When I recently read that three-time AMA Superbike champion Doug Chandler was helping Cycle World test open-class sportbikes, I started thinking. Why, in this budding era of 1000cc superbikes that richly reward smooth and precise riding, is Doug Chandler unemployed?
Mr. Smooth, as Chandler was sometimes known, could take these 200 horsepower beasts around a racetrack as quick as anyone (I thought). Still in shape and riding as well as ever (as I surmised from the Cycle World article), he might give plenty of factory riders fits on, say, a privateer GSX-R1000. After all, isn’t Troy Corser employing a similarly smooth, effortless style to great effect in World Superbike?
It just seems to me that Chandler retired at exactly the time his riding style would be best rewarded by the horsepower monsters now emerging as the norm in AMA Superbike racing.
