Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES P118 BY LARRY LAWRENCE BREAKTHROUGH IN THE HEARTLAND M iguel Duhamel was a rider on the rise in the late 1980s. The son of legendary road racer Yvon, Miguel turned pro in Canada in 1988, had a ride with Honda's FIM World Endurance team in '89 and began racing AMA 250cc Grand Prix and 600cc Supersport. But then he broke his femur at Suzuka while testing for HRC in June of 1989, an injury that temporarily slowed his rapid ascent. He came back strong enough later that year to earn a ride with Yoshimura Suzuki's AMA Superbike squad for 1990, but then a big crash in a Superbike heat race at Daytona saw him hit the wall on the banking and seriously injure his right hand. That pretty much wrote off the first half of the '90 season, but by mid-summer Duhamel was making up for lost time by racing about every series known to man in his return. Duhamel raced the Suzuka 8 Hours Endurance race with Doug Polen on a Yoshimura Suzuki and finished a very credible sixth in a race stacked with Grand Prix, World Superbike and Japanese National racers as well as the normal FIM Endurance contingent. The pair of Duhamel and Polen was running fifth when in the last hour the bike began running on three cylinders and Polen had to nurse it home to the finish. "Doing that well at Suzuka gave me a lot of confidence," Duhamel said. A week later Duhamel finished fifth in the AMA Superbike race at Mid-Ohio and things were looking up. But while most of the AMA racers took over a month off until the next AMA road race at Topeka, Kansas, Duhamel kept right on plugging away at his recovery, getting sharper every weekend by racing three Canadian Nationals. By the time he came to Topeka, Duhamel was race toughened. The problem Duhamel faced in AMA Superbike was the Yoshimura Suzuki GSX-R750 he was riding. The once mighty team was going through a down period and its motorcycle was woefully un- competitive against the factory Muzzy Kawasaki ZX-7 of Doug Chandler and Scott Russell, the factory-backed Commonwealth Honda RC30 of Randy Renfrow and the Vance & Hines Yamaha OW01s of Thomas Stevens and David Sadowski. "We thought the fifth at Mid-Ohio was about all we had," Duhamel said in an interview years later. "We were thrilled with that result, so even though I was sharp coming into Topeka that summer I don't know if I really expected to have a chance to win." During the break after Mid-Ohio, Yoshimura did some serious work and testing on its factory Suzuki GSX-R750 in an effort to make it more competitive. They heavily braced the steering head,

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