stop of the world championship series.

The year before, after another Aussie, world champion Wayne Gardner, was hurt in a spill at Laguna Seca, retired rider Barry Sheene deplored the track on Australian TV, saying it was unfit. Sheene had never seen a race at Laguna Seca, but his comments received worldwide attention.

“The problem is not with the track, the problem is with their right wrist,” said Wayne Rainey, the world 500cc road racing champion and winner of the last two Laguna Seca races, at his home in Downey.

“A 500cc bike is hard to handle on a tight track like Laguna Seca, because when you’re in low gear, it always wants to spin a wheelie when you twist the throttle. The bikes are so powerful today, with so much torque, that if you’re not careful, it’ll highside you. That’s what happened to both Magee and Gardner. They went off in the same place, all by themselves, because they asked the bike for more than they could handle at that spot on the track.

“There are more dangerous tracks in Europe, by a long ways. Salzburg, in Austria, and Spa, in Belgium, are much more dangerous because they are so much faster, and Spa is lined with guard rails, which is the worst hazard for a motorcycle rider. Neither Magee nor Gardner slid into a thing. Their whole problem was too much throttle.”

Rainey, who won his first world championship for Yamaha with an almost perfect season last year, will defend his U.S. International Grand Prix crown Sunday at Laguna Seca in Round 3 of the world championship series.

In 15 races, Rainey won seven times and had five seconds, two thirds and only one DNF (did not finish).

Laguna Seca officials made several changes this year, widening runoff areas, removing several dirt embankments and repaving portions of the track.

“If those changes don’t make them (foreign riders) happy, they should stay home,” Rainey said.

Rainey fell only once last year in thousands of miles of testing and racing. The fall came at Nurburgring, Germany, where he crashed during practice. Team owner Kenny Roberts estimated that Rainey ran the equivalent of 10 complete races during testing.

“I fell going about 130 m.p.h., and all I hurt was my little finger,” Rainey said. “It all depends on how you land. It happened so fast, I didn’t know which side of the bike I fell off. But I was back riding the next day.

“Going down is inevitable in such a high-risk sport, but I try not to go past the limit too much. I work hard on throttle control. That’s one reason I was on the podium for every race but one last year, and that one was Hungary and it didn’t matter.”

Rainey, after finishing third in the 1991 season opener in Japan, won two weeks ago in Australia, holding off hometown favorite Mike Doohan.

“It was the first time an Australian hadn’t won their Grand Prix,” Rainey said, “so Doohan and Gardner will be gunning for revenge this week because no one has beaten the Americans at Laguna Seca.”

Eddie Lawson of Upland won in 1988, and Rainey took the last two races.

“I expect Doohan to be the toughest rider to beat Sunday,” Rainey said. “He is only one point behind me in the world standings, and he likes Laguna Seca. He’s the only Australian who’ll admit he likes it. Kevin Schwantz, if he can remain upright, will be tough, too, but Schwantz sometimes rides so hard, he either wins or pokes a hole in the wall. You can’t do that at Laguna Seca.”

Schwantz won five races last year to finish second in the standings but crashed in five others, including Laguna Seca, where he broke his right wrist. This year, the lanky Texan won in Japan and finished fifth in Australia.

Either an American or an Australian has won the world championship every year since 1983.

“There are two reasons Americans and Aussies have dominated,” Rainey said. “First, we trained on dirt bikes before we took to road racing; and secondly, we can’t stand settling for anything but winning. The Europeans seem perfectly happy to finish second or third, but not the Yanks and the Aussies. For us, winning is everything.”

During the off-season, he won a big race in Paris, the Guidon d’Or, which matched road racers against dirt-track riders.

“That was the most fun I had all year,” he said. “I not only beat guys like Lawson and Gardner, but (world motocross champion) Eric Geboers was in it, too.”

Rainey will be carrying an extra responsibility this weekend. In addition to riding his 500cc bike for Roberts, he will be running his own team in the world 250cc companion feature. Alan Scott, 25, a former 125cc rider from Concord, Calif., is his protege.

“I actually put the team together for Kenny Roberts Jr.,” Rainey said. “He’s only 17, not old enough to ride in a world championship race, but he rides for me in the Western Eastern Roadracers Assn. season. I got my first taste of what it’s like to run a team last week at Willow Springs.

“Scott and Kenny Jr. ran second and third in the Formula II race on 250cc Yamahas, and we were real pleased. It was quite an experience for me. I found it is really difficult to watch and have no control of the outcome, the way I do when I’m riding myself. Toward the end, my two guys were racing each other, and I kept hoping they wouldn’t take one another out.

“I got involved when Kenny asked me to put together a team for Junior to run the WERA series. I thought it would be a little deal with one rider and one guy to run the team, and then I got a sponsor and the team grew to two riders.

“Now I have two mechanics--one is my dad--a team manager, two riders, a sponsor and a lot of expenses. My dad did all the work on my bikes until I got my first factory ride with Kawasaki in 1982, so when I decided to have a second rider, I asked him to come along as Alan’s mechanic.

“One thing I like is that my sponsor, Otsuka Electronics from Japan, is not a tobacco company. I keep hearing talk that the tobacco sponsors may be banned just about everywhere by 1993.”

By contrast, the senior Roberts’ Team Marlboro Yamaha employs 30 mechanics, engineers and managers for two riders, Rainey and world 250cc champion John Kocinski of Little Rock, Ark.

“It’s so high tech today that we have special engineers just for the computerized rear suspension,” Rainey said.

Kocinski, 23, moved up to the 500cc class this year to replace four-time world champion Lawson, who switched to the Italian Cagiva team after an unproductive year in 1990 following his accident at Laguna Seca.

Kocinski finished fourth in his 500cc debut in Japan and took third in Australia.

Winning the world championship has brought about more changes for Rainey than the challenge of retaining his No. 1 plates.

He and Roberts purchased a seaside villa in Sitges, Spain, a Mediterranean resort south of Barcelona, for a home base during the European portion of the season.

“The fans in Spain adopted us as their own. Cycles are very big there,” Rainey said. “There were 170,000 fans for our race in Jerez and only 15,000 when the Formula One cars ran on the same track. Last year, we only got home (to Downey) twice. The rest of the time we spent in a motorhome. Now we will be able to fly to Barcelona between races and rest. And there’s a golf course only two blocks from our villa.”

Rainey and his wife and childhood sweetheart, Shae, also are preparing to build a home in Monterey, high in the hills above Laguna Seca.

Some things don’t change, however.

One of the first things Rainey does when he comes home is load up his go-kart and head for the Adams kart track in Riverside.

“There’s nothing like going out there and running all day,” he said. “Eddie (Lawson) has a kart and he runs there, too. My mom and dad used to race there before I was born.”

Ila Rainey, his mother, flipped her kart in a spectacular crash there while pregnant with Wayne.

“I like to take friends out to the turn where she flipped and tell them how I remember it,” Wayne laughed.