Larry Lawrence | October 26, 2016
Photo by Henny Abrams
Racing is never predictable, but in mid-1990s AMA Supersport racing the one thing you could bet on was that a factory rider would win. That’s the way it had been for years in the series, which was just a notch under AMA Superbike in terms of importance, during the sport bike decade of the 1990s. So when Todd Harrington raced his 4&6 Cycle Kawasaki ZX-6R to victory in the Pro Honda Oils AMA Supersport race at Road America in June of 1996, it marked one of the biggest upset victories in the history of American motorcycle road racing.
The victory by a privateer team was huge news and it propelled Harrington from a little-known up-and-comer, to the hottest property in AMA road racing. And while the victory ultimately landed Harrington a factory ride, he found himself on the right team, at the wrong time. Instead of moving forward with his factory ride, Harrington ended up spinning his wheels, unable to make the impact on the sport many expected he would.
Motorcycles had been part of Todd Harrington’s life since he was a kid in the western suburbs of Chicago. His parents tried to steer him away from motorcycles. “My dad even bought me a boat,” Harrington grins. “He thought having a boat as a kid would be safer than a motorcycle, but I wasn’t going to give up until I got a bike.”
His parents finally relented and got him his first minibike and that started Harrington on a journey that would eventually see him earn one of the most unlikely victories in professional racing.
Harrington began his club racing at a local track called Blackhawk Farms and he was instantly one of the fastest novice riders in the field. All the while Harrington was splitting time attending college at Northern Illinois University studying psychology.
While he burned up the tracks of the Midwest, the big coming out party for Harrington came at the Daytona AMA/CCS Race of Champions in October of 1992. Harrington was the headliner of that year’s event, scoring a record six race wins in the amateur class. Nearly all the of the coverage of the Race of Champions that year centered on Harrington and pro teams were taking notice. Harrington thought he already saw his path to the pro ranks.
“I was a big fan of Colin Edwards and tried to emulate what he did by racing AMA 250 Grand Prix,” Harrington said. “It probably wasn’t the best idea. I was used to racing production bikes and I was thrown into the deep end trying to go straight from novice club racer to AMA Pro.”
As a rookie he typically ran from about 13th to 18th every race in the AMA 250 Grand Prix Series and finished the season ranked 14th. Not bad my most standards, but for a rider many were touting as the next Colin Edwards, it cast some doubts on his potential.
He moved back to what he knew in ’94, Supersport racing and again he took his lumps up against perhaps an even deeper field of talent in that class. He missed a lot of the 1995 season with injuries, but he hopped on a Superbike for the first time and turned in a very respectable 12th place at Pomona.
Things turned around in a big way for Harrington in ’96. He hooked up with builder Jim Rashid of 4&6 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 mid-season 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 promising, 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 Duhamel’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 leaders 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, 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 ruined 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,” Harrington 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 company 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!”