It was an unlikely win by a rider skeptical of the concept for the bike, and a win that initially anyway, felt no different than any other win.

So says Kenny Roberts about his 1975 Indy Mile win on the TZ750 (700) powered dirt track Yamaha.

"I didn't think I had a chance of winning," Roberts says of that seminal night in motorcycle racing. "I can remember pushing the groove out further and further in the race until I was using the bales as a a berm. After the race, (Tuner) Kel (Carruthers) was pulling twine from the bike that I had ripped from the bales. That's how far out I was."

"I can remember coming out of the final corner and thinking, 'I'm going to get third place! I'm on the podium!' And then realizing I made it all the way into the lead," recalls Roberts. "I only led one lap, the last one, and that was for about ten feet. I couldn't believe it. It was like a giant hand pushed me into the lead, because the bike had never hooked up like that previously. If you look at pictures from the race, you can see that the tire is spinning on the rim--that's how bad it was spinning."

The concept of the four-cylinder two-stroke engine in a dirt track frame was born as Yamaha's chances on the American dirt track scene, against the Harley-Davidson XR750, slowly lost momentum.

"When they told me that they were going to build that bike—they built five of them—I told them they were crazy. They had several of them built (by Doug Schwerma of Champion Frames) and I was still telling them they were crazy," Roberts remembers. "A TZ750 motor in a dirt track frame?! Come on."
Roberts says his instant mental image of that race, whenever he thinks of it, is a tunnel-vision view down the track from turn four towards the finish line with Jay Springsteen and Corky Keener in front of him-all going 120 mph. "Whenever someone asks about it or I am reminded of it, I see that image in my head," Roberts says. "Me looking down at the finish line with those guys in front of me, me thinking I was going to finish third."

Roberts won possibly the seminal motorcycle race in the history of two-wheeled sport that night, one that seemingly every motorcycle racing enthusiast—including Valentino Rossi—either knows about or remembers fondly. However, at the time, Roberts said that it didn't really feel that different from any other win, and certainly didn't feel like a seminal moment. At all.

"It was like, 'Okay, we won, now, let's go get dinner, where are we going for dinner?" Roberts remembers. "I guess it was kind of like winning a championship because after you win a championship it feels kind of anticlimactic. That's the way that the Indy Mile win felt."