TS EHCET I BO NE ST TI T LT EH E R E W A S D A N N Y H A M E L
DANNY HAMEL:
THE BEST THERE WAS BRETT SMITH
PHOTOS BY KINNEY JONES
They heard him before they saw him; that’s how it was with Danny Hamel. He had a distinct method of riding a motorcycle that nobody could duplicate. Hamel started the 1995 Baja 500 as the third overall rider and Jim “Bones” Bacon and David Pyle went up the course a few miles because they wanted to see Hamel one last time. Support personnel for Team Green Kawasaki, their next move was to take his teammates to the first rider exchange. It was a moody, drizzly early June morning in Ensenada, Mexico, just past 6:00 a.m., neither dark nor completely light. Bacon and Pyle stood in the mist in front of a Gigante Supermercado on the outside of a 90-degree right-hand turn that sent riders in a flat, straight line down Federal Highway 1, a four-lane thruway, toward Maneadero. They watched a Honda rider, the second competitor in the Pro Motorcycle class, come through the corner. He blipped the throttle, tip-toed the bike on the wet pavement, and didn’t seem in much of a rush to leave behind the last shred of civilization he would see for the rest of the day. Then came Hamel. The sight of the young man finally caught up with the thunderous “BRAAAP” of his 500cc two-stroke Kawasaki. Pyle estimates Hamel came into the right-hander at about 40 miles per hour and marveled at how someone could carry such speed on a fresh set of Dunlop 695A tires. Pyle remembers the goose bumps on his arms as he watched, smiling.
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