AMA Superbike Champ, Suzuka Winner Wes Cooley Dead At 65

Wester Steven Cooley, known to the world as ‘We,s, won the 1979 and 1980 AMA Superbike Championships on a Yoshimura Suzuki GS1000s, and he got his start on the Southern California club racing scene where his father operated a club racing team.

Eddie Lawson fought Cooley tooth and nail during the championship battle that took place in 1980.

“When I came into Superbike with Kawasaki in 1980, Wes and Freddie [Spencer] were the guys to beat. We had some great battles and it was always fun racing with him. He was always a real nice guy and it always seemed like he was having a good time. We were competitors for sure. Every time we raced it was a battle and we raced real close and you could race right next to him and it was always safe. Same with Freddie. You could race right next to those guys and no one ever did anything dirty,” Lawson told Cycle News. “Wes was always such a pleasant guy, and someone told me he was sick, but I hadn’t seen him in years and didn’t know how bad it was. And then when I heard he passed it was such a shock, I couldn’t believe it. It was sad to hear.”

Cooley honed his racing skills in the lower displacement classes before being snapped up by Pops Yoshimura to race a Kawasaki KZ1000 in the AMA production class, and Cooley won his first AMA superbike race in 1977.

By the time the 1978 season rolled around, Yoshimura swapped out his Kawasakis in favor of Suzuki bikes with superior handling characteristics, and Cooley was suddenly winning with regularity. Cooley teamed up with Mike Baldwin to win the Suzuka 8 Hours race in Japan, and then during the 1980 season, he teamed up with Graeme Crosby and took the checkered flag again at Suzuka.

Cooley won his first superbike national championship in 1979 and then defended the title in 1980 by holding off Hall of Famers Eddie Lawson and Freddie Spencer.

Wayne Rainey, Superbike teammate with Cooley at Kawasaki in 1983, remembered Wes this way:

“As a flat tracker I didn’t pay that much attention to Superbike racing, but when I started racing in the series, Wes was the one guy I knew about. He was the face of the series. As a teammate Wes was always a gentleman and we didn’t really have a rivalry. Even before we were teammates at Daytona in ’82 Wes saw me going around the banking with my Kawasaki getting into such headshake that the wheels would actually come off the ground,” Rainey said. “He noticed I was tensing up and knew I was making the problem worse. He knew if I kept doing what I was doing it wasn’t going to end well. Wes came up and told me when the shake started happening to just ease off the handlebars and I’m telling you that made all the difference in the world. The bike behaved so much better. Wes had a big heart.”

But in 1985, Cooley suffered horrific injuries in a crash at Sears Point Raceway before eventually returning to racing. Sadly, he couldn’t recover his championship form, and after he retired from racing, he became an instructor at a riding school. Cooley also became a nurse and was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2004.

“I think physically I was able to go as fast as I had before,” Cooley said in a 2004 interview. “But I lost that mental edge that it takes to run at the highest level of racing.”

Cooley also served as the Grand Marshal at the 2016 AMA Vintage Motorcycle Days and was honored at the 40th-annual Suzuka 8 Hours in 2017. At that event, he completed a lap of honor on the Suzuki GS1000 he took the race with to commemorate the occasion.