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VOL. 55 ISSUE 12 MARCH 27, 2018 P115 Superbike in 1980, but mechani- cal problems cost him the title. Part of Muzzy's job with the team was chasing down those prob- lems and getting them solved. The first race he worked was at Daytona and the bike had issues there. Then at Talladega the team found Lawson's Kawasaki down on power to the factory Honda and Suzuki. Plus, they were breaking rods at an alarming rate. So Muzzy flew to Japan to talk over the issues with the Japanese engineers. He had a laundry list of parts that needed upgrading, but much to his surprise Muzzy was met with resistance from the engineers. "They insisted that we were going to do things this way, with these parts and that the bike was not to be revved over this rpm," Muzzy recalled. "I listened and then I said to them, 'Well I guess that means second place is all right to you guys.' That pissed them off." Muzzy realized help wasn't coming from Japan, so when he got back he convinced Mathers that they weren't going to win races unless they took matters into their own hands. Mathers took a big risk with his bosses by approving the aftermarket parts Muzzy said were needed, includ- ing titanium rods. But the result of the upgrades was the power and reliability of Lawson's Kawasaki improved dramatically and Law- son went on to win the 1981 AMA Superbike Championship. It was a bold and ultimately successful debut for Muzzy as a factory tuner. With the developments Ka- wasaki's U.S. Superbike team made, Kawasaki took that knowl- edge and introduced the famous KZ1000R-S1 Superbike (or ELR for Eddie Lawson Replica, as its commonly referred to today). The underdog Kawasaki team ran off a string of three consecutive AMA Superbike Championships with Lawson twice and then Wayne Rainey. Then the company inexpli- cably halted its road racing effort. According to Muzzy it wasn't exactly a tidy ending. "We got back from the last race and they said, 'We're not going to race anymore. You're all fired.'" Fortunately for Muzzy, during Kawasaki's peak of success, Honda had quietly approached him about defecting and coming to their camp. "I called Honda up and they said, 'Yeah, and we really need you and we need you now! We're going dirt track racing,'" Muzzy said. "So, I went to work for Honda and that's when they hired Ricky Graham and Bubba Shobert and built an in-house dirt track team. In fact, Honda's racing department at the time had over 100 employees. I was in charge of development for all of Honda's racing efforts, but my focus in '84 was on the dirt trackers." Honda clearly got the equation right with its RS750. In '84, the first year of the full factory effort, Graham edged out Shobert by a single point to win the AMA Grand National and give Honda a 1-2 series finish. A pattern was developing. Ev- erything Muzzy touched seemed to turn to gold. Even though things couldn't have gone much better in terms of success on the track, Muzzy was not happy at Honda. He cites the corporate culture at the company and the fact that a lot of people who worked for him still viewed him as an adversary from the Kawasaki days. So, in the midst of unmitigated success, Muzzy quit. "I told Mathers (who'd also come over from Kawasaki to Hon- da to run its racing program) I was quitting and he told me I couldn't. I said, 'The hell I can't.'' And then he told me he'd just signed Wayne Rainey and one of the things he guaranteed Wayne was that I was going to build his bikes." So, in 1986 and '87 Muzzy signed on as a contractor to over- see Rainey's road racing program with Honda. The end result, of course, was another AMA Super- bike Championship in '87. Next week we'll take a look at the second half of Muzzy's professional career that includes restarting his own business and then helping bring Kawasaki back into road racing and ultimately helping lead them to a world championship in an amazing 1993 season, unquestionably the zenith of Muzzy's career. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives