Racer X Films: Rick Johnson Interview | 1986 Honda CR250 | Garage Build | Two-Stroke Motocross

hey guys it's David Pingree here with race directs online we got a really cool interview today with Ricky Johnson on a bike that he really made famous back in 1986 and this thing was donated to us I want to give a big shout out to bolt motorcycle Hardware they donated this bike to us it was in their showroom they said hey if you can do something cool with it you can have it so we got the man himself here that that made miracles happen on this bike to come and ride it today and talk to us about it so I think we did something with it I really want to thank them if you've not seen the bolt motorcycle hardware track kits they look just like this it's anything this happens to be for a KX but they haven't make them for every model anything that might come loose fall off on a typical track day they got here they also have complete bike rebuild kits for any make and model awesome little little packages check these things out bolt motorcycle hardware calm Ricky thanks for joining us it's awesome now you know looking what you guys have done with this we've already started talking about the handlebars about the forks the wheels a lot of the different things but it's pretty cool that there was a bike that was in this greatest shape you know obviously you guys did a you know frame-up restoration paint everything like that it's even cool to see the tightness self stuff on there and one little thing before we start is these number Five's I only ran them one time and that was 1986 at Anaheim and my dad used to paint my helmets actually helped Roy learn how to spray clear over the top of the stickers and stuff like that but my dad actually hand-painted these and cut them and designed the five and did the did the swoop on all the different stuff but Hana was kind of afraid that we might get disqualified because it said has to be blocked numbers and this and that so we went to the tech nacelle side place with that just the box number five from around to on but yeah this thing definitely is cool yeah it was interesting because we when we were talking about doing this design the guys were like no this is the number he ran at Anaheim and I'm like okay and with all these other pictures this one and so we went with this I didn't know that story though so interesting story so you already told us we got the bars wrong these are the David Bailey more of a David Bailey Bay and Ricky's like I had more sweet they went down they were you know well I gotta thank the guys from Ren Thal because it went from it was the RJ Ben and I liked a little more sweep and I like it a little dip at the end so kind of some philosophy behind that is if your arm is over it tightens up those those those arm bones and it pinches the the nerves in the middle if you open it just a little bit that lets more blood flow and it actually is a little more comfortable on your hand because you're out your armor is actually straight when it's back so people don't know that so the higher you got your bars up the more twists your arms the more you need to have your elbow up to compensate for that so it was more of a comfort deal also I ran silver bars I don't know why why we want a silver because they had gold and I think de Bourgh's and Thorpe and everybody ran the gold stuff but I liked the rent on out honestly I prefer this bar still to this day over the the twin wall twin walls too stiff to pingy it's too hard if you take the crossbar off it's not so bad but this bar has the right amount of flex and when I was I was 180 pounds and I was pretty strong and I would over jump stuff a lot and I never ever ever bent a bar without crashing yeah so a seven eighths bar is plenty strong plenty and it also gives you a little forgiveness but it was great when they when they came over with that bar and they said we'd try it and we did and actually the only problem we ever had was at the beginning on my practice bikes the glue wasn't quite strong enough and so then I was trying to tell Brian London so he was putting the rolling handlebars on what's happening is the bar my practice bars are squatting down a little bit so they changed that and I've never had a problem well besides from us screw in the handlebars up we did our best I apologize you also said you helped sort of come up with a concept of the half lawful grip well that was back in 84 so I love the Honda grips and I hated the Yamaha grips are really stiff and the our e grips at the time were really gooey and they would come apart and it just felt didn't feel connected so I always like the Honda grips and Jonny O'Meara like the Honda Yamaha throttle at the time so we would trade Oh Jim felt who was Johnny O's mechanic grips for throttles and so then I ran for Senate silo at that time and they wouldn't give me a glove without padding in there so it made the grip a little too fat so I started shaving the top shaving the top off so it didn't bunch everything up there but I still had the the waffle on the finger so I'm looking for royalties from all the grip companies all of them a buck a set of grips that's all just go back quarter