Bruce Nield races his Honda at Road Atlanta during a WERA event in 1988. Nield, from Blacksburg, Va., primarily raced club events, but on occasion he made appearances in AMA Pro events. In 1990 he took fifth in the Circle Bell Pro Twins race at Road Atlanta riding a Ducati. Nield was part of the team, along with co-riders Roger Lyle, Steve Foote and Mike Parrotte, that won the Prototype class in the AMA/CCS Endurance Championship 1984. Legend has it that Bruce bought this ex-Freddie Spencer Honda thinking it was a 750cc and later after a tear down found out the displacement was actually 860cc. It would be interesting to know if that story is true. (Update: Click on comments below to read the rest of the story).
Bruce Nield races his ex-factory Honda at Road Atlanta in 1988. (Larry Lawrence photo)
Rider Files 
That was Spencer’s Daytona winning superbike from 85, Chandler rode it under “Freddie Spencer Racing” banner, it was then sold to Bruce who sold it to me. Bruce was given two 860cc motor’s and another “Works” 750 motor that was in Spencers Daytona bike. The 860’s were for all the dirt track guy’s that were running in the F1 class, Graham, Shobert, Chandler. Bruce bought the bike from Chandler’s father in law, Jerry Griffith’s.
Comment by Brian O’Shea — March 25, 2010 @ 12:17 pm |Edit This
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Brian
Thanks for the explanation. Cool stuff. One of those 860cc motors was probably the one Shobert rode to his unexpected victory at Mid-Ohio in ’84 I think. If that’s the case that’s a historic motor.
Larry
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Correction on the first year of Roger Edmondson’s AMACCS in 1984. They had an endurance series that ran 6 hour races at Rockingham, Nelson Ledges, Summit Point, Roebling Road, etc. Daytona was not on the schedule.
The series champions earned points throughout the year and the team with the most points won the title. We were the Prototype National Champions after running the whole series. Bruce Nield only rode one race at Summit Point for the Performance Engineering team out of Northern Virginia. Race on!
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Thanks for the correction Roger.
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My first ontrack experience was with Bruce in May of 1990 at racing school with AMA/CCS. I had met him at Daytona (bike week) where he pointed out that my riding on the street needed to be applied to the race track and gave me the info on the next available race weekend with rider’s school. …And a racer was born… THANKS BRUCE!!
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Bruce ended up with essentially two HRC VF750s although one was closer to a stocker with lotsof trick HRC parts, Fox shock, VF1000R ft end etc. Bruce was a great inspiration to me in my early race years racing a RZ350 in the late 80s. He actually used my RZ for the Roebling Road Winter Challenge in 1989 so he could run a bike in every class. He and Mike Smith were battling for overall points lead and Mike had to scramble to find a lightweight bike to ride. Bruce beat him anyway. I had the pleasure of racing Bruce’s VF750 in 1997 n WERA Vintage5 class. The bike won every race entered that year and we won the National Championship. It was a joy to race and was always fun to get a tire replaced and find names like Chandler and Rainey written inside the wheels. I was a little shorter than Bruce and had to use a corbin style red, white and blue seat that was made for Bubba Shobert. The bike also had “Bad to the bone” painted on the tail light, supposedly a Fred Merkel modification. As a side note, I started my racing career by enrolling in the MAARC road race school, headed up by Roger Lyle.
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