The pre-race meeting took place in
a locked garage down in the infield
of the Daytona International
Speedway. Inside the garage were
Kenny Roberts, Gene Romero, Don
Castro and a handsome dark-haired man
with a moustache and sunglasses and a
clipboard in his hand. He was Peter S'.
(Pete) Schick, coordinator of Yamaha’s
racing efforts in the U.S. Schick stood
while the others sat listening. From time
to time he glanced at notes on his
clipboard while talking. He didn’t have a
lot to say.
Clutch plates in all three team TZ750
Yamahas that had burned out during
morning practice were being replaced. . .
the two refueling stops for the 200-mile
race would come, as usual, on the 1 7th
and 34th laps. . .the weather forecast
was for relatively mild temperatures. . .
Between glances at the clipboard,
Schick studies his three racers—his
“kids.” as he likes to call them—with a
practiced eye. The great Kenny Roberts,
on the pole position at 107 mph,
seemed to be daydreaming. The great
Gene Romero, starting third, was fidget-
ing and chain-smoking and obviously
eager to ask questions. The great Don
Castro, starting the race from deep in
the pack, seemed worried.
“Questions,” said Schick, and looked
at Romero.
“Pete, for my refueling stops, you’ll
signal me three times, right?
Three laps before the
stop, then two laps, a
and then one
lap?”
Schick nodded. They had gone over
this many times before.
“And you'll signal me my lap times
every lap?”
Right again, said Schick, smiling to
reassure Romero.
“Okay,” Schick said. The meeting
was over. He unlocked the garage door
and showed Roberts, Romero and
Castro out one by one. Team captain
Roberts had not said one word. To
himself Schick thought: “Kenny’s run-
ning the whole race in his mind. He’s
like a computer. He’s probably already
run it five times, and now he’s doing it
again.” Romero, a bundle of nervous
energy, walked out of the garage next.
Castro came out last. Schick draped an
arm around Castro’s shoulder.
“Donnie,” he said, “you just remem-
ber that you can win this thing. We all
know you can. So just do your best and
remember that. You can win it, guy.”
Castro nodded wanly. Schick smiled
encouragement and patted him on the
back. Pumping up Don Castro before a
race was as much Pete Schick’s job as
leaving Roberts alone and answering the
keyed-up Romero’s questions.
Schick glanced at his watch. He
walked to the Daytona pits along the
edge of the banked front straightaway.
Time for a chat with the immaculate
Kel Carruthers, builder of the three
immaculate yellow and black works
Yamahas. Carruthers and his men had
the refueling rigs set up. Everything was
in order, and Schick, a disciplined man,
permitted himself the luxury of one of
the 10 cigarettes he allows himself on a
race day.
If he was worried about the chances
of the Yamaha team he did not.
show it. Worrying was for
others, not the man
racing refers
to as
“The Godfather.” And even if some
disaster did strike down all three team
bikes, .1 Yamaha win of some sort was
preordained. Seventy of the race’s 90
starters were aboard Yamahas, including
the entire five-bike front row with the
exception of the blue Suzuki of the
Finn, Lansivuori. And Harley-Davidson,
the only U.S. racing team that can rival
Yamaha for organization, was not con-
testing Daytona at all, except in the 250
Combined event.
Nice, comfortable odds. And with a
man like Pete Schick calling the shots
for Yamaha from the sidelines, the odds
for a victory shortened that much more.
All that was left was for Schick to
make a last-minute inspection of the
bikes, and deliver more pats on the
backs of his riders. Finally, amidst
smoke and noise, the 1975 Daytona
200 roared away, and Roberts, Romero
and Castro sent their big Yamahas
around the winding track.
For Schick, those three were the
only riders in the race. Scribbling furi-
ously on his clipboard with one hand
and working a stopwatch with the
other, he recorded times and kept sepa-
rate lap charts on the trio. He exulted as
Roberts on the No. 1 bike swept past
Lansivuori and into the lead. He fretted
as Castro on No. 1 1 fell farther and
farther behind. lie observed the No. 3
bike of the steady Romero, his pre-race
jitters gone now, hanging in there. Gene
was saving his fastest laps for later.
The race was totally absorbing to
Schick, and nothing could break his
concentration. Suddenly Roberts
roared into the pits bawling, “Clutch!
Clutch! The clutch has gone out!”
Schick did not panic; he watched
mechanics push away Roberts’ broken
machine, then immediately forgot all
about Roberts and devoted his serious
attention to Romero, now running
second.
Over the track public address system
came word that the leader,
Steve McLaughlin on an
independent Yamaha,
had just crashed.
“Steve’s
bailed. ’ cried Schick to the Yamaha pit
men out on the grass strip separating the
pit lane from the race track. “Signal
that to Gene. He probably saw it hap-
pen, but signal him anyway. He’s lead-
ing the race now.”
And the next time Pete Schick got to
talk to Gene Romero was inside Day-
tona’s victory circle.
Two words come to mind when
you think of Pete Schick. The first
is success, because for the last few
seasons Schick’s success—Team Yama-
ha’s success—on the Grand National
racing tour has been staggering. Having
won the Daytona 200 only once before
Schick took over the team, Yamaha has
now won the last four 200s in a row.
Never having won an American Motor-
cycle Association manufacturers’ cham-
pionship previously, Yamaha now has
won two straight, setting records in
both 1973 and ’74 for points earned.
Never having owned the coveted Num-
ber One plate before, Yamaha has
owned it for two years now, thanks to
Kenny Roberts.
Yamahas also won the U.S. Open
motocross title (1973, Pierre Karsmak-
ers) and took the world land speed
record (Don Vesco) at Utah’s Bonneville
Salt Flats. And there have been other
successes too. Pete Schick has been
largely responsible for a lot of them.
