This a panoramic view of the start of the AMA Pro Twins race at Road America in June of 1990. That year was a great battle between the Ferracci Ducati of Jamie James and the Gio.Ca.Moto Ducati of Jimmy Adamo. James won most of the races, but the more experienced Adamo hung right in there and the championship battle went right down to the wire with James earning the title by just three points.
Jimmy Adamo on the No. 26 Gio.Ca.Moto Ducati gets the jump on Kevin Erion’s No. 71 Two Brothers Racing Honda and Ferracci Ducati’s Jamie James on the No. 73 bike. James went on to win this race and the championship. Also pictured in the photo are Ely Schless (No. 50), Randy Shemwell (No. 52) and Dale Quarterley (No. 32). I’m not certain who No. 48 is – perhaps local Brian French. (Larry Lawrence photo)
Rider Files 
According to my program from RA that year that is Brian French on the #48 Hansen Duc out of Sheboygan. Great shot, and yes, LL, that is a great view from Elkhart!
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I might be wrong, but is that Eraldo leaning againt pit wall on the far left?
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I think you are right, that is Eraldo.
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Thanks for looking that up Stu. It’s good to know that my memory still works every once in awhile.
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Great photo of Road America. Adamo was a great rider.
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Sh.t, your mind is as sharp as a tack, my man!
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Many years down the line here, but that is not Eraldo on the far left. I can see why one would think that, but he didn’t look like then & they were still wearing blue FBF polo shirts at that time. If you look closely at the front of Adamo’s bike, below the windscreen on each side are some cracks & pop rivets. This was my first race being employed by Mr. Adamo. I was asleep in the back of Jimmy’s van on the way there & just as the sun came up, Jim fell asleep at the wheel. He would never, ever admit it for the next couple years of his life. As we drove in the early morning hours through Pa. on Route 80, Jim dropped the left 2 tires of his van into the soft/sandy shoulder & that woke him up. There was no guardrail but there was the start of one coming. At the last second he decided to abort the fast lane & drove into the center median, a HUGE drop that if it were anyone else driving, they would have rolled the van. I woke up facing the rear of the van, looking through the windows to Jim yelling “HO! ………HO!……..HO!” as if to say “you may want to wake up & grab something”. As I watched the horizon angle change through the rear windows, I was getting banged around like I was in a garbage can, getting slammed into the roof & side wall of the van. I grabbed the nearest thing I could, which was the carbon fiber nose fairing of the 888 just behind me the “bed”. The futon mattress I was sleeping on was on top of the 55 gallon drum of F&L race fuel which was thankfully tied down very well. As the slamming & the screaming stopped, I realized we were not out of the woods quite yet, literally. Now, we were traveling WESTBOUND on the EASTBOUND soft shoulder/fast lane side of route 80. VERY large rocks placed there to prevent erosion etc, so the van was in the throws of death, scrounging for traction because it was in a constant uphill angle with so much camber that we risked rolling the OTHER directing into the very center of the valley that is the center median, eastbound cars in the fast lane whizzing by inches from the left front fender. We had to keep moving so the van was bounding along in this off road environment until we could get an opening in the eastbound traffic to pull a u turn. Eventually we did. Now we are headed eastbound in the eastbound lanes, shedding what looked to be 2 tons of vegetation that was tangled in the undercarriage as we got moving on solid ground..As we approached the spot where we swapped lanes, we could see a massive, perfectly parallel missing slice of the several foot tall vegetation from the eastbound to the westbound lanes on an angle that you could be sure that if anyone looked at they would think “that vehicle rolled”. We had to get to the nearest exit. As we get to the spot of the roadway where we flew off the fast lane of the westbound side, 10 or 12 cars had parked there with their hazards on in the early dawn. They were all of the concerned drivers who witnessed the Dukes Of hazard move a minute prior. As we crawled along 80 east, getting our bearings, I started digging myself out from under all the stuff that was on top of me. Jim alerted me to the people watching from the elevated point on the other side of the highway. I opened the passenger window, stuck my head up & over roof & waved to them as we passed. They waved back, some of them with their mouths literally agape, in shock we had driven out of that. I waved & yelled “just had to take a piss!” to them, but their expressions of disbelief did not change, many if them shaking their heads in disbelief. That made Jim & I laugh hysterically until we got a few miles down the road to the nearest exit & stopped at a travel center. The windshield was cracked in an X pattern, corner to corner, from the body of the van being twisted like a strudel at 70 MPH or whatever it was. The front license plate had a ton of those purple flowers that grow in the center median in Pa. in the summer, BEHIND the screw heads, like the screws were loosened, wrapped & tightened. That’s how much we were bushwacking in that grass. The contents of the van had been packed by Jim before we left & as usual it was like a Tetris game. After the excursion, we opened the back doors and a bunch of small stuff fell out. Try as we may, we could not get all the stuff back in & close the doors. Everything had been disrupted on the floor etc so it was not going to go back in & fit. I grabbed the bicycle that we used as pit transportation & banged the quick release for the front wheel. We stuffed the bike minus the front wheel in the back doors & the front wheel had to lay on top of all the equipment somewhere. We got to the track & as I was getting familiar with drilling into carbon fiber to fix the fairing, every person that came by & asked what was going on, Jim would tell them “Enzo broke the fairing on the way here”. Of course he left out that he fell asleep & drove into oncoming traffic, so I would instruct that person to check the windshield of the truck & ask the same question again. Jim said that he dropped to wheels into the soft shoulder & decided to drive off rather than hit the guardrail head on. He left out the part where he was snoring though…. That was my the first 8 or so hours I had ever driven with Jimmy & I was a young kid. Looking back, that would have been a hell of a phone call for my parents to get had things gone another way. Back then I could sleep standing up & it didn’t matter who was driving in a vehicle that I was sleeping in. I never fell asleep in that van again & to this day there are only 2 people in the world that I will let drive while I sleep. If I try to sleep in a moving vehicle with the wrong person at the wheel, I keep seeing that memory of the horizon out of the back of the van changing. It sucks. But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
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