Cycle News

CN III ARCHIVES BY LARRY LAWRENCE Y ou don't see them anymore, the 24-hour copy centers named Kinko's. About a decade ago they were bought out by FedEx and now do busi- ness under that name, but in the 1990s Kinko's Copying Centers were all over and became the place to go if you had to have copies or flyers made. In AMA road racing a team emerged in the mid-1990s with backing from the copying giant, the team was Kinko's Kawasaki, headed by former club road racer Robert Nutt. For a brief three-year span Kinko's Kawasaki was one of the premier AMA Supersport teams in the paddock. They had a presentation every bit as impressive as the full factory teams and probably did more than any other team of its era to promote the sport of motorcycle road racing. The team looked poised to be a perennial championship contender, but at the end of the 1997 racing season it all came apart practically overnight. Both Kinko's and Kawasaki simultane- ously decided to go in different directions and it left the independent team from Knoxville, Ten- nessee, high and dry. Nutt tried to look at other avenues to keep his team going, but he was busy as it was with his own business and ultimately he made the painful decision to pull the plug on the squad. Yet while it lasted, Kinko's Kawasaki helped launched the careers of a couple of top- notch riders, revived the career of a couple others and left a blueprint for how a team, under innova- tive leadership, could compete with the factories. Nutt was a person strongly dedicated to the sport of motorcycle road racing. He started in club racing in 1984 and pretty quickly earned suc- cess, especially in endurance racing. The early- to-mid '90s saw Nutt co-running a two-time WERA National class championship winning team, a 250 GP team and finally a Supersport team with fac- tory backing. A relationship with a regional group of Kinko's Copy Centers, which began in 1992 flourished until the Kinko's corporate headquar- ters took notice at the exposure the young team was getting and decided to back them with a full company sponsorship. Kawasaki decided to pattern a road racing squad after its successful Team Green motocross division and in 1995 sponsored Nutt's entry in AMA Supersport racing, along with increasing support from Kinko's. The team riders for '95 were WERA standout Thomas Wilson and Sears Point specialist James Randolph, who'd stunned everyone with his 1994 Sears Point 750 Supers- port victory. Wilson was a rider Nutt fought for at Kawasaki. "Kawasaki was like, 'We don't know about this Tom Wilson guy. He's only raced WERA and never raced outside the eastern United States,'" Nutt said. "They agreed I could have Wilson, but told me, 'we've got this guy who Jim Allen said is going to be the next big thing and his name is James Randolph.' And James was blazingly fast, but man he could crash some stuff." The team's preparation in WERA endurance and sprint racing served them well. Kinko's and especially Wilson proved an instant success in AMA Supersport. Wilson scored five podium finishes in AMA 600 Supersport and finished third in the series with only the factory Hondas KINKO'S KAWASAKI P102

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