CN
III ARCHIVES
BY SCOTT ROUSSEAU
Y
ou would think that after carding three
exciting Daytona 200 victories, and then
finishing runner-up to Miguel Duhamel in the
closest Daytona 200 finish ever in 1996, that
Scott Russell would have met his waterloo when
he returned to battle at the 1997 Daytona 200
on a Yamaha that was basically an iteration of
the bike that had won the 1993 race with Eddie
Lawson aboard. But if you counted Russell out,
you couldn't have been more wrong.
After an unsatisfactory end to his long-time
partnership with Muzzy Kawasaki—for which
he scored his first Daytona 200 win in 1992,
runner-upped to Lawson in '93, then came back
to win two straight last-to-first romps in '94 and
'95 (the latter of these being Russell's unfor-
gettable crash-and-win performance)—Russell
switched to Lucky Strike Suzuki to take his shot
at GP racing for the 1996 season. First, how-
ever, came the 1996 Daytona 200, where he
and Smokin' Joe's Honda's Duhamel staged a
titanic battle, Russell just missing in his attempt
to slingshot past Duhamel at the finish line.
Then it was on to the GPs. In a perfect world,
Russell's view of Daytona should have been
strictly rearview, a pleasant memory of his old
American road racing days before moving on to
bigger and better things in GP.
"Yeah, that sounds good, but it didn't work
out like that at all," says Russell, who celebrated
his 40th birthday on October 2, 2004. "It was
hard to jump into a team like that and just take
over, especially when Mick Doohan was riding
P
126
RUSSELL TO THE FOUR
SCOTT RUSSELL'S DAYTONA,
YAMAHA WIN
like he was. The [Suzuki) team was good, but
I never liked the bike. I never could get it to do
anything I wanted it to do. Then I got hurt on it. It
was tough. We didn't make a lot of hay when that
sun shined."
So, come 1997, Russell returned to superbike
racing, starting in Daytona with a factory Yamaha
VZF750 on which he'd had a total of eight days of
test time. Though he could certainly be counted
on to be a factor in the race, there were ques-
like he was. The [Suzuki) team was good, but
