Rennie Scaysbrook | May 28, 2023
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First (and last) Superbike win
Anyone who makes it to the professional level of motorcycle racing, regardless of discipline, is a talented individual.
But there are those, like Steve Wise, who can lay claim to professional status in multiple disciplines, such as motocross, flat track and road racing.
Like a precursor to the great Jean-Michel Bayle, Wise knew how to get the best from a motorcycle regardless of its intended purpose.
After a career focusing on tabletops and berms, the early 1980s saw Wise switch to the blacktop and land a factory ride with the American Honda outfit as teammate to Mike Baldwin in an era that included some of the greatest names to grace the AMA Superbike grid—such as Wayne Rainey, Fred Merkel and Wes Cooley, plus, when their schedule allowed, European-based grand prix heroes like Randy Mamola, Freddie Spencer and Kenny Roberts.
Winner Steve Wise celebrates his first and only AMA Superbike win at Mid-Ohio on the podium with Fred Merkel and Jimmy Adamo. Photos: Bert Shepard
Wise’s first and only AMA Superbike victory came at a soaking Mid-Ohio during the fourth round of the 1983 AMA Superbike Championship Series. At the time, the AMA championship would see riders competing in several classes including the (almost) anything goes Formula One class, which at Mid-Ohio saw the grid filled with all makes of machines including Honda NR500 and Suzuki RG500 grand prix two-strokes, a Ducati Pantah TT600, Wise on the Honda 750cc V4 Interceptor, Kawasaki and Suzuki superbikes, even a Harley-Davidson XR1000 in the hands of Dave Emde.
“Mid-Ohio was a real highlight of my racing career,” Wise said. “It showed my versatility as a racer. It was a big high, because nobody had, or nobody will probably ever again, be at the top of many classifications, motocross, road racing and even flat track—I got third at the Houston TT [1982]. And there was the Superbikers.” Wise won that legendary event twice, and very nearly three times.
Winning Mid-Ohio was just one of several highlights of Wise’s career, one of his most memorable moments was qualifying at the front of the grid in the 1982 Superbike National at Laguna Seca.
“I remember sitting there on the front row and looking over and seeing Kenny Roberts, Freddie Spencer, Randy Mamola and Wes Cooley, and thinking to myself what an honor it is to be here, on the front row, with these guys.”
Wise (28) leads the way at Mid-Ohio in 1983.
The torrential conditions of Mid-Ohio in 1983 across both days meant it would be races of attrition. As was customary back in the day the Formula One race would distill into a battle between Baldwin and Kawasaki’s superbike-mounted Cooley. The latter took an early lead that at one stage had ballooned out to 10 seconds only for the former to close inexorably on his NS500 and take the lead just after the halfway point of the 31-lap race.
It was a position Baldwin would never relinquish as Cooley dropped the Kawasaki while in pursuit on lap 28, promoting Wise to second with Suzuki’s Jeff Hein in third. However, Baldwin’s winning margin over Wise was so large he was only 25 seconds away from being lapped, such was the pace Baldwin and Cooley were pushing in the rain.
Determined to make up for the gap to the leader in the Formula One race, Wise rocketed out of the gate in the Wiseco Superbike 100 event to lead from the line over a young Kawasaki-mounted Wayne Rainey.
It didn’t get better for fourth-placed Cooley whose engine went “bang” on lap two to cap off a miserable weekend for the late former two-time AMA Superbike Champion. Rainey would also soon be out of the reckoning, dropping his Kawasaki on lap five to leave Wise and Baldwin to begin opening a gap to Ducati-mounted Jimmy Adamo and Honda’s Fred Merkel.
Baldwin was in no mood to hang about and get involved in another close tussle and put the hammer down, stretching his lead a potentially race-winning 15 seconds by lap 15. Then, as fate would have it, the gods smiled on Wise.
“After 40 years, I don’t remember a whole lot about the [actual] race,” Wise says, “but I do remember that I hadn’t ridden in a month after my crash at Riverside [International Raceway, in California], where I broke my collarbone. I remember [at Mid-Ohio] that Baldwin was leading, and I was running second and Baldwin had crashed [on lap 15]. I was about a corner behind, coming up over a rise and saw that he had run off the track. I’m not sure that he had actually crashed but had run off the track. It had been raining a lot, so it was probably muddy, and he couldn’t get back on [the track]. I could see him out of the corner of my eye, I could see [him], but that was about it, it was so fast.”
Wise was greeted by his extremely happy Honda crew after his win at Mid-Ohio.
Wise now inherited the lead but was still not in a position to relax as the eventual two-time WorldSBK Champion Merkel began to chip away at the gap, as Wise started disposing of the backmarkers, eventually lapping up to sixth place (imagine if Jake Gagne lapped up to sixth place in this day and age!).
With three laps to go, Wise hit the cruise control button. Happy with his 12-second lead over Merkel, Wise brought it home with a raised fist over the line to his Honda crew with tuner Mike Velasco almost more pumped than he was.
For Wise, that torrential day in the Ohioan countryside was to be the highlight of his road racing career. Wise admitted to struggling with the constant changing between the lightswitch powerband and lithe weight of the two-stroke 500 and the heavy, comparatively docile four-stroke superbikes, and not long after this Mid-Ohio triumph, two crashes on the Honda NS500 landed him in hospital, the second of which at Laguna Seca was severe enough for him to rethink things and call time on his racing career.
Honda ran this ad in Cycle News after Wise’s and Mike Baldwin’s win at Mid-Ohio 1983.
But Wise is far from a forgotten man. He was named the AMA Pro Athlete of the Year in 1982 and he was inducted into the AMA Hall of Fame in 2001. And this year, he’ll return to Mid-Ohio as the Grand Marshal at the Permco AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days event, where he will lead the Lap For History tour of the course.
Every dog has his day, and for a jack of all trades like Steve Wise, deservedly so. CN
