Cycle News

VOL. 52 ISSUE 6 FEBRUARY 10, 2015 P103 of Miguel Duhamel and Mike Hale finishing in front of him in the final standings. It was more of the same in AMA 750 Supersport where Wilson was third as well (teammate Randolph fourth). Kinko's was considered an overnight success in the AMA paddock. Nutt was also on the leading edge of promot- ing his team. He hired a PR firm to generate news for the team. That meant whenever and wherever there was an opportunity to get road racing in front of the general public during the mid-90s, chances are it was Kinko's Kawasaki out there doing the work. The team made appearances at amusement parks, city festivals, you name it. They were always on local TV news leading up to races. That led to the team's appearance on MTV as part of an extreme sports show and even one, in what turned out to be, a humorous big maga- zine shoot with one of the stars of the TV show Friends, Matt LeBlanc. "They sent him to ride one of our bikes," Nutt said. "They gave us his dimensions for the leath- ers and everything. We had some special RS Taichi leathers made up with his name on them and he shows up and the guy was easily 50 lbs. over what they said he was. He couldn't fit into the leathers to save his life. We had to borrow some leathers and stencil his name on the back or something. That was pretty funny." The team helped foster Wilson into AMA Pro Racing and he was immediately scooped up by the Harley-Davidson Superbike team the next season. In 1996 Kinko's had Thomas Stevens and Jason Pridmore, both riders treading water in their careers at that point. Both had solid years with Kinko's and moved on to better paying rides the next season. In '97 Nutt brought on another un- known talent out of the WERA ranks named Jamie Hacking to team with veteran Mike Smith. Hacking was known as a bit of a wild man, and Nutt was just the kind of encouraging and calm team owner Hacking needed to guide him. "I don't know if Jamie was accustomed to riding sticker tires," Nutt said, of Hacking's debut at Phoe- nix International Raceway. "But on his first lap of practice in an AMA Pro weekend he literally went out and dumped over on the second corner on the 750. He'd scuffed up his brand new Kinko's leathers and the paint was hardly even dry on the bike's shiny new Kinko's paint job. He was just de- jected. I put my arm around him and said, 'Look, you're here to ride and we're here to fix anything you mess up, so you can put this aside and go race.' "I think he qualified on the pole. We told him not to smoke his rear tire, to save it for the end. Sure enough he went to the front, got excited and forgot about preserving the tire. It was a real lesson. That was the fun part, getting a kid like that, with so much raw talent, and teaching him what he needed to know to go to the front." In spite of having such great success, espe- cially for such a young team, the party ended after the '97 season. "It was the perfect storm," Nutt remembers. "There was an internal struggle at Kawasaki. Rob Muzzy just hated the fact that any part of the road racing budget was going to something other than his program. He convinced them he would do more if he could get his budget increased and basically they just yanked it from us. At the same time Kinko's was buying up its franchises and preparing to go public and racing just wasn't fitting into that direction. Suddenly I had employees, a building, a truck and trailer and no money. It was a pretty traumatic time." Nutt moved on to take care of his other busi- nesses and moved away from racing, but never lost his love of the sport. "I continue to watch it and keep up with what's going on," Nutt said. "Back in 2007 I almost came back into it, but then the economy went bad and I decided the timing wasn't right." Nutt showed how to take a team from club rac- ing to the professional ranks in short order and Kinko's Kawasaki became one of most successful teams of the era. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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