LUNCH WITH LESTER HARRIS
A fascinating chat with the chassis guru turned WSB team boss
One of the many advantages of youth is a blissful ignorance of how difficult some tasks are. Take Lester Harris, for example. In 1977 he was 25 and decided to design and build a production motorcycle with his older brother Steve and their friend Stephen Bayford. Never mind the fact that the British bike industry had recently imploded – they got on with the Harris Magnum.
“We’d built an endurance racer from a Kawasaki Z1000,” says Lester, as he awaits the sausage and mash he’s ordered at a pub near the Harris Performance factory in Hertford. “Then people started ringing us, saying: ‘I’ve seen that endurance racer you built – it’s got headlights on it, I want one on the road’.”
At this point, an older head would no doubt have shied away from the idea, remembering dozens of similar enterprises that went sump-up over the years. But the Harris trio were having none of that. “We went to our local Kawasaki dealer, bought a brand new Z1000 and built a road bike. That was the Magnum. We styled it ourselves and made our own fairing, seat and tank. We thought we knew what looked nice, but with the benefit of hindsight it looked hideous.”
Sales were, predictably, modest. Though the bike handled beautifully – not surprising given their racing experience – and the Z1000 engine was a peach, the looks were a stumbling block. “Later on we were sitting in our unit, reading MCN, and noticed that the new Suzuki Katana was styled by Target Design in Germany. My brother said: ‘We should get them to style our next bike’. Bear in mind that, at that stage, we were three blokes working in an old mushroom shed. I said: ‘Do me a favour, they’ll never do any work for us. We’re penniless.’ But Steve phoned them up anyway and it transpired that Target Design were a two-man company – and Jan [Fellstrom] said he’d design our bike for us. He did a load of sketches and eventually made us a clay model, which we had moulds taken off – and that was the Magnum 2.”
Suddenly, Lester and the two Steves had a hit on their hands. “We must have sold 1000 of them over the years; it was the bike that turned us from a little jobbing engineering shop into a manufacturer. We sort of productionised it. By today’s standards we didn’t really, but we did break everything down into sub-assemblies so we could make it in more volume. We got to a point where we were making four bikes a week – on top of all the other stuff we were doing. When I look back, I don’t know how we had the energy to do it all. I don’t think we ever went home.”
A relentless work ethic has been a consistent element of Lester’s career – he’s still working hard now, aged 68 – but to start with, the motivation was rather different. Back then, the purpose of the business was to fund his and Steve’s racing habit, which had developed from an early love of thrashing round on cheap bikes.
“We didn’t come from a motorcycling family,” says Lester, “but we lived in the country, so there was room to ride around on old bangers like my wreck of a Bantam. Steve and I both went into engineering – him as a welder and I did an engineering apprenticeship.
“We were both club racing by then. Steve is two years older than me, so he’d started first and had a BSA A65 that he’d built with our local dealer Dick Rainbow. He raced it for a year and at the end of the season offered me a go at Snetterton. It was absolutely mint, and of course I rode it like a complete tw*t and crashed at Coram on the second lap. To his eternal credit, Steve didn’t brain me – but I bought it off him and started racing on that. It was a good bike, way better than I was. I thought I was pretty good on the road, but when you go racing it’s a shock how fast everyone is.
“Steve was sponsored by then and rode an ex-malcolm Uphill Triumph Bonneville, which was a really nice bike.
I went on to race a G50, Steve had a Seeley, then we went two-stroke. He raced a Yamaha 350 TR2B – we went down to Phil Read’s and bought it off him. But the first time Steve rode it, it threw a rod and cut the engine in half. I then built a 500 Suzuki twin and Steve got one too, so we were doing all sorts of bits and pieces.”
Lester was winning races and suspected he might be good enough to go professional. Then he went to the TT: “Back then [1972] it was the pinnacle, everyone aspired to go – and when I saw some of the top guys there I thought: ‘I can’t do that’. They were just so, so fast. It’s the same now – I watch Peter Hickman and those guys in awe. I was a good club racer, but I wasn’t in that class. Both Steve and I knew we weren’t going to crack it as professional riders.” By then Lester and Steve had decided to make a race bike frame using the knowledge they had amassed during their apprenticeships – Steve with Racing Frames, which made tubular chassis for F1 cars, and Lester with a racing kart manufacturer. “We thought we’d start a little business that would pay for our racing. There was no other goal. All we wanted to do was go racing.
