Martin out of Thai GP – but Roberts’ 1979 title may give some hope

Roberts won the MotoGP title at his first attempt in 1978, only to smash himself up while testing Yamaha’s latest 500 GP bike in February 1979.

At least Martin can take some positives from Roberts’ story, because the American retained his crown. These may be very different times, but Roberts’ injuries were significantly worse than Martin’s.

Roberts was riding at Yamaha’s Fukuroi test track in Japan when he lost the front attacking a 110mph corner (Japanese test tracks were fast back then!) and slammed into the guardrail at 90mph. He broke his back, a foot and a collarbone and ruptured his spleen.

“I remember laying there, going, I’m toast, I’m toast,” Roberts recalls. “My back was numb and I knew I’d hurt something in my stomach.”

Roberts was rushed to a dilapidated Japanese hospital.

“For three days I thought I was going to die. They wouldn’t give me pain shots because it’d slow down the healing. Then they said, ‘We’re going to operate’. I said, ‘no way, I’m going back to America’. They said, ‘You won’t make it’. Well then, I was dead because from what I was looking at they didn’t have good medical facilities.

“I remember them putting the gas mask on me to put me out and I thought this is it, I’m not waking up. I was very surprised when I did wake up.”

However, it seemed certain Roberts would never race again. Anyone who knows ‘King’ Kenny will know him for his constant wisecracking and piss-taking, but this time was different.

“Kenny, small, broken, brought down at last, crushed,” wrote his biographer Barry Coleman. “No brave jokes, no optimism, no determination to be cheerful. No, Kenny was smashed.”

He was in hospital for weeks.

“The pain continued, wore on,” continued Coleman. “His abdomen swelled up, and the pain intensified. Though no one seemed to agree with him, Kenny couldn’t see any reason why he shouldn’t die. One day, however, he farted magnificently, and almost continuously, for hours. The doctors were very pleased, and Kenny started beaming again, faintly. He knew a turning point when he saw one.”

Roberts got home a month after the accident, missed the first GP in March, which Barry Sheene won aboard a factory Suzuki. He returned for round two, at Austria’s Salzburgring, a hyper-fast Alpine track lined by guardrail.

Roberts comfortably won the race and went on to easily beat Virginio Ferrari and Sheene to the world title.

Duke was the first rider to win three consecutive MotoGP/500cc world championships, in 1953, 1954 and 1955, and he may have made it four in a row if it wasn’t for what happened at Assen in July 1955.

Duke and his fellow factory Gilera riders supported a strike by privateer riders, who were fed up with getting paid starvation wages by race promoters, who were regularly welcoming more than 100,000 fans to their events.

In those days, the circuits, the promoters and the sport’s governing body (the Fédération Internationale de Motocyclisme) worked together like some kind of mafia. The riders were treated like performing circus animals, especially the privateers who mostly had no sponsors of any real worth and relied on start money and prize money not only to race, but also to eat.

Thus privateers were forced to fend for themselves – stealing petrol off the organisers and undertaking all kinds of nefarious deeds to make it from one race to the next.

“Most meetings used to supply petrol free,” recalls Aussie ‘Happy’ Jack Ahearn, a top privateer of the 1950s. “So when the bloke filled the tank up, I’d do one or two laps, go into the pits, drain the petrol into me truck and when the truck was full, I knew I could make it to the next meeting. With no money you had to be a bit of a rat, otherwise you wouldn’t survive. We had to get a pound or starve.”

At Assen the privateers demanded £20 per start (£400 in today’s money), which the organisers refused, until Duke and the other stars threatened to pull out of the feature 500cc race.

Duke and his co-conspirators were summoned to FIM headquarters in November.

“We were sentenced to six months suspension from all motoring sport activity from January 1 1956,” wrote Duke in his autobiography, In Pursuit of Perfection. “Clearly, we were set up as an example to deter any other FIM licence holders from contemplating similar action in the future.”

Duke therefore missed the first two rounds of the six-race 1956 championship. He never won another title.

Funnily enough, the FIM continued its draconian hold over GP riders until Roberts showed up in 1978. The American was shocked at the treatment meted out to competitors in the sport’s premier championship and resolved to do something about it.

Coleman in his Roberts biography, again: “It was plain that the riders and the organisers, and the governing body, had subsided into some sort of system in which talent and achievement such as his own could be exploited for everyone’s benefit but his… He had been made to race for two hundred dollars appearance money, made to race on tracks fit to freeze the blood, and to live in paddock conditions barely fit for pigs. And told that if he didn’t like it, he could just plain go away, and that really didn’t sit too well with Kenny Roberts.”

During the 1979 British GP, Roberts, other riders and Coleman announced a breakaway championship that would bypass the blazer-wearing fogeys at the FIM. World Series would pay the riders more money, race only at safer tracks, improve paddock facilities and get the championship properly televised. World Series was the start of the championship we know today, even though it didn’t happen, because the FIM did everything it could to make sure it didn’t and then at the last moment a few riders broke ranks.

However, the mere threat of a breakaway championship changed everything.

“The old promoters and the FIM treated us like shit,” Roberts explains. “It was just wrong, they had everybody by the balls. We got close enough to making World Series happen to scare them. After that it was like heaven.

“We turned it around from not being able to talk to the promoters about safety to being able to talk to them. And they increased prize money by 300% and everyone knew what they were paying, so you didn’t have to play with the promoter’s balls to get 500 bucks more. The whole mafia thing went away.

“Back then, Jesus Christ, it was a nightmare. A lot of people didn’t know how big an achievement that was. I didn’t do it for money, I had more to lose than anyone else. I did it because I thought it was right, because the sport needed it.”

We don’t yet know whether Martin will return to action at round two, in Argentina on 15/16 March, or at the third GP, in the USA, on 29/30 March.