Larry Lawrence | March 28, 2018
Wayne Rainey and Rob Muzzy talk at Daytona in 1987. Rainey would go on to win the AMA Superbike Championship that season. It was the second time the Rainey-Muzzy combo won the title. (Tom Riles Photo)
Rob Muzzy is a problem solver. He studies a racing machine, and along with his riders, they determine the shortcomings of the machine and make improvements. Its sounds like tuning 101, but that kind of methodical approach to building racing motorcycles served Muzzy well over the years. At times his conclusions and solutions went against conventional thinking, and might have even rankled engineers in Japan, but more often than not Muzzy was proven right. His machines carried a number of riders to scores of victories and championships – national and world – and along the way Muzzy became one of the all-time legendary tuners and builders in motorcycle racing.
Muzzy’s experience with tuning motorcycles goes back to his youth when he delivered newspapers in L.A.’s Balboa Peninsula on a Whizzer motorbike. Not satisfied with the performance of the little Whizzer, a 12-year-old Muzzy milled the head, welded and then ground down the cam. It was the start of a lifelong pursuit of performance.
Like many kids of his era, the motor culture of Southern California in the late 1950s and early’60s shaped Muzzy’s life. He first started getting paid for his passion of tinkering on machines when he began building chassis for drag bikes. In addition to working on customers’ machines, Muzzy also raced himself. He did everything from drag racing to off-road, dirt track and even Speedway racing.
In the early 1970s he moved to Corvallis, Oregon, and after briefly working at a motorcycle shop he opened up the first Muzzy’s in 1974.
“At first, I was building hand-made exhaust systems for dirt track guys and it went from there,” Muzzy said. But by the early 1980s the economy in Oregon was suffering a serious downturn and Muzzy, hoping to find a more stable income, began applying to the various motorcycle companies.
“I thought that would be something that would be more secure,” Muzzy says with a sarcastic laugh. “I sent out my resume to all the manufacturers and got back all these nice, cheery return letters saying ‘No thanks, we don’t have anyplace for you,’ which I kept and hung on my wall.”
Then Muzzy saw an ad in Cycle News that Kawasaki was looking for a road race technician.
“I knew Steve Johnson and called him and asked him if they needed a real mechanic or just a parts changer,” Muzzy remembers. “Johnson said, ‘Holy crap, you’re just what we need.’”
After interviewing with a couple of folks from Kawasaki, including racing boss Gary Mathers, Muzzy got the job.
Eddie Lawson was plenty fast on the factory Kawasaki KZ1000 Superbike in 1980, but mechanical problems cost him the title. Part of Muzzy’s job with the team was chasing down those problems 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 alright 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, including titanium rods. But the result of the upgrades was the power and reliability of Lawson’s Kawasaki improved dramatically and Lawson 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 Kawasaki’s U.S. Superbike team made, Kawasaki took that knowledge 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 Championship with Lawson twice and then Wayne Rainey. Then the company inexplicably 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. Everything 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 Honda 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 oversee Rainey’s road racing program with Honda. The end result, of course, was another AMA Superbike 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.