“But as so often happens when you start taking orders from people, their priority becomes greater than yours. They want to go racing, we’ve taken an order to build them something, and it’s not long before we were building that instead of going racing ourselves. Within nine months we’d stopped riding altogether.
“First we built frames that were copies of something else,
but the first bike we designed was around a Suzuki twostroke engine. We were friendly with Martin Hines who ran Zip Karts and he gave us this 250cc motor he’d developed for his superkarts. So, not really thinking about it, as you do when you’re young, we said yes. We designed a chassis, put this engine in it and I was going to race it. But what we hadn’t realised – I was only 22 – was that the power characteristics of a kart engine were very different to a motorcycle. All the power is at the top and I simply couldn’t keep it in the powerband. It was impossible – and dreadful. It taught us a lot, though. Also, it brought us in other work.”
Though the Suzuki wasn’t a success on track, it helped confirm that Lester loved the process of solving motorcycle engineering problems. “Very quickly I got almost as much buzz out of building a bike, developing it and seeing it being successful as I did from riding it. So there was a seamless transition from rider to engineer.”
By this stage it was obvious that the Harris team had the knowledge, drive and talent to succeed; but with hindsight, Lester reckons their accomplishments were also down to timing. “Back then, doing what we did was easier because there was a big appetite for improving bikes – they were quite fast, but the brakes, handling and tyres were crap. There was a big market for us.”
A fine example of this improvement was the twin-shock Yamaha TZ700 of 1974 which “handled terribly” according to Lester. It was ripe for the Harris treatment. “Yamaha had recently released a monoshock trials bike [the TY250], which was quite a revolutionary thing back then. We looked at it and thought we should use the idea, so we started converting race bikes to monoshock. We did a lot of those, so when the TZ700 turned up we converted that.” It was hugely successful: “We went to the Formula 750 World Championship round at Silverstone and 15 bikes on the grid had our swingarms on. And we were still just boys really.”
By 1980, their reputation for chassis-fettling, hard work and honesty had spread wider than they imagined. “This bloke phoned up one day and said: ‘It’s Barry Sheene here and I’d like you to do a bit of work for me’.” Steve Bayford took the call and thought it was a wind-up. “But it really was Barry and he told us he’d got these factory Yamaha GP bikes that wouldn’t do what he wanted. It was such a coup for us to work for him – by then he was an
‘BACK THEN, BIKES WERE QUITE FAST BUT THE BRAKES, HANDLING AND TYRES WERE CRAP. THERE WAS A BIG MARKET FOR US’
international superstar,” says Lester, still looking slightly stunned that Barry Sheene knew who they were. “We made lots of frames for Barry and some very trick linkage systems. I used to draw all this freehand with a pencil – it took ages.
“Barry was such a top bloke to work with. He said at the start: ‘I don’t expect you to do this work for nothing, I’ll pay you. But I expect 100% from you.’ He was only difficult when he didn’t get what he wanted, and he was totally single-minded. He had total conviction that he was the best rider in the world, that he should be winning, and everyone else should be doing what’s necessary to get him there.
“He generated this persona of the playboy – and he was a bit of one, but he worked bloody hard. He was out in his garage with his mechanic Ken all the time. He was fastidious.
“Working with Barry did our credibility a lot of good. Mick Grant, John Newbold, Trevor Nation... all the top
British riders rode our stuff at one time or another, so we had a good client base.”
It wasn’t just the Brits who wanted to tap into Harris’s chassis-building skills – a certain three-time world champion was interested, too. “In the late ’80s Kenny Roberts was bitterly unhappy working with the Japanese factories and GP racing was in a perilous state [there were only 12 regular riders on the grid in 1988, for example]. He had this idea of getting factory engines from Yamaha and building privateer bikes.
