Larry Lawrence | April 4, 2018
Rob Muzzy (Photo by Henny Ray Abrams)
This is the second installment of a two-part series. You can find Pt. 1 here.
After the success Rob Muzzy had with both Kawasaki’s and Honda’s racing programs, you would think he could write his own ticket. The only problem was each time Muzzy helped a manufacturer establish a winning program in AMA Superbike, the company promptly left the series. It happened at Kawasaki after the 1983 season and again with Honda in ’87.
Thanks to prompting by his wife, Muzzy decided to re-open Muzzy’s as a business. So he opened the company that this time would last for 28 years. After winning championships with Kawasaki and Honda, Muzzy had established credentials in the racing world second to none. That reputation helped his company rapidly become a leading aftermarket seller of performance parts, best known for Muzzy exhaust systems.
By 1989, with his company up and running, Muzzy felt the itch to get back into racing and he approached Kawasaki. The company was launching its ZX-7 sportbike, so the timing was perfect.
“They said OK and gave me a small budget,” Muzzy recalls. “And that’s when I hired Doug Chandler and that was the opening stage of my next 10 years that would result in something like 18 championships.”
Muzzy Kawasaki suffered through teething problems developing the new ZX-7 into a Superbike during the ’89 AMA Superbike campaign. But once again Muzzy and Chandler patiently worked through the issues, developing the motorcycle into a winner. Chandler finished with a flourish in ’89, winning the last two races and becoming the only rider in the series that season to win more than one race.
Chandler first AMA Superbike victory at the Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in ‘89, completed the AMA Grand Slam for him by winning nationals on all forms of flat track racing tracks and a road race national. Only Dick Mann, Kenny Roberts and Bubba Shobert had managed the feat before Chandler. No one has done it since.
Chandler came back and won the 1990 AMA Superbike Championship. Muzzy also hired a young up-and-coming rider named Scott Russell, who promptly won the AMA 750 Supersport title that same year. Also key was the fact that Muzzy proved his machines were capable of winning at the highest levels when Chandler scored victory in World Superbike races at Brainerd, Minnesota and Sugo, Japan.
The wins just kept rolling in under Muzzy’s leadership. Russell defending his 750 Supersport title in ’91 and then scoring the AMA Superbike Championship in 1992.
Those results resonated all the way back to the upper echelons at Kawasaki. In the middle of the night Muzzy heard his fax machine printing. Kawasaki’s Misao “Lyndon” Yurikusa was asking Muzzy to head Kawasaki’s World Superbike effort for the 1993 season.
“This was like one in the morning and I faxed him back,” Muzzy said. “I told him I would do it, but that would force me to leave my company so I wanted a personal contract for this much money, before we even talk racing budget. He faxed back like two minutes later on the same piece of paper and it said, ‘OK’. I thought, ‘Oh shit, what have I gotten myself into now!’”
So starting in 1993 Muzzy found himself traveling the globe in the World Superbike Championship. And with Scott Russell riding at his absolute peak, the pair won the title in their first attempt.
While fulfilling to have immediate success at such lofty levels, Muzzy admits he was stretched thin during this period.
“It was tough,” he admits. “I was still trying to keep up an eye on my business, we still had a team in America and we were doing World Superbike.”
Muzzy ran at that torrid pace for four years. In addition to the sheer workload, Muzzy went through some tough times on a more individual level. When Scott Russell abruptly left the team in the middle of the 1995 racing season to race MotoGP with Suzuki, it hit Muzzy particularly hard. Muzzy felt he had helped guide Russell from promising up-and-comer to World Champion. It was an amazing journey conquering the world together and as a result the two had a strong bond. Then Muzzy had a fraught relationship with the uber-talented, but personally troubled rider Anthony Gobert.
By the end of 1996 Muzzy was more than ready to walk away from World Superbike and bring his focus back to America.
Reunited with Doug Chandler, Muzzy Kawasaki once again won two more AMA Superbike Championships in 1996 and ’97.
A new president took over at Kawasaki in 1999. Muzzy met with him and was told his contract with the company would not be renewed to do road racing, but within weeks of learning this, Muzzy said they then asked him to take over Kawasaki’s drag racing program, an important avenue for advertising Kawasaki sport bikes in America. “So that’s how I got into drag racing,” Muzzy adds talking about his transition in 2000. “I ran that program for seven or eight years.”
After his time in Kawasaki’s drag racing program Muzzy began to scale back his activities. In September of 2015 he went into semi-retirement and closed down his exhaust system company. At its peak the Muzzy Racing in Bend, Oregon, employed nearly 50 workers.
While never working directly in MotoGP, Muzzy did help with development work under contract for Kenny Roberts’ Proton GP squad.
Some of the stories that have become legend of Muzzy’s “creative” tuning of his Superbikes, only added to his lore. Muzzy laughs but is quick to add that everything they did was legal. “Obviously I think that was the job of any crew chief, shall we say, to find things within the rules that would help,” Muzzy says.
Muzzy also had great relationships with his riders from Eddie Lawson to Wayne Rainey to Doug Chandler and Scott Russell. He always was careful to listen to what the riders wanted to make them comfortable on the bike. Muzzy tells a story involving Miguel Duhamel that wonderfully illustrates that point.
“Miguel came to race with us after he raced in GP where he had a horrible time,” Muzzy remembers. “And after going through things on the bike with him in testing he said, ‘I can’t believe how much better it is to have someone who cares about making this right for me. In Europe they’d tell me, ‘Tough shit, ride it.’”
Looking back Muzzy says it’s easy to point to the zenith of his career and that was 1993 when he headed up the teams that won the World Superbike Championship and also gave Kawasaki its first victory in the prestigious Suzuka Eight Hour.
It appears the era of tuners, who were nearly as popular as the riders, is past, but even during that high-flying period of motorcycle racing Rob Muzzy stood out as one of the all-time greats.
