That inaugural event proved to be an appropriate opening to a series that has since become the premier motorcycle road-racing championship in America. 

British expatriate Reg Pridmore won the first three AMA Superbike titles, first with BMW and then with Kawasaki. While he won only three AMA Superbike Nationals during his career, that was enough to give him the first three titles in series history, 1976-'78. 

A young Wes Cooley came on as the premier rider in the class in the late-1970s. Cooley rode the awesome Yoshimura Suzuki GS1000 to the championship in 1979 and '80, and developed a fondness for riding the powerful Suzuki on its rear wheel. 

The combination of Eddie Lawson and Kawasaki took over in 1981 and '82, but it wasn't easy. They arrived just as Honda jumped into Superbike racing with all its might and the considerable talents of Freddie Spencer. The Lawson/Spencer battles put the Superbike class on the map. 

As Lawson and Spencer left for the grand prix circuit, the Superbike class was changing forever. The initial class structure called for production-based machines up to 1,000cc in displacement, but in 1983, that limit dropped to 750cc for four-cylinder machines. Honda appeared to have the edge with its new V-four Interceptor, ridden by Mike Baldwin and Fred Merkel. But it was Kawasaki's Wayne Rainey, piloting an older-design GPz750 that slew the Honda giant in 1983. 

Honda with Fred Merkel, Rainey and Bubba Shobert, claimed the next five Superbike titles in a row. Through that period, Honda Interceptors won an amazing 72 percent of the Superbike races, and Merkel won three championships, tying Pridmore's record. He also topped the list with 20 career race victories, a record that would stand for over a decade. 

The growing competitiveness of AMA Superbike racing is clear from the record in the '80s. Every one of the AMA champions from 1981 to '87--Lawson, Rainey and Merkel--went on to become world champions. And Spencer, who never managed to win the AMA Superbike title, claimed three world championships as well.  

Bubba Shobert crossed over from the AMA Grand National Dirt Track Series in 1988 to win the Superbike title in a close battle with Suzuki's Doug Polen. 

The 1980s closed with a new generation of Superbike riders taking center stage. Suzuki teammates Scott Russell and Jamie James, along with another dirt-tracker, Doug Chandler, riding a Kawasaki, dominated the 1989 season. All three would eventually become champions, but it was James who took the title that year. 

The early-1990s was a period of parity. Chandler, Thomas Stevens and Russell each won the Superbike title--Chandler and Russell on Kawasakis and Stevens on a Yamaha. Meanwhile, like many AMA Superbike champions before them, Chandler and Russell went off to chase world titles. Significantly, both of them returned to the States a few years later as the AMA championship continued to grow in stature. 

The mid-1990s saw Ducati domination, with Doug Polen and Aussie Troy Corser. Polen reversed the previous trend, winning the Japanese and World Superbike championships before conquering America in 1993. 

In 1995, Miguel Duhamel didn't just win the Superbike championship; he did it in record-breaking style. Duhamel won six races in a row giving Honda its first title since 1988. He would go on to break Merkel's long-standing record with his 21st Superbike race victory in 1998, and has since added a couple of additional victories, including an epic win over Mat Mladin in the 1999 Daytona 200. 

The 1996 and 1997 seasons saw the return of Doug Chandler to the top of AMA Superbike. Chandler reunited with Kawasaki to beat Duhamel in a pair of great season-long battles. That made him the third rider to win the AMA Superbike title three times. 

But another new generation was on the horizon, and in 1998, a young rider by the name of Ben Bostrom, riding for Honda, won a hard-fought battle with Chandler and Mladin to take the crown. 

Mladin was not to be denied, though, as he closed out the 20th century and opened the 21st with a pair of AMA Superbike titles in 1999 and 2000. 

The next 25 years of AMA Superbike racing holds even more promise.

-- More History -- The History of Daytona and past winners  --