FIRST BLOOD SCHWANTZ VS RAINEY
Kevin Schwantz and Wayne Rainey had already clashed in the AMA Superbike championship in the States, but it was their monumental battles in the 1987 Transatlantic Challenge that turned dislike to hate and began one of the most bitter grudge matches ever seen in racing.
Kevin Schwantz truly hated Wayne Rainey, and Wayne Rainey truly hated Kevin Schwantz. It wasn’t for the benefit of the press, it wasn’t for TV audience ratings, it wasn’t faked in any way – it was real.
The 1987 Transatlantic Challenge pitted a team of hand-picked British riders against an equivalent team from the USA and ran over nine races, held at Brands Hatch and Donington Park over Easter weekend. Ostensibly, the idea was for each team to work together to score more points than the opposing team, but Schwantz and Rainey didn’t give two hoots about teamwork – they only wanted to beat each other. And they wanted it bad.
In 1987, Rainey was already an experienced racer. He had won the US Superbike Championship in 1983 and had spent a season in 250cc Grands Prix in 1984 in Kenny Roberts’ Marlboro Yamaha team. Schwantz, on the other hand, was relatively new to road-racing and was yet to win a title. “I might have won an amateur motocross championship in the intermediate class, but I don’t exactly remember,” he says.
Rainey was 26 and from Downey, California, while Schwantz was 23 and from Houston, Texas. Rainey rode for Honda, Schwantz for Suzuki. Rainey was an experienced, calm, and calculated racer, Schwantz an all-action, wild-riding spectacle on two wheels, who looked just as likely to crash as win. They were a perfect mismatch.
“I remember going to a track called Kent in Washington State in 1985 and I had heard a little bit about this new kid called Kevin Schwantz, and that he’d got the Yoshimura Suzuki ride for the AMA Superbike championship,” Rainey says of the time he first set eyes on his future nemesis. “I didn’t think much of it, but because I was trying to figure the track out