lucky greedy ok quarter quarter done quarter sole so yeah I don't know I I I know that I did it and now it's the trend and honestly it works but but when I do off-road riding and stuff like that I do like a little extra cushion so I'll go to a four to a full waffle yeah it kind of depends on what you're doing huh yeah tell us a little bit about this bike you came off a championship on the Yamaha and went to Honda at the time those 85 works bikes were and maybe some people still say the best motorcycle has ever built yeah you got to ride that thing briefly in testing and then they sent you hundred one 45 minute motor in the production roll kicked in an 86 this was the bike you went to so talk me through how all that went well it what's funny is I just did an interview with Eric Johnson about 1985 in 1984 won the championship on a production bike and Brock I think Brock won the championship as well and we were up against the 84 and then 85 the worst bikes were great Kawasaki had a good works bike but the Honda was just off the charts it was so good so smooth and it was so above and beyond anything out there so then an 8 186 came I was I was gonna go up and sign with Yamaha but then Roger called me in the morning and said hey you want to come want try the bike and so I said yep I met him up at a place called up in la cresta Acosta right by Carlsbad Road running machines bike and the guy who was the Tonto who was the the suspension guy was kind of a fan of mine like the way I rode he says I think I got the setup foreman so we all we did as a justice sag and I raised the bars like I'm two millimeters and I got on that thing and I could run my practice by car because it was the same bike that I raced and I was literally four seconds a lap faster and I was yes because I was afraid at first because it was so soft it I was gonna bottom him out like the ahmo's I'm like I don't know there's like go ahead and so then I started looking for bigger holes to jump into I'm like this stuff is butter it's so it was so good so they bait-and-switch I got tat it was awesome I said I'll sign I don't care what is sign me up for bonuses because I think I'm gonna win a lot and then we went right to went right to the production bikes and so then I got one of these and one of the problems that I had is on the left side is that V right there and so the boots didn't have real good protection at the time and so my ankle bone would go down and so I had like a big ball on there so then that's where we came up with the plate to kind of stop us from going in there you wouldn't you don't need it so much now because the ankle pad the plastic on the boots and stuff is a lot better but that was one of the I'm gonna say was a flaw I always felt that Honda overall was a better bike but the Yamaha had a smoother power and turned better like when you could like bumps and whoops and jumps the Honda had it covered when it come to just flat corners like with a lot of times what we have out here in Southern California the Yamaha the way the weight was and the way the geometry was I can always really real corners a little faster on Yamaha than I could on a Honda so when you went to the production bike was there disappointment at first absolutely not because and this is the thing that I told Eric you know like a lot of people are either saying Ronnie and Johnny and Dave and stuff really complimented Brock and I for for doing as well as we did on the production bikes but here's the thing we were ahead of the curve we were practicing on the same bike that we were racing so back in 1983 Yamaha put me on a works bike and I wrote it for a little bit in action 82 but I didn't have a worst practice bike so I was like I'm not comfortable with I'm having to relearn the bike even though it's better but you know it's better once I get there but I'm having to relearn everything and as you know everything is muscle memory if you're riding a dual sport with a headlight or whatever once you learn that kind of how it works you ride it to the best of your ability and so for Brock and I we were able to ride our rate practice our race bikes and so we were comfortable from the first lap of practice and I think some of the other guys had to work into it right and that's something that a lot of the race teams have gone and corrected where the guys are racing on pretty much a rep rakha singh on what they race them pretty much exactly now and I and I pushed for that because the power and the suspension I could just hit things harder and then also the power was so much faster on on the race bike I was like a third of throttle tour on my practice like I'm a two-thirds throttle and so notice I do that now well let me do it this way it looks better I don't like so Guney but once again muscle memory and timing because if you're gonna ride it a hundred percent of your level you need to know exactly what your bike is doing and I think that's that that was an advantage for us but also the biggest thing with Honda was how much effort they put into it when we showed up they had then my bike and Dave his bike and Jonny's bike everything set up with spare pipes spare cylinders spare brakes