Lester Harris – legendary bike builder and performance guru
One of the founders of Harris Performance, who helped transform handling for all
‘The phone rang and it was Barry Sheene’
‘Bikes were fast but the brakes and handling were crap’
Over the last 50 years Lester Harris has built everything from a complete production bike to frames for 500cc GP racers. He’s worked with everyone from Kenny Roberts to James Whitham and along with his brother Steve and school friend Stephen Bayford he turned Harris Performance Products into a global leader in chassis design – so much so that in 2015 Royal Enfield bought the entire company.
As is so often the case with British motorcycle engineers, the journey started with racing: “I won some club races but both Steve and I knew we weren’t going to crack it as professional riders. So we thought we’d start a little business that would pay for our racing. But as so often happens when you start taking orders from people, their priority becomes greater than yours. It wasn’t long before we were building bikes instead of going racing ourselves. Within nine months we’d stopped riding altogether. “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. We’d built an endurance racer from a Kawasaki Z1000 and 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.’ “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. “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. But Steve phoned them up anyway and Jan [Fellstrom] said he’d design our bike for us. That was the Magnum 2. We must have sold a thousand of them over the years; it was the bike that turned us from a little jobbing engineering shop into a manufacturer.
“Then in 1980 this bloke phoned up and said: ‘It’s Barry Sheene here and I’d like you to do a bit of work for me.’ 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 international superstar. “We made lots of frames for Barry and some very trick linkage systems. He was such a top bloke to work with – he generated this persona of the
playboy, and he was a bit of one, but he worked bloody hard.
“In 1991 Yamaha decided to release engines to private manufacturers who could build machines for privateers. They chose us and Serge Rosset [of ROC]. 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]. “Just before the GP team wound down, Garry Taylor at Suzuki asked us to run their new factory WSB team with the GSX-R750. There were huge amounts of stress 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 but he’d always be a laugh. He never criticised anyone except himself and always gave 110%. “We’ve done endurance racing, British Championship, TT, WSB, Grand Prix, customs, Bonneville Speed Trials… we 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 our people – most have worked for us for over 20 years and there’s nothing those blokes can’t make.”