Larry Lawrence | July 13, 2016
Doug Toland had no big expectations from road racing when he got into the sport, he just loved to ride motorcycles. In fact, the more races he entered, the more laps he turned, the more fun he had. Then he was asked to fill-in for an absent rider at an endurance race and Toland loved it. “I knew I’d found something I wanted to do more,” Toland explained of his first endurance race. “Lap after lap for an hour or more at a time and an ear-to-ear grin the entire way.” It seemed like Toland was made to be an endurance racer and he climbed the ranks which eventually led him to his biggest claim of fame – in 1993 becoming the first American to win an FIM Endurance World Championship.
Toland grew up in Southern California’s Orange County and like so many kids of era his parents bought him a minibike when he was a kid. Even though racing was many years in the future, a template was already being set. As a kid, the only thing Toland needed to be happy was a full tank of gas and some trails to explore. And when the end of the single track or fire road approached, he wasn’t shy about finding the next trail by riding his dirt bike on the street. “You wouldn’t get in too much trouble doing that back then,” Toland remembers. “I think we all did it.”
While still a teenager Toland got a job at a local dealership. He’d been racing motocross, but one of the mechanics at the dealership was a road racer and Toland was invited to come along and give it a try at Willow Springs. He was 17.
Toland was fast from the start, his years of play riding on the dirt paid off. He was able to get the most out of his street bike, a Kawasaki KZ550, even though the setup may have not been ideal. “I just went out and rode,” Toland recalls. “I didn’t know anything about suspension settings or anything else about setting up a bike for road racing. The thing had trouble with ground clearance so I just put bigger tires on it. I didn’t know anything.”
The turning point for Toland came during an AFM Six-Hour Endurance race at Willow Springs in ’83. Toland just showed up to watch some buddies race and one of the team riders couldn’t make it at the last minute. They asked Toland if he wanted to ride and even though he had to scramble and borrow riding gear. Riding a nearly stock Kawasaki GPz750, Toland and teammate Jeff Tuttobene stunned a slew of strong teams to win the race. That was Toland’s first high-profile victory and gained him a reputation as one of the top up-and-coming riders in the ultra-competitive SoCal road racing scene.
In the middle of 1985 Toland joined the Team Hammer in the WERA National Endurance Series and for the first time began getting experience at tracks outside of Southern California. He raced in all kinds of weather conditions, day and night. A lot of things were happening for Toland at this point in his career. He got his first opportunity to do an AMA Superbike race and he rode for Yoshimura Suzuki as teammate to Kevin Schwantz. At Laguna Seca in July of ’85 Toland’s AMA Superbike debut resulted in a solid fifth-place on the Yoshimura Suzuki GS700ES Superbike. At about the same he was asked to come in at the last minute to do a photo shoot for Cycle World and that led to a him becoming a tester for the magazine.
In 1986 Toland was a member of Team Hammer when it won the WERA National Endurance Championship. He was also making decent money club racing and winning a lot of Suzuki GSXR contingency races. Toland was so dominant in fact, that when Doug Polen announced he was coming to race at Willow Springs, the Toland vs. Polen buildup for that showdown was one of the biggest ever for a club race. Toland also got the opportunity to ride for the Vance & Hines Suzuki Superbike squad in select AMA Superbike races and he scored an impressive fourth at Sears Point in May of that year.
With the kind of quality finishes Toland was earning in at AMA Superbike events, you would have thought he would have been a shoo-in for a factory Superbike ride. Unfortunately, at that point in AMA Superbike, there weren’t many rides to be had and even though he scored the occasional factory and factory-backed rides with Suzuki, he never quite landed a full-time gig in the series.
In ’87 Toland suddenly found himself without a ride. He did some development and AMA 250 Grand Prix races with Ron Wood on his Rotax-based GP bike. “The Wood-Rotax bike was something completely different for me,” Toland said. “I was used to nothing but inline fours and being a big single it vibrated a lot in comparison, but it was light nimble and fun to ride, but it was never going to compete with the top 250 two-strokes for a variety of reasons but it was a great experience working with Ron.”
A magazine feature on a Team Cycle World Suzuki GSX-750 stuffed with an 1100cc motor, racing the 1988 WERA 24 Hours West at Willow where Toland turned the fastest laps, caught the attention of a world endurance team owner, who invited Toland over to do the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He did well enough to be asked to race the rest of the year and it turned into a five-year stint of World Championship Endurance racing.
His championship came in ’93. In a somewhat strange arrangement in World Endurance in that era, points were awarded to riders instead of teams. Toland ran for two squads – his normal French Honda team and, for two rounds, the UK-based Phase One Kawasaki squad. Toland turned into a world title contender when he became the first American on a race-winning team during a 24-hour race July 3-4 at the Spa course in Belgium.
In the final race, the Bol d’Or, Toland was back on the French Honda team, riding with Andre Lussiana of France and Peter Linden of Sweden.
“With three hours to go, the lead riders dropped out with mechanical problems so all I needed was to finish ninth or better to win the championship.
“We were running third at the time and ready to go for the win, but the team decided it was more important for me to win the world title than the race. We cut back about 1,000 r.p.m. to save the bike and not take any chances. It was a tremendous thing for them to do but that was the relationship the team and riders had; it was like family.”
Toland came back to America to wrap up his racing career, riding for Erion Racing Honda. He and teammate Andrew Stroud won the AMA SuperTeams title in 1996. In ’97 he scored seven podiums and finished runner up in the AMA Formula Xtreme Championship to Stroud.
In ’97 Toland joined American Honda and today he’s close to 20 years with the company.
“I always tried to be respectful and a good listener to everyone I came across in the industry,” Toland said. “And I think because of those relationships one thing always seemed to lead to another. It’s great, I wouldn’t change a thing. Would I have liked to have raced full time in AMA Superbike or World Superbike? Sure. I got to ride a few of the MotoGP bikes in various capacities and that would have been fun to be able to race one of those too, but I got out of racing what I did and it led me to where I am today and the ride is still going.”