Larry Lawrence | August 15, 2021
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
This Cycle News Archives Column is reprinted from the September 26, 2007 issue. CN has hundreds of past Archives columns in our files, too many destined to be archives themselves. So, to prevent that from happening, in the future, we will be revisiting past Archives articles while still planning to keep fresh ones coming down the road -Editor.
From The Rock Store To Road America
In the span of just a couple of years, Mark Homchick went from street racing to the Rock Store in the Santa Monica Mountains, to racing guys like Freddie Spencer and Eddie Lawson at tracks such as his favorite, Road America, in the early 1980s.
A top-ranked 250cc Grand Prix and later AMA Formula One rider, Homchick scored AMA podiums, led a National, raced wheel to wheel against—and sometimes beat—the best riders in the country. He also represented the United States in the Anglos-American Match Races. Despite showing tremendous promise in his short professional racing career Homchick was one of the riders who just missed the cut when it came to factory rides. Regardless, he always found sponsorship—at least enough to race on someone else’s dime.
Mark Homchick went from a local street “racer” to a top-ranked 250cc Grand Prix and AMA Formula One road racer in the early ’80s.
Homchick honed his riding skills carving up the mountain and canyon roads in Santa Monica. A cocky Woodland Hills high schooler, he would bolt out of class when the bell rang, hop on his Honda CB350F, speed off to the mountains and put in 100 miles a day in the twisties on a good afternoon.
“One of my favorite things was to hook up with this group of doctors and lawyers I got to know,” Homchick remembers. “I was 17 and they were all in their late 20s or early 30s. They’d be on ‘The Gentlemen’s Express,’ which is what they called a Honda CB550 with pipes and low handlebars. Being the contentious little brat that I was, I used to love to get on those roads and hang back a little and then just plow past them all by the time we’d get to the top of the hill.”
Like a lot of young motorcyclists of the 1970s, Homchick was hooked on Cycle Magazine. Cycle’s office was in Westlake Village, just a footpeg scrape or two away from his home.
One day after school, he rode up, walked in the front door, and asked whoever would listen, “Hey, I really enjoy the magazine; how do you guys put this thing together?”
Not surprisingly, the writers at Cycle couldn’t resist hero worship, and eventually they let the young enthusiast hang around. Before long, Homchick became a regular at Cycle and gradually found himself doing things here and there for the magazine, such as riding in photoshoots, driving the company van, tagging along to the races, and just generally sticking his nose in wherever they’d let him.
Homchick enjoyed going to the local club road races and helping Cook Neilson and Phil Schilling, but he hadn’t the chance to race. One thing that kept him off the track was his propensity to become extremely cautious for weeks or even months after a crash.
“I’d be all freaked out after a crash, and it would take me a long time to get my confidence back,” Homchick recalls. “Phil gave me a loan, so I could buy Cook’s original Ducati GT, and I was riding home from high school one day, crashed and broke my back. I was in the hospital for two weeks, and a body cast for six weeks.
“As soon as I got out of the cast, I went right back to riding. My first ride was up in the Malibu mountains, and I met a guy I knew on the way, and, of course, I had to beat him up the hill. I’m dragging pipes through the turns and just generally riding fast, and I thought, ‘Wow! I just got hurt worse than I ever have, and it didn’t faze me. I guess I’m ready to go racing.’”
Homchick met Matt Owens, who had a DS7, Yamaha’s predecessor to the legendary RD line. Owens offered to let Homchick race the Yamaha. With help from Gordon Jennings and Pierre des Roches, they got the little Yamaha race-ready and in 1976 Homchick entered his first road race, an ARRA club race at Willow Springs. And he won the 250cc Production class.
In only his second or third race, he went on to beat the hottest 250cc Production racer in Southern California at the time, a guy named Wally Karpynic, who rode a ratty old Suzuki X6. Wally hadn’t been beaten in several years, so it was big news in the local club scene that this new upstart was beating the top guy in the class.
Neilson’s retiring from racing was maybe the best thing that ever happened to Homchick. Neilson’s tuner, Schilling, wasn’t happy unless he had a racing bike sitting around to tinker on, so he bought a Yamaha TZ250E for Homchick to ride.
“I couldn’t believe my luck, I was going GP racing with ‘Schiller’ tuning for me,” Homchick said. “I think our deal was, I would buy the tires, and I had some lousy job and put everything I made into racing.”
Homchick went to Daytona to race the Novice event, thinking he would smoke everyone. Two things he didn’t realize were the fact that a kid named Freddie Spencer was also in the race, and Homchick had never raced Daytona before, and, compared to the tracks he was used to, it was an entirely different animal. Homchick finished ninth despite crashing in both the heat race and the final. Later that summer, he broke through, earning his first big win, taking the Novice victory in the AMA National at Sears Point.
In 1979, Homchick turned expert and raced a couple of 250cc Nationals. He scored a promising fifth at Loudon and fourth at Sears Point. With just three rounds in the series that year, those two finishes were enough to put Homchick fourth in the final AMA 250cc Grand Prix standings.
Dunlop tire distributor Stanley Chan put together a deal for Homchick to race a Paul Dahmen-tuned Yamaha TZ750 in 1980. He spent most of that year learning to ride the big TZ at club races.
In 1981, Homchick finished a very respectable eighth in the Daytona 200, despite running off the track once and having a chain stretch on his machine late in the race. He went on to finish ranked 10th in the final AMA Road Race National standings with three top-10 finishes.
Homchick earned his best results in 1982. He rode AMA Formula One Nationals again and a few 250cc Grand Prix races. He was also invited to be a part of the American squad in the Anglo-American Match Races. Homchick said he learned a lot about race craft in the Match Races and came back from England more confident than ever.
At Road America that year, he qualified on the front row and led most of the first lap of the National. In the 250cc race, Homchick finished second to Craig Morris, who, taking advantage of a quirk in the rules, won while riding an air-cooled 350. He went on to score another 250cc podium at Loudon that year but later abandon the ride to focus on the Formula One bike. He had an F1 podium in the bag at Pocono in the National before crashing late in the race.
Honda recognized Homchick’s potential, and he was invited to the ill-fated Laguna Seca Superbike tryout after the 1982 season where John Woo died.
The Honda ride never materialized, however. Formula One was dying and sponsorships were drying up, so Homchick reluctantly left racing. He had been hired as chief road-test rider for Cycle in 1980, so he had plenty to keep him busy.
After breaking his neck test-riding a motocross bike, Homchick left Cycle and ended up doing PR for Suzuki during Kevin Schwantz’s AMA Superbike days with Yoshimura. That was during the great Schwantz/Rainey battles, and Homchick says he’ll never forget one famous incident where Schwantz was using everything he had to psych out Rainey.
“Kevin had gotten into a high-speed turn-one crash with his teammate [Satoshi] Tsujimoto,” Homchick remembers. “After the crash, he was at the hotel playing tennis with somebody. Rainey walked by and saw him and just shook his head in disbelief. You know Kevin was beat up, but he wasn’t going to give any advantage to Wayne.”
In 1988, Homchick moved to Tokyo for a time and worked with Kawasaki setting up press intros all over the world.
“I’d break in the press bikes before the journalists rode them,” Homchick said. “I got to ride at Shah Alam, Estoril and all these state-of-the-art tracks. It was great.”
For a kid who started out peeking into Cycle’s garage to leer at the new bikes, Homchick made a pretty good life out of the hobby he loved so much.CN
