Armed with a Pops Yoshimura Kawasaki, Wes Cooley wins the final AMA Superbike Series race of the season at Riverside, California.
Wester Steven Cooley was a young, balls-to-the-wall rider who helped bring Superbike racing into the modern era. Before Cooley, a lot of the riders in Superbike Series were older, more conservative stiffies who rode European twin-cylinder "cafe racers." Suddenly, was it no longer en vogue to ride with a smooth, European style. Cooley came in with four-cylinders flamin', rear tire smokin' and the front wheel in the air. He became the face of the new Superbike class.
Bike-mad and with an understanding of how engines worked and what to do to improve them, Pops Yoshimura arrived in America in 1971 and five years later, in 1976, he put the "cat among the pigeons" in the newly formed AMA Production Superbike Series.
While Yoshimura could coerce obscene amounts of power out of an eight-valve, four-cylinder Kawasaki, the rest of the bike he wrapped around the massive power plant couldn’t handle it, it didn't help that the handling of the big KZs was already notoriously bad.
"The tires back then?" said Wes Cooley with a laugh. ‘Ha, they were really different. Nothing like they’ve got now, that’s for sure. When I started riding the Kawasaki 900 it handled better with street tires than with slicks. It would hook up too good with the slicks, which would make the frame torque. I could get away with running plain old road Dunlops and make it slide better. With slicks it would just wobble all over the place."
In the very first AMA Superbike Series race at Daytona International Speedway in March of 1976, Wes rode the Kawasaki to a fourth-place finish despite the machine's propensity for trying to shake him off his saddle at top speed around Daytona's high banks. A year later, Kawasaki returned with an improved bike, one with tires that handled marginally better and Cooley made it to the podium for the first time with a solid third-place finish.
The final AMA Superbike race of the 1977 season was at Riverside, California. Wes Cooley rode the Pops Kawasaki to his first victory that day after a good battle with the Ducatis of Cook Neilson and Paul Ritter.
Pops Yoshimura died in 1995, leaving a legacy as a master craftsman, tuner and fabricator and was one of the pioneering personalities of Superbike racing. In 2000, he was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame, Wes Cooley would be inducted in 2004.
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