Wayne Rainey: three 500cc titles, one fall at Misano, and the long way back

At the 2022 Goodwood Festival of Speed, Wayne Rainey rode up the hill on the Yamaha YZR500 that had carried him to his third world title in 1992. Yamaha's engineers had taken the bike out of the museum and moved the gearshift to the left handlebar, so he could ride it with his hands.

It was the first time Rainey had ridden a Grand Prix bike since 5 September 1993, the day he fell at Misano and broke his back. Kenny Roberts, his old team boss, was there. So were Mick Doohan and Kevin Schwantz, the rival he had once said he hated.

Rainey had been nervous. Once he was moving, he said, the bike didn't feel like a museum piece.

Who Wayne Rainey was

Wayne Wesley Rainey was born on 23 October 1960 in Downey, California, and started out, like Kenny Roberts, as a dirt tracker. Kawasaki signed him for its superbike team in 1982 as Eddie Lawson's teammate. When Lawson left for Europe, Rainey took over and won the 1983 AMA Superbike title on a Kawasaki GPz750, beating Honda's new V4s.

Kawasaki pulled out of road racing straight afterwards. In 1984 Roberts, newly retired, gave Rainey a ride in his 250cc Grand Prix team. It lasted one season. Rainey went home, joined Honda, and in 1987 won the Daytona 200 and his second AMA Superbike title after a season-long fight with a young Texan on a Suzuki called Kevin Schwantz.

Both men moved to the 500cc World Championship in 1988, Schwantz with Suzuki and Rainey back with Team Roberts on a Yamaha. Their rivalry, already bitter in America, became the defining duel of the class for the next six years.

1990 to 1992: Wayne Rainey's three straight titles

Wayne Rainey won his first 500cc Grand Prix at Donington Park in 1988, finished second to Eddie Lawson in 1989, and then took over. In 1990, on the YZR500 0WC1, which made 155 PS according to Yamaha, he won seven races and the title.

Rainey was the opposite of Schwantz. Schwantz braked later than anyone and either won or crashed. Rainey was smooth, calculating and relentless. Schwantz won more races; Rainey won more titles.

He won again in 1991. In 1992 the title looked lost: Mick Doohan's Honda won the first four races and led by a distance until he crashed in practice at Assen and nearly lost his leg. Rainey, riding through his own injuries, closed the gap and beat Doohan to the title by four points at the final round in South Africa.

That 1992 bike, the 0WE0, was the first Yamaha 500 with a "big bang" engine, which fires its cylinders close together so the rear tyre finds grip more easily coming out of corners. It is the bike Rainey rode at Goodwood thirty years later.

Misano, 5 September 1993

In 1993 Wayne Rainey was chasing a fourth straight title. With three races left he led the championship from Schwantz, and at the Italian Grand Prix at Misano he was leading the race, a few yards ahead of his rival.

On the first corner of a lap early in the race, the rear of his Yamaha stepped out and he fell into the gravel. He smashed his sixth thoracic vertebra. He was 32, and he was paralysed from the middle of his chest down.

Schwantz went on to win the 1993 title, the only one of his career. The rivalry ended in that gravel trap. The two men later became close friends.

Wayne Rainey after the crash

Wayne Rainey did not leave the paddock. On the advice of Frank Williams, the Formula 1 team owner who had been paralysed in a road accident, he went back to work, running Yamaha's 500cc team as manager until 1998.

He became president of MotoAmerica, the American road racing championship, and the corner after the Corkscrew at Laguna Seca, near his home, is named Rainey Curve. In 2019, 26 years after Misano, he rode a modified Yamaha R1, his first time on a motorcycle since the crash. In 2022 came Goodwood and the YZR500.

Wayne Rainey lost the use of his legs at the peak of his career and kept his place in racing anyway. His three titles came in one of the hardest eras the 500cc class has known, against Schwantz, Doohan, Lawson and Gardner.

He never got the fourth. He got the bike back instead.