Cycle News

VOL. 53 ISSUE 42 OCTOBER 25, 2016 P13 Cycle and raced a Kawasaki ZX-6R in 600 Supersport. He came out of the gate with some solid top-10 finishes at Pomona and Homestead, but the breakthrough came midseason at Mid-Ohio where Harrington turned a lot of heads with a fourth-place. "Mid-Ohio was always one of my favorite tracks," Harrington explained. "It's definitely one of the tracks where a non-factory rider is on a more level playing field with the factory bikes." Even though his results were ever more promis- ing, nothing prepared fans for the magic carpet ride Harrington caught in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin, the very next week. Harrington qualified in a wet first session, so his time was a whopping 14 seconds slower than Miguel Du- hamel's pole time. That meant he would start well back on the grid in row five, normally a place that would give a rider little chance to win a supersport race. Once the green flagged dropped Harrington began making his way through the field. A grin came across his face when he realized his team had nailed the setup on his Kawasaki perfectly and his freshly built motor was a rocket. "It was almost easy," he said. "I could brake late, get the bike turned and get on the gas early and didn't have to run it out to the edge of the track. When I saw how fast I was catching the leaders I thought, 'I could do this! This could really happen.'" But it was no cakewalk. Just getting up to the lead- ers was a big task. Harrington especially recalls, in spite of his bike being perfect, how hard it was to get around Gerald Rothman Jr. on the Moto Liberty Honda and the two Erion Honda's of Doug Toland and Andrew Stroud. About halfway through the race, Harrington had worked up to the lead pack that consisted of Duhamel, Thomas Stevens, Ken Melville and Ben Bostrom. In the closing laps Duhamel and Bostrom both fell off the pace. In the end it came down to Harrington, who'd taken the lead with a couple of laps to go, over Thomas Stevens on the Kinko's Kawasaki and Ken Melville on the Moto Liberty Honda. Stevens had a plan to try to get around Harrington on the final lap, but Melville ru- ined that by diving past Stevens going into the first turn on the final lap. Stevens did manage to get back by Melville, but by then it was too late to catch Harrington. For Harrington the Road America Supersport victory would mark the zenith of his road-racing career. He had some other strong performances that season, including a podium at Las Vegas. So promising was his '96 season that it earned Harrington a factory ride with Muzzy Kawasaki for '97. Unfortunately, the ZX-6R was largely unchanged from '96, while both Honda and Suzuki stepped up with much improved 600 supersport bikes. Harrington was hopelessly outgunned. In '98 he and Rashid reunited and Todd again scored some solid 600 Supersport results, but also suffered a lot of crashes along the way. In 1999 he crashed while racing an NASB event at Summit Point, West Virginia, and broke his right wrist. A botched operation led to a year's worth of four surgeries and recovery. His wrist was never the same and suddenly his racing career was over. "I was pretty lost for about five or six years," Har- rington said of his post-racing period. "I got into a bunch of trouble and pretty much lost direction in my life. I'd dropped out of college to pursue racing, so I didn't have a specific skill. I didn't know what to do. Racing was my purpose in life. When that was gone I didn't have anything to fill it." Time eventually, at least, partially healed the wounds of no longer being a racer and he became a flight simulation technician for his dad's aviation company American Flyers. His dad sold that com- pany and now the two of them are in business flipping houses. "The adrenaline, the excitement, the risks—I think that's what's hard to step away from. You leave that world and go to a regular world and none of that's there. It's hard going from 180 miles per hour at Daytona and passing people within inches to hanging drywall." One thing Harrington will always have, however, is that glorious and unexpected national victory at Road America in 1996. To this day when Harrington is around racing people someone will inevitably come up to him and say, "Hey, I was there the day you stuck it to the factory guys!" CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives

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