spare linkages shocks all the timber stuff and it's just like a kid in a candy store and you're thinking this is for me you know yes for my teammate too but they're putting that Efrain out for me so as when you go home you're like okay I don't want to stay out late I don't want a party I don't want to eat crappy food I want I want to be the best too and then when you have guys like Dave Arnold and Roger DeCoster who Roger was my idol still is my idol on your team it's like if I lose I'm the weak link and I don't want to be them all right so something I want to just touch on it and if for those of you didn't see Rick on the whiskey throttle show shameless plug here it was really good you talked a little bit about how Johnny and David Bailey were kind of buddies training buddies and and they rode together and when you came onto the team you kind of felt a little like an outsider you tried riding with them and just for you it worked better to stay down in San Diego and do your own thing how did how did having those guys on the team help you or did you guys all push each other what about bike development was there different things you liked that they didn't well David's bike and my bike were pretty closer they're about the same size she's a little bit shorter than me probably was probably 170 ish and I was about 180 so our bikes were pretty close how we rode and stuff like that johnny was completely different bars were way back really soft suspension like I got on and try went one lap bottom of the thing out just felt like crap but that's the way Johnny rode almost like a BMX guy just like really really really technical and I was more just at more of a hammer just hang on tight and make the suspension do the work but we went back and forth because when when I went to the pro circuit pipe I went I wanted rideability I wanted that crack the bottom not not to hit and the Honda power went a little bit and then it hit and it had just unbelievable numbers which we ran the Honda pipe the the works pipe in all the sand races in ninety I'm gonna say 99% of the outdoors but in Supercross were Anaheim Phoenix you know the different tracks there was a lot of that initial crack of the throttle being smooth off the exit so I've got with Mitch because I worked with him at you know at the end of my Yamaha days and said I want to try some stuff if it's right or wrong let's try it so he came down with the gas welder hacks on a bunch of pipes and we started mixing and matching different things and I said I like that and this is what's unbelievable is that going to Honda and saying I have this guy who used to have a husky shop welding up a pipe but they dynode it and they saw they could quantify what I was looking for and that's the thing is that with now with the electronics everything that you see with the fuel injection it's making that rideability it's not that overall power you know because it how you get off the corners gonna be how you how you get down the straightaway so if you have to hesitate or more clutch and do this to do that and that's what I found I was doing with the with the worx pipe I wanted just that from zero to 30% throw-out a ride ability yeah and he actually like you said built this pipe this same exhaust this is actually a die of that exhaust system they did a limited run down at Pro circuit of this and to me that's really cool that he would put that time and effort into you and I paid off for both you guys it definitely paid off for Mitch I won the championship so I and absolutely paid off for me now Mitch's easy to bust his balls but that's the way he was he was so hands-on with everything it didn't matter and didn't matter the scenario in he's very involved with his riders emotionally physically mentally on the bike he works with the you know what the different guys with the transmissions and so he definitely has a grasp on the whole concept and back then he was us it was kind of a small mom-and-pop shop and but we had some we had some great times and we won a lot of races and it was kind of cool because that started the trend the other guys are like well if he's running it you know he's with Honda and Honda has everything maybe we should try saying English saw Kawasaki come in you saw y'all maja come in and stuff like that like I said it's been good for everybody tell me something the one positive thing you remember like the the best thing you remember about this bike and the worst thing the worst thing is going to be my ankles because I still got some bone spurs in there from that and actually that was part of when I started making the plastic without my star I wanted them to put that we did the suede on the inside to get traction on the outside of the bike but then I had him do that to protect that so whenever it came up it never never found that ankle bone and then there's a I don't know if it was like this on your race bike but this 10 millimeter not here 12 yes that thing that dig right into your boot exactly but now if you look if you look at your new tech 10 the way that the ankle protection is and that that was part of the evolution of that the the best thing was the crank the Honda Works