Larry Lawrence | February 27, 2022
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Brunson Burner
Kevin Brunson was another in the Texas pipeline of super-talented road racers that produced Freddie Spencer, Kevin Schwantz, John Kocinski, Doug Polen and Colin Edwards, just to name a few. In 1984, Brunson emerged as one of the leading AMA Formula Two (250ccGP) riders. Not only did he win two nationals that season, but he did so on his underdog Rotax-powered Armstrong against a slew of the more established Yamaha and Honda GP machines. And it was even more impressive than that. Had Brunson been just a couple of 10ths faster on the final lap at both Brainerd and Mid-Ohio that season, he would have been a four-race winner in ’84.
Photos by Gary Van Voorhis
Then a funny thing happened to Brunson. He was on a rapid rise and factory teams were starting to pay attention, but at the peak of his career, Brunson had an epiphany.
“I realized that racing was something I did, it wasn’t who I was,” he said.
So, despite wins and podiums and factory racing attention, Brunson decided to walk away. Instead, he focused on finishing his university studies. He later became an inventor of medical devices, many of which are still in use today. In retrospect Brunson made the right call, but as a result very few racing fans today remember one of the leading road racing prospects of the mid-1980s.
Brunson came up flat track racing with the help of his dad. In ’78 Kevin and his dad drove to Shreveport, Louisiana, to buy Freddie Spencer’s Yamaha TZ250E. “I don’t think Freddie was real excited when his dad sold that to us,” Brunson recalls. “But I remember sitting in Freddie’s living room and us doing a deal to buy a couple of his bikes and their trailer.”
From there Brunson honed his skills with a combination of flat tracking and road racing. He had a near-death crash at the Santa Fe Short Track in the summer of ’81, recovered, and scored a breakthrough in October of 1981 in the Fall races at Daytona. Brunson scored a surprise podium (third) behind Sam McDonald and Randy Renfrow. Suddenly people were asking who was this speedy 18-year-old from Texas.
The turning point for Brunson was meeting a racing enthusiast and motor man named A.A. Harper. Harper, who’d cleared mines for the Allied forces in Germany during World War II, was a motor enthusiast who had success in outboard motorboat racing before turning his attention to motorcycles. Harper was looking for a rider and Brunson a sponsor, and with that the duo got together and Brunson began racing Harper’s quirky Armstrong 250 GP bike.
“My dad had taken me as far as he could,” Brunson said. “Mr. Harper was a great sponsor. He’d call me in the middle of the day and tell me to get down to his shop. He was really into aerodynamics, and he’d make some modification to the fairing and call the local sheriff in San Marcos to close off a section of Farm-to-Market Road and I’d go down and ride that thing at top speed with the sheriff’s radar gun on me. That’s just the kind of guy he was and the kind of respect he had around his community.”
Brunson’s new sponsor only wanted to go to tracks he liked.
“Mr. Harper only wanted to do certain races,” Brunson recalls. “He didn’t want to do tracks like Loudon, Willow Springs, Pocono and places like that, so that meant I was never going to do a full season and run for the championship.”
And while most AMA 250 riders were on Yamaha TZs, or Honda RS GP bikes, Brunson spent nearly his entire pro career on the Armstrong, powered by a Rotax tandem, rotary valve two-stroke. It was heavy and difficult to tune, but that was part of the attraction to Harper, trying to make this underdog machine into a winner.
“Kocinski rode it once when I was injured,” Brunson said. “Years later I saw him, and he told me he couldn’t figure out how I even rode the thing, much less won on it.”
One benefit of having Harper as a sponsor was that he liked to stay in nice hotels and eat at nice restaurants, so in many ways Brunson’s life at the races was first class all the way. Most of the time Brunson flew to the races, so in some ways he had the race routine of a factory rider.
After his strong Daytona performance at the end of ’81, Brunson spent most of ’82 focusing on school and didn’t hit the national circuit much at all. But in ’83 Brunson found his way to the podium again at Brainerd and then ended the year with a head-turning victory in the October Daytona race.
