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CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE G oing into the 1994 season, it didn't look good for seven-year AMA Pro Road Racing veteran Tom Kipp. Then a bold decision turned things around for the friendly and fast Ohioan. Uninvited, he somehow got into the pre-season tire tests at Daytona and started making his case to team managers there. After all, he had been perhaps one of the hottest riders in AMA road racing before crashing and suffering bad injuries early in '93. Maybe some had written him off, but Yoshimura's Suehiro "Nabe" Watanabe saw Kipp's hunger. Before the test was over, Kipp had a verbal agreement with Yoshimura Suzuki to join them as a Supersport-only rider. That later morphed into a full-scale Superbike and Supersport program. Kipp's signing with Yoshimura Suzuki proved to be a perfect match for both parties. Kipp went on a mid-season tear and won the AMA 750cc Supersport Championship in a close battle with teammate Britt Turkington. Along the way, Kipp finally earned a significant victory for him. After years of coming oh-so- close, Kipp finally scored a national win at his home track, Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course. It had to be one of the most memorable victories of his career for his friends and family who came every year to Mid-Ohio to cheer him on. The Ohio racing fans loved it, too. Home state hero Kipp was always a favorite to the large crowds that came to Mid-Ohio in those days. P124 KIPP'S HOME TRACK BREAKTHROUGH Kipp hailed from the Cleveland suburb of Mentor, Ohio. Lexington, Ohio's Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course is just an hour-and-a-half away, and Kipp always considered Mid-Ohio his home track. Kipp's history at Mid- Ohio dated back to 1986. During his novice days of road racing, when he was just 17 years old, Kipp won a CCS Yamaha RZ350 Cup race there, beating the experts, too, on a wet track by finding unique lines. "I realized on some of the corners they didn't have sealer on the far out- side line, maybe a line six-feet wide," Kipp recalls. "So, I started riding out there, which is normally a ridiculous line, but I was passing guys left and right. In some ways that win meant even more than my first national win at Mid-Ohio because I was a novice and beat all the experts." So began his long tenure at Mid- Ohio, and once he turned pro, it would be a long time before he could claim his second victory there. Three years after his novice suc- cess, Kipp came close to winning at Mid-Ohio in 1989, when he took a very close second to Scott Zampach in the 600cc Supersport National. Kipp led significant por- tions of the race, but Zampach, who would go on to win the series title that year, got him with a couple of laps to go and held off Kipp by two- 10ths of a second at the flag. The one that got away for Kipp, though, was the AMA Superbike race at Mid-Ohio in 1991. Kipp was racing for Wiseco Yamaha, and he'd qualified well on the second row. "A lot of people thought that Wiseco program was a big-budget deal," Kipp said. "But the reality was that team was on a shoestring budget. My dad was the president of Wiseco, and he was finagling the best he could to put a little budget aside for me to race. We were sitting there on the grid at Mid-Ohio. It was me, my dad, and my good buddy Dave Fussner, who worked for Wiseco and built Privateer racer Tom Kipp (right) led most of the Mid-Ohio AMA Superbike race in 1991 but was passed late in the race by eventual winner Thomas Stevens (center) and second-place Miguel Duhamel (left) on their factory machines. PHOTO: LARRY LAWRENCE