Larry Lawrence | January 16, 2022
Cycle News Archives
COLUMN
When Satellite Teams had Satellite Teams
The period of the early 2000s was undoubtedly a once-in-a-lifetime peak of motorcycle racing in America. There was no better illustration of that fact than Bruce Transportation Group Honda, which became a leading team in AMA Pro Road Racing of that era with riders such as Alex Gobert, Roger Lee Hayden, Josh Hayes, Marty Craggill and Jake Zemke. Bruce Transportation Group Honda was essentially a satellite team of a satellite team. That’s right, in early 2000s AMA Pro Road Racing there were up to three levels of factory-backed Honda teams. There was the factory team, then Honda’s satellite squad Erion Honda and then yet another satellite squad running out of the Erion Racing shop. Bruce Group operated under its own tent, complete with its own big rig, independent team personnel, media kits and riders. The team was financed by Bruce Lyskawa, a racer-turned-team-owner.
Jake Zemke was the most successful rider to race for Bruce Transportation Group Honda. In this photo, Zemke is shown ahead of Damon Buckmaster on his way to the Formula Xtreme victory at Laguna Seca in 2002. Photo: Henny Ray Abrams
And as the team’s unique yellow livery suggested, a big part of Lyskawa’s company Bruce Transportation Group was operating a large fleet of school buses for districts across New England.
The story of Bruce Transportation Group Honda begins with Lyskawa who raced professionally primarily in the AMA Harley-Davidson 883 and AMA Team Challenge Series in the 1990s. Lyskawa met Kevin Erion just as he was looking to step up his involvement in the series and become a team owner.
“I raced motorcycles for years, and while I never finished with great results, I really loved the sport—it was in my blood,” Lyskawa said.
Erion made Lyskawa’s entry into team ownership as seamless as possible.
“I met Bruce when he purchased Formula Xtreme bikes and 600 SuperSport machines from us,” said Erion. “For a long time, Bruce talked about how someday he’d like to form a race team, and then in mid-1999 our discussion about a new team started turning more serious. Finally, he asked, ‘How do we start?’ and basically we were in business.”
Bruce Transportation Group Honda team was formed ahead of the 2000 season.
Lyskawa was a hard-core road-racing enthusiast and even though the sport was thriving in the late-90s and early 2000s, one element he felt was missing was sponsors from outside the motorcycling industry.
“We were building up a first-rate race team, but even more important, we were building up the image of motorcycle competition outside of the mainstream industry,” Lyskawa explained. “We wanted to open the door to outside support for the entire paddock, and we were proud to be in the forefront of that movement.”
Alex Gobert’s first full-time ride in America was with Bruce Transportation Group Honda. This photo clearly shows the school-bus-themed livery the team sported.
The team now had sponsorship, a shop and backing from an established racing squad. What it needed next was a crew chief and they found their man at Vance & Hines in Joey Osowski. Osowski was a national championship-winning endurance racer from the 1980s. He’d raced for both Team Hammer and Cycle Tech Racing, so he knew how well-organized teams were run. It turns out Osowski was the perfect man for the job, and he quickly assembled a solid team.
“I wasn’t looking to leave Vance & Hines,” Osowski recalls. “I really enjoyed working there, but when they talked to me about being crew chief, I got excited about the possibility of getting back involved in racing.”
Then the team signed riders Jake Zemke and promising Canadian Kevin Lacombe. Zemke came from the Cycle Gear Suzuki team and his signing turned out to be a brilliant move. Zemke was immediately a Formula Xtreme contender for the new Bruce Honda team and was also a solid top-10 runner in Supersport. Lacombe finished 10th in the Formula Xtreme Series with a pair of top-10 results on the season.
While closely associated with Erion Honda and getting Honda support, Bruce Transportation Group Honda was distinctly its own team. Note the press kit with nothing in red, which was very un-Honda-like in those days.
The series culminated with Zemke taking his first-ever FX victory at Willow Springs. He finished runner up in the series. To have a first-year team come out with a victory and placing a rider second in an AMA National Championship Series was a remarkable accomplishment.
“I look back on my time with Bruce Transportation with a lot of fondness,” said Zemke who moved next door to Erion Honda the next season. “It was the beginning of my long association with Honda and the team worked well together from the start.”
In 2001, the team was made up of riders Josh Hayes and Roger Lee Hayden, both racing Formula Xtreme and Supersport. Hayes finished fifth in both championships that season and scored four podium finishes in FX. He scored another unexpected podium in 750 Supersport when he ran his 600 Supersport bike on the tight and technical Loudon circuit.
In just two short years, the Bruce Transportation Honda firmly established itself as a force to be reckoned with, and team owner Lyskawa was thrilled with his team’s fast start.
“By all standards, the 2000 racing year was absolutely spectacular,” Lyskawa said. “There we were, a brand-new team, not a factory team, and we were running with the big dogs—I couldn’t have been happier! In our first year, we established a presence, a reputation, and an enviable record, and then in ’01 we solidified those gains. Going into our third season, we were already considered one of the top teams in the paddock.”
The Bruce Team ran out of the Erion Racing shop for the first two years, benefiting immensely from the knowledge, experience and data that had already been generated for the Honda CBR929RR/954RR and CBR600F4/F4i race bikes. In 2002, the Bruce Group established its own shop directly across the street from Erion Racing, but the same open working relationship existed, with access to all of Erion Racing’s data. Bruce Group came within a cat’s whisker of winning the 2002 Formula Xtreme Series with Zemke, who’d returned to the squad. Zemke was a solid podium finisher nearly the entire season, won at Laguna Seca. At the end of the season, he was tied in points with Jason Pridmore in the final standings, but Pridmore won the title in a tiebreaker having earned more wins. In addition, Zemke also did a few superbike rides that season, a first for the squad.
That year also saw an 18-year-old racer from a famous family of racers, Alex Gobert, join Bruce. The youngest of the three racing Gobert brothers showed promise finishing with six top-10 FX results and an eighth-place ranking at the end of the year.
Despite Bruce Group’s success, Honda began cutting back its support of satellite teams in 2003. That year, the team field just a single rider, Australian Marty Craggill, in Formula Xtreme. Craggill had a respectable season, scoring two podiums en route to seventh in the championship, but that was it for Bruce Transportation Group Honda. The team disbanded after the ’03 campaign.
“I financed the team for four seasons, and I’d hoped that being an outside-the-industry sponsor, that we could attract more companies like ours to keep the team going, but it never materialized” Lyskawa recalls. “We had a great run. I was very proud of what our team accomplished in a short amount of time, and we also helped young guys like Jake, Josh, Alex and Roger move their careers forward and that was rewarding as well.”
Those who witnessed the rapid rise of the scrappy little team with the funny bus logo will always remember them for being a small team that unquestionably made their mark. CN