crank you get on the bike and you go run run and it would just be like no vibration compared to a Yamaha you like yeah you kind of you felt in your hands your butt and everything everything else but the Honda crank and the way they did the motors it was just it was just it was butter it was awesome yeah I wish I wish let me ask you this those race bikes 85-86 how would they compare to race bikes today no they're nowhere close because the thing one of the things is we were going back and forth with the upside-down fork that the what's called the conventional fork the action of it was a lot better I ran upside down fork at Anaheim it was a mistake because I thought I could run into stuff harder and it didn't flex and so I like that aspect of it but the action of it if you go back and watch that video you watch this after the first turn we go down there I land and I kind of bounce and so it kind of hesitate and I'm not blaming I ran out of gas that's why David beat me but it it hurt me and I went back which that wasn't a really good thing because this show guys like this is great you're running it but now if you quit running it I'm like I don't want to I don't give up on it but that conventional fork is better that's what I went back to that and I ran at San Diego NASA and halfway through the season we went back to the upside-down fork but man it the best yes I could say the best thing is got to be the crank and the motor and just the overall attitude of Honda one thing I noticed riding these older bikes we built a 92 CR last year there are a lot smaller the whole bike feels more compact versus a modern bike that's flatter feels a little bit longer do you like the smaller feel or the new oh I don't know and that's what I liked about if you will look at a KX 500 really long in the seat because a lot of especially when I trained beginner riders and stuff they think this is their their limit where they can go and as you know if you're going up something that's past vertical your crotch is all the way up on the handlebars if you're going down something that's past vertical well your legs are kind of short so your bike gets right about here but mine is back here is you it's just this is for turns and and kind of for decoration but I agree with you a lot of things that people don't realize is that if you look at the way this size the seats were designed is so that it when you slide forward you don't look you slide and you feel on your goosh you're in the right spot if you look it puts you right in front of the foot pegs because they could they made bikes they go all the way up there but you don't want to get up there you want to have something that stops you that you don't have to look and think where it were to sit but I definitely like a bigger a bigger platform because I'm a bigger guy short legs long body so if I can if I got room to move all better for me well that the 86 Anaheim race obviously has been talked about to death but it was it was sure fun to watch still probably one of the most popular races ever as far as Supercross goes so seeing this bike and particularly this number really brings me back I'm sure a lot of people back to that night what were your thoughts on that night just kind of overall well weed out I was really happy because Johnny and David kind of adapted adopted our set up with the motor because they were you know they're up at Hanalei and Hahnel and track was bigger it almost like kind of a hybrid and then in the track that Brock and I had that Johnson Biscay built was an actual like you know super cross length and width and all the different stuff had a couple big jumps on it but they ran they ran our setup Dave and I both want our qualifiers were right before the race I went up to him I said hey man we're both fast I'm not gonna take you out but we're both here to win and we shook hands on it and there was some there was some bumping and cutting off but it was never it was never to take each other out like we moved it he moved into me because we were so close on time you had to you can't just Pat like people go why you have to hit me well because you won't get the hell out of my way you know right so I had to bump him out of the way he had to bump me out of the way and then like I said I ran out of gas because I was sick a couple weeks before and and I just when I left and I was like heartbroken because I lost the best battle in Supercross history supposedly you know but I was in it and so I went back to the drawing board and I said I'm gonna I'm gonna take my training serious a little more serious god I think that was when I got a heart rate monitor I got talking to triathlete try out the triathletes and stuff like that I changed everything to be the best it could have been a blessing in disguise absolutely I think if I were to wonder I might have gotten cocky and thrown it all away well we appreciate you coming by and just sort of reminiscing with us a little bit a lot a lot of love went into making this thing look the way it does so we appreciate all the companies involved and what we're gonna do a garage build on this thing so you'd be able to see all of that I got one more thing