The second word Pete Schick brings
to mind is power. He has awesome
power-too much power, say his detrac-
tors—and Schick admits this. It’s one
reason he’s called The Godfather. Ask
him if he isn’t the most powerful
individual in Grand National motorcycle
racing today, and he will shrug and
reply that it only seems that way, and
he doesn’t like to think of himself in
that light. . .but he can’t deny it either.
Schick’s power is spread around in
different ways. He’s a member of the
National Championship Committee,
which sets the racing schedule, a past
member of the AMA’s board of direc-
tors, and is a former director by proxy
of the Motorcycle Industry Council.
Very important is his job at Yamaha
International in Buena Park, California,
where he has a staff of 20 working for
him, including nine riders, and is man-
ager of Research Sc Development of new
two-wheel products. But it is in
his position as coordinator of
racing for Yamaha that
Pete Schick is able
to exercise his
. power
the most. He’s the man who gets to hire
and fire factory riders, and seemingly
has the ability to turn these riders into
stars. That’s power.
There are numerous examples. Gene
Romero, the 1970 Grand National
Champion, had slumped to 7th place in
the standings before coming to work for
Schick and Yamaha at the end of 1973.
By the end of ’74 Romero had vaulted
up to 3rd, had won two of the year’s
most prestigious races—Indianapolis and
Ontario—and, of course, won Daytona
last March. Team rider Don Castro was a
six-year veteran who had never won a
Grand National race until joining Schick
and Yamaha in 1973. He won his first
one that same season. And in moto-
cross, Schick turned Karsmakers, a
talented but little-known Dutchman,
into the U.S. Champion and a rider
Motor Cycle News of England called “a
true superstar in every sense of the
word.”
But for every rider he’s added to
Yamaha’s U.S. team, Schick has had to
turn down dozens of others—sometimes
it seems as if all the racers and would-be
racers in America come to Pete Schick
for jobs.
“Pete Schick,” said Terry Tiernan,
former president of Yamaha Interna-
tional, “is a great guy, who actually has
a very rotten job to do. He’s the one
who has to say ‘no’ to the racers and
would-be racers.”
By now Schick knows all the racers,
and has their various selling techniques
memorized. There are some who under-
stand and accept it when he says no, he
can’t hire them, and Yamaha can’t give
them free race bikes, but others who
don’t hear a word he is saying. Many of
the ones Schick turns down hate him
for it, and therefore cannot be objective
about him.
They say that the only reason Team
Yamaha wins Grand National races is
because of Kenny Roberts —forgetting
that Pete Schick and Yamaha were
shrewd enough to sign Roberts to a
three-year contract at a time when other
manufacturers were passing him over.
They say that Team Yamaha wins
races because Schick lets Kel Carruthers
do all the work. But Carruthers, like
Roberts, had to be signed.
They say Schick is successful because
Yamaha has the best bikes—forgetting
that the little 350cc Yamaha road racing
Twins were inferior and so were the
750cc dirt track Twins until develop-
ment work got them going.
They say Schick’s team wins because,
of all the
the
manufacturers, Yamaha has
biggest racing budget and
this could be true. But
the money isn’t
enough; it has
to be
spent in the right way. And knowing
that race victories mean nothing if they
aren’t publicized, Schick and Yamaha
have their own talented publicist, Bob
Shafer, spreading the word.
“I feel sorry for the privateer riders
who have to race against the factory
teams,” says Schick. “They don’t have a
chance, and it isn’t fair. But as long as
Harley-Davidson, Suzuki and Kawasaki
have factory teams, Yamaha is going to
have one, too.”
Schick seems to have a tolerant
attitude toward his critics. Even when
Steve McLaughlin, Schick’s loudest
critic of all (who once was getting
freebies from Yamaha, but does no
longer), called Schick “dangerous,”
Schick’s reaction was to shrug it off,
saying: “To be successful in anything,
there’s got to be some S.O.B. who has
to say ‘no.’ And, in racing, I guess I’m
that S.O.B. Where I get into trouble
with some of these racers like McLaugh-
lin, is that I come right out and say ‘no.’
I don’t pussy-foot around. I don’t be-
lieve in that.”
Ikete Schick expressed similar com-
F ments that day in 1972 when
Tieman, then still president of the
corporation, called him to his office to
place him in charge of Yamaha’s racing
program. Although the yearly racing
budget exceeded SI million, matters
were totally disorganized. “Everybody,”
Schick remembers, “was doing his own
thing.” In what was loosely referred to
as the “racing division,” the Grand
National riders were Kenny Roberts,
Jim Odom, Chuck Palmgren, Keith
Mash bum, Kel Carruthers and Pat
Evans. All had their own outside tuners.
Yamaha’s motocross team of Gary and
Dewayne Jones. Jim Weinert and Marty
Tripes, had in effect been taken over by
the two racing fathers, Jones and Tripes.
It was hardly surprising, then, that
for all the money spent and talent
involved, Yamaha was not doing par-
ticularly well at the races. “It’ll take
you at least a year to get everything
straightened out,” Tiernan told Schick.
Shick, at the time, was already one
of Yamaha’s blossoming corporate stars.
He had been with the corporation since
1964, had risen through the ranks as a
district manager and later served time in
Portland. Chicago and California as a
district sales manager. His latest title
was national sales coordinator.
Completely reorganizing Yamaha’s
racing program might make him unpop-
ular, Schick realized, but something had
to be done. Besides, he was a racing
enthusiast from way back. He told
Tiernan he'd take the job on one condi-
tion: “That I get to call all the shots.”
Tiernan granted him that.
During the opening races of 1972, a
Cinderella story seemed to be unfolding.
Young Yamaha rookie Roberts seized
the early Grand National point lead...