Larry Lawrence | May 30, 2018
Archives: Rainey Finally Gets It Done
Summer of 1988. This was Wayne Rainey’s second time around the GP block. Four years prior things hadn’t gone to plan. Coming off an AMA Superbike Championship, in 1984 Rainey raced a Roberts Yamaha in the 250 Grand Prix World Championships. He finished eighth in the series. The next season he was back racing in America. This time around Rainey, now racing in the premier 500cc GP class on the Lucky Strike Roberts Yamaha, was determined not to let history repeat itself, yet things were not coming together quite like he’d expected. The ’88 GP season was on the home stretch and Rainey felt he was in a desolate valley looking up at what seemed like an insurmountable peak.
Wayne Rainey celebrates his first GP victory at Donington Park in 1988. (Henny Ray Abrams photo)
Rewind to earlier in the season – Rainey had shown good speed in the first three rounds that season, but he was still worried.
“I’d been close, but hadn’t gotten a podium,” Rainey remembers. “And then you start thinking, ‘Am I ever going to get that win?’ My teammate [Kevin Magee] had already won, Kevin [Schwantz] had already won. You start questioning whether it’s ever going to happen for you.”
But then things started to click.
At the Expo 92 Motorcycle Grand Prix at Jerez, Rainey blasted away from the start and led 27 laps before Eddie Lawson finally reeled him in, and after much work, got around him. Rainey finished second. It marked his first 500cc GP podium. Then came a string of podiums at Imola, Nürburgring and Salzburgring. Rainey suddenly found himself second in the standings. Yet still no win.
Then a statement made on a PR trip to Assen sparked something in Rainey.
“Kevin and I were on a plane with some other racers,” Rainey recalls. “We’d been talking and someone said ‘There’s really only one race to win if you can’t win your home GP and that’s the British Grand Prix.’ That was true for me too. There was just so much history around with that race.”
So, with that thought in mind, Rainey made a mental note – the British GP was one where he would go all out to win.
Rainey got a major confidence booster just a week before the British Grand Prix. He’d won the pole and gone on with teammate Magee to win the prestigious Suzuka 8 Hours.
Back on the GP circuit, British tire company Dunlop, was keen to win its home GP as well and Rainey said the company had come up with a “really good compound” for that race. Lucky Strike Yamaha was the only top team on Dunlop, so, as Rainey recalls, “If you had an advantage with the tire it was for our team alone.”
Another ace up his sleeve were new AP carbon fiber brakes Rainey’s Lucky Strike Yamaha would use at Donington Park. It would be the first time the brakes would be used. The decision to use them in the race was Rainey’s. It was a gamble, but Rainey said, “I hadn’t won a race yet and wasn’t really in the championship battle. They felt great in practice, so I figured I’d go with them. I really had nothing to lose.”
The lighter weight carbon fiber brakes allowed Rainey to flick his bike back and forth more quickly than he could with the traditional brakes and also gave him less chatter while heavy on the binders, yet there were characteristics not yet fully understood and Rainey found one of them first hand on the warm-up lap.
Rainey was the first to use carbon-fiber brakes on his Team Roberts Yamaha and it went better than expected. (Henny Ray Abrams photo)
“Everybody rushes off into the first turn and I went to put the brakes on and everybody was stopping… I couldn’t stop!” Rainey said. “It felt like I was going to plow into the back of these guys. Then the brakes suddenly built heat and I almost looped out. So not being used to those brakes that whole lap I was making sure they stayed warm. I didn’t know sitting on the line if they were going to cool off. We had no experience with that stuff.”
Rainey got a great launch off the line at the start of the GP and he was flying. “Coming around the first lap I had over a second lead,” he recalls. “Then the next lap it was two and I think we stretched it out to over seven.”
Rainey was gone, but then a new problem, staying focused for the closing half of the race.
“Those last 15 laps took forever,” Rainey grins. “I remember I told myself to just keep focused on braking, shifting and my lines. Every once in awhile my mind would start drifting and I’d have to quickly snap myself back into focusing on the job at hand. It was the longest race of my life.”
Talking about coming around the last turn on the final lap with his first GP victory in hand, you can tell by way his eyes light up that the memory still is vivid in Rainey’s mind.
“I can still feel it now,” Rainey says. “I came around that last corner and I knew I was going to win it. Man… that was a feeling I’ll never forget. It was great.”
One of the lasting legacies of Rainey first win was that carbon fiber-composite brake rotors quickly came into general use.
Of course, Rainey would go on to win dozens more races and three world championships, but he remembers that first victory at Donington Park in 1988 as a very special moment in his racing career. Looking back now perhaps his most special.
