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The 1987 AMA Superbike season featured a Wayne Rainey/Kevin Schwantz rivalry that began in America and would ultimately find its way to the other side of the Atlantic Ocean and the 500cc World Championship. At Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course for the seventh round of the 10-round AMA Superbike series, the rivalry caught fire as both riders and their teams ended up protesting the other over the legality of their motorcycles.
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The race itself was won by Schwantz with the Yoshimura Suzuki rider besting Rainey by 12.6 seconds on a hot and steamy day in central Ohio. Rainey started fast but Schwantz took over at the front on the seventh lap, ran lap times in the 1:35 range, and was never headed again. A lonely third went to Yamaha FZ750-mounted Jimmy Filice with two dirt trackers, Bubba Shobert, and Doug Chandler, rounding out the top five.
“It was a cakewalk,” Schwantz said, half-jokingly after the race. “Well, it wasn’t really that easy. I hit a false neutral on the second or third lap, but when I got into the 35s, I managed to get away.”
Rainey wasn’t pleased with the outcome and pointed to a lack of track time and a lot of Dunlop tires to test as a major reason for the result.
“We just need to put more time on our bikes,” Rainey said. “The sessions are too short. We have all these tires (Dunlops) to test. I just needed more time on the tires I used. I was riding comfortably, but the thing just didn’t work like it could have.”
Rainey, however, left Ohio firmly in control of the AMA Superbike Championship, 118-94, with just two rounds remaining.
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That, however, was all pending results that weren’t initially official after the two teams – Suzuki and Honda – started World War III with protests. It began with Schwantz/Suzuki protesting the legality of the valves in Rainey’s Honda VFR750 and then Rainey and Honda countered with a protest of the rods in Schwantz’s Suzuki GSX-R750. The protested parts were taken to a metallurgy lab in Cleveland, and both were declared legal a few days after the event.