Larry Lawrence | October 4, 2017
Doug Chandler races the Cagiva GP500 ahead of Àlex Crivillé and Wayne Rainey in the 1993 Dutch TT at Assen. (Henny Ray Abrams photo)
At the end of 1992 Doug Chandler was coming into his own as a Grand Prix road racer. That year with Lucky Strike Suzuki, Chandler became one of the top riders in the series. He scored four podiums that year, including runner-up finishes at Suzuka and the Hungaroring and earned two poles. He basically ran level with his teammate Kevin Schwantz in the point standings, just five points behind at the end of the year. In fact, Chandler finished ahead of Schwantz in the races during the second half of ’92.
So when Cagiva came calling with a big-dollar contract before the 1993 Grand Prix season, Chandler was kind of hoping Suzuki would step up to the plate to keep him on the squad.
“I was pretty content at Suzuki,” Chandler admits. “But then you get offered quite a bit more. I didn’t necessarily expect to Suzuki to match Cagiva’s offer, but I figured I would at least get an increase, but nothing there. So, I took a chance and went with Cagiva.”
Cagiva, which began motorcycle production in 1978, had been competing on and off in GP racing since 1980. In 1988 Cagiva got a premier rider in Randy Mamola and the results finally came. At the 1988 Belgian Grand Prix at Spa-Francorchamps, Mamola gave the Italian maker it’s first Grand Prix podium finish with a third.
Then in 1991, four-time World Champion Eddie Lawson came on board. He scored a couple of podiums in his first season with the team. In 1992, in wet-to-drying conditions at the Hungaroring, Lawson brilliantly elected to run cut slicks and took victory, giving Cagiva its first GP win. Lawson ended his two seasons with Cagiva ranked sixth and ninth before announcing his retirement.
Cagiva’s lineup for 1993 was Chandler and a GP rookie from Australia named Mat Mladin. It was going to be tough for the team to keep their spirits high after losing a rider like Lawson, but Chandler was tough and had proven his worth with Suzuki.
Chandler was on his third different GP bike in as many years and he wasn’t sure what to expect from the Cagiva, but was pleasantly surprised when he first rode the machine.
“The Cagiva was a really nice bike,” Chandler explained. “At that level, they were going to try to come up with whatever it took for you to get around the track faster. There was a lot of effort and we started off with a podium at Eastern Creek.”
It was a stunning debut for Chandler aboard the Cagiva with Chandler finishing a close third behind fellow Americans Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey in the Australian Grand Prix. Incidentally, that marked the last time Americans swept a MotoGP/500cc podium.
The enthusiasm for the new bike and team was dampened quickly however at the next round in Malaysia.
“I was chasing Wayne (Rainey) around in practice when the throttle stuck on the bike going into a corner,” Chandler said. “It took me into a tire wall and I ended up puncturing my left hand.”
The injury set Chandler back. He raced on with the injury, but wasn’t able to get back inside the top 10 until round five at the Salzburgring in Austria, where he’d qualified on the front row. From there results steadily improved. He had another outstanding race in the Dutch TT at Assen. There Chandler worked his way up through the field and battled past Honda’s Shinichi Itoh and Rainey to score fourth and just missing the podium by 3-10ths of a second behind Àlex Crivillé, after Crivillé used the superior power of his Honda to blow by Chandler on the back straight on the last lap.
Assen was the halfway point in the season and Chandler was seventh in the standings and things were looking good at that point for improving. Then the bottom dropped out. At Catalunya Chandler was in position for another solid finish when Itoh hit the back of Chandler’s bike causing Itoh to crash, taking Chandler with him. Then at Mugello, Chandler crashed in qualifying.
“The next thing I remember I’m waking up in the medical center,” Chandler recalls.
The concussion kept him out of the next two rounds.
With both Chandler and Mladin riding injured (Mladin had broken and then re-broken a collarbone) Cagiva started looking for other options. At the British GP they brought in World Superbike rider Carl Fogary, who turned in a great ride finishing fourth in his one-off ride. Then the team brought on John Kocinski, who earlier that season had been fired from the factory Suzuki 250GP squad.
Kocinski’s hiring did not sit well with Chandler, or the rest of the team.
“John had gotten fired at Suzuki and I think at the time they (Cagiva) didn’t have to invest much to get him,” Chandler speculates. “It ended up good for them, because he won some races, but it caused a shit storm with the people inside the team.
“I was giving it everything I had and then they bring John on. I was thinking, ‘Wait, we’re barely getting it done with what we’ve got and yet you’re going to add a third bike?’ They pulled one or two guys over from the test team (to work with Kocinski) and I felt they need to be doing testing, not running a third bike at the races. It was a little frustrating.”
Even though Chandler had closed out ’93 well, with the Kocinski hiring, the bike throwing him down a few times, he wasn’t in the best place when 1994 rolled around. But help came in the form of veteran crew chief Kel Carruthers, who Cagiva brought on board. “He helped me get my head on straight,” Chandler said of Carruthers.
The ’94 version of the GP500 was closer to the other factory bikes in terms of top speed, but Chandler said the bike then started having reliability issues.
“We’d qualify well and run well early in the races, but we just kept have mechanical problems with the bike and had a lot of DNFs,” Chandler remembers. “It was kind of frustrating because we had a really good bike, but we couldn’t get all the pieces to come together. I remember at a couple of races I was battling near the front when a cylinder popped off.”
But Chandler had one more stellar performance on the Cagiva. It came at the end of ’94 in Argentina where he finished runner up to Honda’s Mick Doohan and eight seconds ahead of Cagiva teammate Kocinski.
With such a strong performance at the end of the year, Chandler hoped to re-sign with Cagiva, but then they unexpectedly announced at the end of ’94 they were pulling out of GP racing. Chandler was dumbfounded at Cagiva’s decision.
“I thought they’d work so long to get to where they got and then they just pulled the plug on it,” Chandler said. “It didn’t make sense.”
For Chandler, there was a happy ending. He came back and won two more AMA Superbike Championships with Kawasaki, following in the footsteps of Reg Pridmore and Fred Merkel as the only three-time champions of the series to that point.
In the end Chandler looks back with mixed feelings about his time at Cagiva. “I looked at it as a challenge to try to run with the bigger teams,” he said. “And we had some good results. And even though I was more interested in winning than the money, the years at Cagiva were my best paid years in GP.”
