Club Roadracing's Professional Amateur
Club Roadracing's Professional Amateur
RACE WATCH
Watch out America. Doug Polen has his act together and he's taking it on the road
DAVID EDWARDS
RON LAWSON
TO HEAR ROADRACER DOUG Polen tell it, everything is going according to plan.
“What I want to do is continually build my career,” he’ll tell you with a zeal born of conviction, “so that in three or four years I can go for a world championship title. That’s my end goal: to be world champion.”
Heady talk for a man who two years ago didn’t even have a motorcycle to ride.
Doug Polen, 26, is a Texas club racer who’s made good. The first part of his story isn't really much different than that of any number of go-fast kids who gravitate to roadracing’s minor leagues. He got interested in motorcycles at the age of 13, when, after transplanting Doug and his two brothers from New York to the wilds of north Texas, their parents bought them a Honda XR75. “We wore it out,” remembers Polen. “It was ridden eight hours a day every day of the week.”
Next came a Suzuki trail bike and a stint as a part-time mechanic at a local cycle shop, Spencer Suzuki, run by one Danny Spencer. You may have heard of Spencer’s younger brother: Freddie. One day, Danny Spencer took Polen, then 16, to a roadrace, and according to Polen, “That was it.”
Polen already had a Suzuki GS550 streetbike, and before long, he had ported and polished and piped it into what he thought was a pretty trick racebike. So trick that it delivered him to a last-place finish in his very first roadrace. Polen overcame that setback by buying a Yamaha RD400 and leaving it stock. Within five or six races he was running near the top of the Production class. Expansion chambers and a set of carbs bumped the RD up to the more-competitive Café class, and still Polen was among the front-runners. By this time, he had also re-done the GS550, and was riding so well that within a year and a half, he was winning most of his races convincingly.
People began to take notice. In 1980, D&D Enterprises, an exhaustpipe manufacturer in Fort Worth, put Polen on its Honda CB750Fbased Superbike. More success followed. The team even went to the Daytona 200 in 1982, where Polen qualified 10th fastest, only to be sidelined early in the race by a blown engine.
A tryout with Team Honda late in 1982 didn’t lead to a factory contract, but Polen was impressive enough that he was given a works aluminum chassis, into which Dave Rash of D&D installed a $6000 HRC engine. The bike’s first race was Daytona ’83, but brake problems forced an early retirement from that race.
Pole,, oil 1987. "1 (liii,!; surprise (1 feii'people'
The bike won next time out, a local race in Texas, but soon afterward, it was retired in favor of a new Inter ceptor 750, stock except for a D&D exhaust. In his first race on the 750, Polen went three seconds a lap quicker than he'd ever gone at that track before. A little motor work, and the Interceptor was ready for the Austin Aqua Festival, a yearly city wide celebration that features a run what-ya-brung motorcycle race through the streets of the Texas capital.
It would be Polen's last race for a! most three years.
At the start ot the race F'olen and long-time Triumph rider John Minonno tangled. Polen ran into a curb and was launched 15 feet into the air. When the metal stopped grinding and the dust settled, Minonno was unconscious and Polen wasn't much better. He walked away from that race. And from racing.
"I decided it just wasn't worth it, not for a three-dollar trophy. Even an AMA race was worth only five or six hundred dollars. There wasn't much future in it,” he says.
For the next two and a half years, Polen did business in the “gray market,” modifying imported German cars to meet U.S. emissions standards. In fact, he still might be putting the EPA tweak on Porsches, Mercedes and BMWs if the the dollar had not taken such a mighty dump compared to the deutschemark. And if Suzuki hadn't come out with the GSX-R.
To help promote its new sportbike, Suzuki initiated an unprecedented grass-roots contingency program for 1986. Win a Stock Production class at a club roadrace on a GSX-R750 or GSX-R 1 100, and Suzuki would pony up a thousand big ones. Second place was worth $500, third $250.
Back in Texas, news of the GSX-R Cup Series, as the contingency program was called, reached John Minonno and the owner of the Suzuki dealership in Polen’s hometown, Dick Coleman. They talked to Polen, who saw the program as a chance to get back into the local racing scene and not go broke doing it. The series schedule indicated there would be 65 races, all over the country. “Why don’t we run some of those,” someone asked, and before long a plan was in motion. Coleman donated his Ford van. An ex-drag racer's 14-foot trailer was conscripted. A bank was only too happy to loan the money to buy two GSX-Rs and an Interceptor 500 (Honda also had a similar contingency series), as long as Polen came up with the $ 1000-a-month payments. Now he had to win.
And win he did. For the next nine months, Polen became the traveling minstrel of motorcycle roadracing, competing in 34 separate race meetings. Often driving 24 hours at a stretch, he would point the van toward Alabama or Pennsylvania, Florida or Wisconsin, California or Colorado. Most of the time, Polen’s brothers, James and Gregg, would -help out with the driving and serve as mechanics at the races. Sometimes it was Coleman, or Minonno or other friends. And sometimes Polen would go by himself, a radar detector his only companion. “Only three tickets all year,” he says, smiling.
When it was over, Coleman’s van was 80,000 miles closer to its final reward. But Polen, the un-retired club racer from Denton, Texas, had won 62 of the 84 individual races he had entered. Amazingly, his total winnings added up to $92,000.
Not all that money came from local club races, either. Polen finished 19th i☺n the Daytona 200, running an essentially stock GSX-R750. At Laguna Seca, he was seventh in the Superbike race and sixth in the Formula One final, again riding slightly modified streetbikes. Then Suzuki flew Polen to the Mid-Ohio national and put him on the spare Yoshimura Superbike. With two laps to go, he was running third behind eventual series champion Fred Merkel and fellow Texan Kevin Schwantz when he ran over some debris on the track and crashed.
“That was my biggest setback of the season,” Polen says of the incident, which he cites as the reason he doesn’t have a factory contract with Suzuki this year. “It was disheartening, but I got over it quickly.”
While Polen doesn’t have a fullhouse factory ride, Suzuki has given him some frames and race-kitted engines that Polen and Otis Lance, yet
another Texas roadracer, will campaign under the Kosar Racing banner. They plan to enter all 10 AMA Superbike nationals this year, starting with Daytona. “I think we’ll surprise a few people,” says Polen, mischievously.
Not surprisingly, Polen will also make as many GSX-R Cup Series races as possible. And this year he’s got an organization to back him up. Incorporated as Texas Hy Performance, Polen’s company will be run by his father, a retired Xerox plant manager, with brother James serving as full-time meachanic and driver. Additional contingency programs have been set up with Polen’s sponsors, Dunlop tires, AGV helmets and RK chains, and he has a Hurricane 600 for use in Honda’s new Hurricane series.
“You shouldn’t do a program, unless you do it right,” Polen says. “And 1986 was a good example of that. Everything was planned to get recognition, to get my name out for the 1987 season. After all, sponsors don’t just give away money and con-
tracts. A professional roadracing career is not just riding on a racetrack. It’s also what you can do for a sponsor and the sport. You’ve got to have fun in this sport, but the business end has to be run in a businesslike manner.”
In his first competition of 1987, a club race in California, Polen the racer had an up-and-down day, winning the 750 class, but destroying his brand-new GSX-R 1 100 in an Openclass crash. But Polen the businessman fared better. After adding up all his contingency money, Polen headed back to Texas with an extra $2200 in his pocket.
And a race schedule in his hand.