okay all right Dunlap obviously was was part of my whole career and I don't work with Frank Stasi back in the day it's awesome that Brock who is my teammate also on Yamaha was a dump guy back then is now the guy there but they came to us when they started the six 96-95 and so it had the angled knob so you could come in you could slide in and do that well they also came to us I think it was in 88 and said we want to do a 19 and so we had all hand cut tires all year long in the Supercross and it was at the LA Coliseum at the very last round keith mccarty came up with wait a minute because it didn't have any of the labeling or anything like that so it just looked smaller but no one figured it out until the last race and so and I have I have a piece of that so Dunlap always did something cool the tire a tire that you ran with they would cut it and bronze it and give it to you at the awards banquet well this one that I have that not even might have been the 595 because it was a hard pack tire but it was all hand cut and we started the night th revolution that's crazy I didn't know that cool stuff I remember the 695 490 combo yeah this might have been even before that exactly that yeah that was way before so but yeah when you're dealing with a company like DOM up they were they were so aggressive and as I said Frank Stacey was always there right after the race like Brian and Brock are but just always trying to do this and do that and and what's great about Dunlop is that they have Brock who was a racer and who was if there's ever a person more anal about setup and that and that's Brock lover and so we had Frank Stacey at the time that did a lot of different racing motocross and some crowd enduro stuff so it was easy to talk to him it wasn't I didn't have to speak engineer ease you know I just say it does this and it kicks that and rotten rotten whatever whatever my English is he's going to adapt to it and and so that's where I think the evolution of the tires came up was for guys like that that's awesome cool history on this thing for sure were you running the razorblade foot pegs back then to you we started with the small one they didn't have the razor blade those are like the IMS pegs which were but the stock ones were like yes width of your thumb yeah we actually Mike Fisher's gets all the credit for making a fatter peg and when he was a test rider Kawasaki also he came out with I'm like it's kind of a platform like that makes perfect sense because the boots once again I had certain inserts and stuff like that to stiffen up the sole of my boot but you land and you you tear your feet apart so so that's another thing that's evolved is boots and pegs and all the stuff it doesn't seem that much because if you put a bike it's got two wheels a throttle handle on the seat completely different animal well and that's something that I think a lot of people appreciate about that era was there was evolution was happening so quickly you guys were already pushing speeds that were out doing what the bike could do so it was constantly how can we improve this how can we make things better this generation was the generation of the bike stronger than the rider I think if you go back to 80 82 and 83 we were still concerned about braking bikes you had to slow down your riding to save the bike oh you didn't jump this that was a limiting factor if I jump this I might blow a wheel up I might my Forks you watch Johnny Oh was was winning I think the 88 or 8088 super cross on his stock Suzuki frame broke you know he broke a frame so it this is when the bikes got so strong that you had to think about I need to go wide open the whole race there's no setting a pace there's no none of that I just if I can jump it I'm gonna jump it and if I don't crash the bike will take it you know something about braking wheels - yes I do that's another story well thanks for coming RJ we sure appreciate it you're an absolute legend and hope we did did you proud for this build no I like I said everything everything you got all the way down to the the bolt stand which I'm gonna try to steal that when I leave here because that thing is badass completely billet it good it's perfect it goes right along with that but yeah I thank you for taking the time down to honor a bike that I rode like I said it's sentimental because it's got the numbers that my dad my dad designed I was busting the balls about the handlebars and stuff like that but Ren thought did call him back the RJ Ben I'm like you know really don't call the CR hi because it wasn't CRI it was my Bend so they were cool about that and they said you know what you you put the time into it so we're gonna call it the RJ RJ bent that's awesome well a true legend and his machine thanks again to bolt motorcycle hardware for allowing us to have some fun with this bike check those guys out and thanks for watching

Channel: Racer X Motocross & Supercross News

Views: 135,951

Rating: 4.8774309 out of 5

Keywords: racer x, dirtbike, motocross, supercross, mx, sx, pro, 2019, 2018, 2017, vault, racer x films, films

Id: yEs-8SypM0U

Length: 24min 0sec (1440 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 17 2019