Racing For A Living
RACING FOR A LIVING
RACE WATCH
Is Britt Turkington the next Doug Polen?
ITS INSECT-ENCRUSTED NOSE pushed against a chain-link fence, the beat-up 1977 Ford delivery van rested in the pits at the Road Atlanta race course, its balding tires and rusting body panels completing the picture of dilapidation. But there was a kind of hush around the Ford because Britt Turkington, the van's owner, was speaking as if he didn't want the van to hear him talking about its condition. "I have to drive it home yet," he whispered.
Home for 27-year-old Turkington is Donna, Texas, but for the better part of last year, he was seldom there. Instead, he lived in motels and in the van as he chased the Suzuki Cup Series around the country, getting more roadracing experience every weekend, along with just enough prize money to make it to the next race.
Turkington is one of the many racers inspired by Doug Polen, the Texas rider who used the Suzuki Cup to springboard to a lucrative racing career. But the Polen connection goes deeper than racing by example: “I used to race with Polen in the early Eighties,” Turkington says. “I would even occasionally beat him back in the old days, and when I saw the kind of success he was having in 1986, I thought I could do that, too.”
That explains why Turkington raced more than 50 times during the 1989 season. Yet, even though he lined up on a starting grid almost every weekend, Turkington didn’t make the kind of money Polen made in 1986, 1987 and 1988, as there are more top-level riders going after the purses these days, splitting up the pot. Of course, Suzuki intended its contingency series to work that way in the first place, but that puts quite a financial burden on guys like Turkington who race for a living without benefit of a factory contract.
Faced with travel expenses and parts costs, Turkington turned to creative financing. He explains how he went “credit-card racing,” paying his monthly installments with money he won at weekend races. “At the first of this season, I felt like I raced for MasterCard,” he says. “A couple of times my card was maxed out. That meant I had to spend another night in the van.”
Because Turkington traveled on his own for the better part of the season, he had to be driver, mechanic, manager and rider. And as the season wore on, his van wore down and his bikes wore out. At the combined WERA and Suzuki Cup finals at Road Atlanta, a meeting of the best amateur and professional racers in the country, Turkington’s bikes matched his van, looking like they had been dragged behind the Ford all the way from Texas.
Bad enough was his scuffed and scratched 1988 GSX-R1 100, held together with yards of duct tape. But that bike looked brand-new compared with his thrashed GSX-R750, about which, he says, “I literally pulled it out of a trash can.” With its dented fuel tank and mismatched bodywork, the bike seemed to long for the crashed-parts bin from which he rescued it. “My bikes were worn out,” he admits. “When I wasn’t riding them, I was working on them.”
His long-suffering bikes were fatigued not simply because of the sheer number of racing hours Turkington had on them, but also because his ’round-the-country traveling left little time for regular maintenance. But hard work does pay off, even in roadracing, and for 1990, Turkington has signed to ride for the U.S. Suzuki endurance team. Manager John Ulrich likes Turkington for several reasons, but two stick out: “He races a lot, and I can't remember the last time he crashed,” says Ulrich. “A lot of guys can go fast when everything is perfect, but Turkington can go fast anytime. He can find out what’s wrong, and ride around it.”
That’s a perfect description of Turkington’s Road Atlanta weekend. > He finished fourth in the 600cc race, getting beat out of third place on the last lap. In the 750 and l lOOcc races, his machinery was simply outclassed, but he still rode to respectable 12thand 7th-place finishes, respectively.
When Turkington dreams about the future, he is like most roadracers, seeing GPs as the goal. But he acknowledges he is already relatively old for a roadracer, and that it would be tough for him to snag a grand prix ride, even if the next couple of seasons turn out great for him. But for 1990, at least, he will start ahead of where he was last year. And with team support and better-prepared bikes to ride, the end of the season should see him in a stronger position, as well.
All in all, that ought to make him feel pretty good. At least he won’t have to worry about the credit manager at MasterCard anymore.
—Camron E. Bussard