“We had a lot of meetings with him and Yamaha and I don’t know exactly what happened – he probably p*ssed them off – and he stepped back from the idea. But it had sown the seed with Yamaha and in 1991 they decided to release engines to private manufacturers who could build machines for privateers. They chose us and Serge Rosset [of ROC].
“In the first year, our bike and Serge’s were basically copies of the factory bike. We figured customers would want what Wayne Rainey was riding [particularly as Yamaha were charging £100,000 for the engine alone]. But over the years we veered off and did our own thing. The last YZR we made had no similarity to the factory bike at all, apart from the engine – the method of construction, geometry, airbox, bodywork... everything was different.”
And the plan to repopulate grids was working – 17 out of the 27 bikes that started the British GP in 1994 were either Harris or ROC Yamahas. “It was an exciting time – we were running a GP team. How did that happen?! At one time we had three bikes, and a three rider team is a big outfit. Of course, we were fighting amongst the B-teams but had some good results – Foggy was right on the pace at Donington [in 1992] and Terry Rymer got a sixth [in 1992 again].”
With his brother travelling round the world running the GP team, Lester, Stephen Bayford and Harris’s growing team of craftsmen had to rise to the task of keeping the business going back home. They were stretched, but holding things together. Then the complexity rose to a whole new level: “Just before the GP team wound down, Gary Taylor at Suzuki asked us to run their new factory World
‘WE WERE RUNNING A GP TEAM. HOW DID THAT HAPPEN?! WE HAD THREE BIKES – A THREE RIDER TEAM IS A BIG OUTFIT’
Superbike team with the GSX-R750,” says Lester. This was too good an opportunity to turn down: “For a year I was running that team, my brother was running the GP team and Steve Bayford was administering both while running the factory. Somehow he managed to keep all the plates spinning.
“There were huge amounts of stress running the WSB team, but I got a big buzz out of it. For two years we had Jamie Whitham riding for us and he’s such a good bloke. You’d be having loads of problems with the bike and he’d come in the garage and always be a laugh. He never criticised anyone except himself and always gave 110%. It makes such a difference when you’re working with people like that. The other riders were good, too – Kirk Mccarthy, John Reynolds, Peter Goddard – but James was just such a laugh.”
For the first year Lester’s stress levels weren’t helped by a mysterious problem with the GSX-R. “We had horrendous stability problems – and the bizarre thing was, it was worse on John Reynolds’ bike than on Kirk’s. We couldn’t work it out. At Hockenheim it was so bad that Troy Corser came over and said: ‘What’s the matter with your bike?’. “Mr Imada [senior Suzuki manager] was with us, so I said: ‘Let’s go over to the back of the circuit and see how bad it is.’ John came past once and it was in a lock-to-lock tank slapper down the straight. It was bloody frightening. Mr Imada said: ‘Finished!’ and withdrew the bike. All the time John had been saying it was unstable, but he hadn’t
‘THERE WERE HUGE AMOUNTS OF STRESS RUNNING THE WSB TEAM, BUT I GOT A BIG BUZZ OUT OF IT’
really been moaning and at no point had he said: ‘I’m not getting on it’. That is when those blokes earn their money.” We’re finishing our coffee and though Lester has mentioned the stress the three Harris directors were under, I wonder if he has glossed over any fights. “Not really. Working with my brother and Steve B all these years has been great – we get on very well. Obviously we’ve had disagreements, but they’ve never been serious. The beauty of there being three of us is that you can do consensus management – when two of you want to do something, that’s the way we go. With two people it would have been more difficult, and having three people helped stop us doing anything too stupid.
“We’ve done endurance racing, British Championship, TT, WSB, Grand Prix, customs, Bonneville Speed Trials… we somehow seemed to have had our finger in all the pies. How much is skill and how much is luck, I don’t know. It’s got a lot to do with the people we’ve employed – most have worked for us for over 20 years and there’s nothing those blokes can’t make. If you’re going to grow, you need great people. I’ve been in the motorcycle industry for nearly 50 years and there is virtually no one in our segment of the market that was there when we started. So I think we’ve done OK.”