FreestyleXtreme Magazine Issue 7 | Page 114

USA’s Brad Lackey wins the 1982
MXGP World Championship

A

T THE TIME OF
writing this, I think
it’s fair to say Ryan
Villopoto’s debut
season in the
MXGP is not going
quite as smoothly as I’m sure both
he and his fans hoped it would. We
therefore thought this would be an
interesting time to take a look back
at the first ever US MX racer to
win a Motocross Grand Prix World
Championship and bring the title
across the pond to American soil.
The year was 1982. The bike a
500cc two-stroke Suzuki and ‘Bad
Brad’ Lackey was the rider. Back in
the ‘70s and ‘80s the 500cc class
was the equivalent of today’s 450 –
the premiere class with the fastest
bikes, the best riders and all the
glory.
Lackey didn’t quite have the
equivalent credentials or media
hype that RV2 had when he set off
to take on the rest of the world, but
he did have a 500cc AMA National
Championship under his belt, which

114 | FreestyleXtreme.com

We remember
the first AMA
champion to
take on the rest
of the world

he won in 1972. It was whilst on
this championship winning high
that Lackey decided it was time to
head to Europe and set his sights
on the MXGP title. Achieving this
goal would be no easy feat however.
On many occasions Brad came
painfully close to victory, but for one
reason or another, with no cigar.
Eventually after ten long years of
battling, Lackey’s dreams came true
in 1982.
The famous ‘82 MX World
Championship came down to the
wire. Going into the final race of the
season in Luxembourg, only about
five or six points separated Lackey
and the Belgian Andre Vromans in
second place. It would be a race
that was won by tactics and a
formidable game plan concocted by
the factory Suzuki team. Lackey’s
crew recorded every lap time of
every rider in every moto for the
five previous races ahead of the
final. This allowed them to predict
at exactly what stage in the race
each rider would start to fade,
and by how much their lap times

would drop. The team could then
instruct Lackey to hang back and
conserve his energy, before picking
the optimum time to make his final
charge for the chequered flag.
“I let him [Vromans] take a 27
second lead,” explains Lackey. “I
had to wait until there were only
five laps left before going after
him. When I got the nod from the
team I pinned it, I caught him and I
passed him with half a lap to go. He
was crying – he didn’t know I was
coming like that!”
Lackey now had enough of a point’s
lead that he just had to finish the
second moto of the day close to
Vromans, which he did comfortably,
finishing in third place ahead of the
Belgian.
‘Bad Brad’ retired from professional
motocross racing an American
hero in 1982 after winning the
500cc Motocross Grand Prix World
Championship, and solidifying his
place in the AMA Hall of Fame. T

© JACK BURNICLE

#throwback: