Brad Lackey

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1972 AMA National Motocross Champion.
First American to win the 500cc World MX Championship.

copyright © 2008, digitalphotography.tv/Charlie Morey

Brad Lackey was one of America’s pioneering motocross racers of the 1970s and ‘80s. In 1972, Lackey won the AMA 500cc National Motocross championship. In 1982, after a decade of trying, he became the first American to win the 500cc World Motocross Championship. During his career, Lackey rode for CZ, Suzuki and Honda, but in the United States he is most closely associated with Kawasaki, the team with which he won his AMA title.


Lackey was born in Berkeley, California, on July 8, 1953. His father was a motorcyclist and got young Brad involved in the sport. By the time he was 9, Lackey was riding with his dad and other friends, cow-trailing through the coastal and interior mountains of the San Francisco Bay area.


At 13, Lackey began racing scrambles across his native Northern California and progressed quickly through the amateur ranks. In the early 1970s, Lackey became an expert-ranked rider just as motocross was beginning to take off in America. Lackey competed against the top European riders in the Inter-Am and Trans-AMA series. By 1970, he was winning support races for the Trans-AMA Series and often was the top American finisher in Trans-AMA races.


"The Europeans taught us that we needed to take our training much more seriously and I took that to heart," Lackey remembers. "From the beginning I knew I wanted to go to Europe and compete against the top riders in the world at that time."


In 1971, CZ sent Lackey to Czechoslovakia to enter a training camp. He also got his first taste of the World Championship Motocross Grand Prix circuit when he raced in a few 250cc GP races while attending the training camp... Read more




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