That victory served as a springboard to the 1984 season when Brunson had his best year.
“Going into ’84 I had enough experience that I figured that was the year I needed to either make it or get out,” Brunson recalls. “I didn’t make all the rounds, but I talked Mr. Harper into hitting a few more than we had before.”
After opening the season with a sixth at Daytona, Brunson overcame a great battle with Dale Franklin on a windy day at Road America to win that race. “Dale was a great rider,” Brunson said. “And I remember the wind really pushing us all around the track. It was almost impossible to hold your line. That was a big win for me, since Road America was one of the premier tracks, but even though I won it, I didn’t feel I was really doing anything different from before. I think I was just building a lot of confidence.”
Brunson was then edged by Alan Labrosse at Brainerd in an epic battle and also nipped by Sam McDonald by two feet at the line at Mid-Ohio. Later that season Brunson served up a bit of revenge on McDonald in the fall Daytona race by drafting past him on the last lap for the victory. But for a few 10ths on the final laps at Brainerd and Mid-Ohio, Brunson very well could have been a four-race winner in ’84. As it stands, Brunson, Labrosse, McDonald and Wayne Rainey were the only multi-race 250 winners in ’84. Despite his two wins, Brunson said his proudest moment in ’84 was finishing second to Rainey at Laguna Seca. Brunson ended that season with five podiums, including the two wins and finished fourth in the final standings despite missing many of the rounds that season.
In spite of the outstanding season in ’84, Brunson was drawn back to focus on his university studies in 1985. In fact, at Daytona in March, he told a reporter that he was retiring, but he found the time to come back to race a few rounds that summer. At Laguna he battled for the lead with Rainey and John Glover in their heat race before crashing. He and Harper frantically went to work on the bike to get it ready for the main event. In the rush, Brunson accidently set the timing slightly off on the rear cylinder. That led to an accidental discovery and a monumental charge through the field that day.
“In the race I started from the very back of the grid because of my heat race crash,” Brunson recalls. “Once the race was going my bike was running like a rocketship. I just sliced through the field and was passing guys everywhere.”
In the end Brunson made it from dead last all the way up to fifth and the fans were keyed in on it, since the race announcer was going crazy following his charge.
What they’d discovered in the haste of putting the Rotax motor back together after the heat crash, was that Kevin had inadvertently timed the rear cylinder for acceleration, and, Harper, the front cylinder for top end. It was a discovery Brunson said he wished they would have stumbled on earlier in the bike’s development.
The bike was so good at that point that at the Daytona season finale, Brunson ran away and hid in his heat race and then opened an incredible 11-second lead in the main event in just seven laps, before making what he called a silly mistake crashing out of the lead.
Heading into 1985 Brunson said he had several options on the table, including a factory offer. And while Brunson, on one hand, was excited by the prospect, he had a strange sense of foreboding.
“Tracks were still pretty brutal back then,” Brunson said. “And we were making that transition from bias ply to radial tires. So, where you used to be able to slide the bike in and out of turns, with radials suddenly you had all this grip like never before, and then it would snap and let go with no hope of catching it. It was a time of a of vicious high sides and a lot of guys were getting hurt.”
The lingering memories of the 1983 Brainerd accident that killed Mark Jones and Hugh Humble also weighed heavily on Brunson’s mind. With all that taken into consideration, combined with career options his education provided him, Brunson made the decision to turn down the offers and retire from racing.
He worked for Cycle Magazine for a time, then later, employed at his father’s medical company, Brunson invented and earned patents on several important pieces of medical gear, including disposable face masks capable of filtering liquids. The company was sold to a conglomerate in the late 1990s and that allowed Brunson to pursue other activities including aviation and ranching, which is what keeps him busy these days.
“I had the time of my life,” Brunson said. “When you walk away from something as exhilarating as racing, you’re always going to miss it. Sometimes I wonder how far I might have gone in the racing, but I have no regrets. I think I ultimately did what I was meant to do.” CN