AmSnow.com is now SnoWest.com
Frustrating
To say the least, this was very frustrating. We had been hired to show Kawasaki what it needed to be competitive, and I felt only higher rpm would do it. After talking it over, Jimmy and I decided to rev the engine after all, to see what its potential power was. We also decided to throw the SRX pipes on it while everybody was at lunch to prove our point.
The exercise worked! We actually pulled 102 horses at 10,000 rpm, and were ready to rev it even higher when an absolutely furious Japanese engineer appeared in the dyno room and hit the kill button. I am positive that we got our butts chewed pretty badly, but we did not understand the language so we didn’t know exactly what we had been called.
A half an hour later we found ourselves in Mather’s office where he gave us a few pointed words, in English.
“You were specifically told not to rev that engine over 8,000 rpm, and the Japanese engineer is absolutely furious, and so is the vice president of Kawasaki,” he said. “I have been told to fire you guys immediately.”
“But Gary,” we argued, “you hired us to tell Kawasaki what kind of power you need to be competitive, and you need at least 100 hp. The only way you are going to get it with that engine is to rev it at 10,000 rpm.”
“You may be right about that Olav,” Gary said, “but that is not the point. That may happen later in the year, but right now you guys are screwing up our development program. I brought you two wild brains in here and I will be dammed if I’ll lose my job because you two don’t want to listen and follow instructions.”
So fired we were, and after removing the SRX engine we left the chassis they had bought in Shakopee and headed down the road with mixed emotions.
After losing the racing program at Evinrude and now being fired by Kawasaki all in a year’s time, our future did not look all that bright. Little did we know that fortunes would turn in our favor the following year.
Back in the saddle
We got a ’77 SRX on the Yamaha support program and I hired Kenny Konop as a driver so I could concentrate on my business. While testing on the Rice Lake Ice Road we had developed a new traction product called the “Kicker” that mounted under the slide rail. It became a big success and built a solid base for our new performance business.
Kawasaki never did develop a higher revving engine, and when its team hit the racetrack in 1977 it ran squarely into a freight train called Polaris’ Midnight Blue Express.
Bob Eastman and his racers, Brad Hulings, Steve Thorson and Jerry Bunke, totally dominated the season. Their 440 was a triple pulling close to 120 horses at more than 10,000 rpm, and with a new IFS suspension no one could touch them.
Kawasaki was looking at a large gap in performance and with the engine still only revving at 8,000 rpm its team was 35 hp down on Polaris. By the Hartford, Mich., race in January Kawasaki had higher revving pipes, but only at 9,000 rpm. By then Kawasaki’s Japanese engineer who had balled us out cancelled the Sno Pro racing program, so Kawasaki never even made it to the Eagle River World Championship.
Kawasaki would never run head to head on the Sno Pro Oval circuit again, but later came up with a popular program called the “Kawasaki Tournament of Champions,” where the Sno Pro drivers raced each other on identical Kawasaki Invader snowmobiles and the winner took home $5,000. The liquid-cooled Invader engine got a good reputation as a strong, reliable unit, and was also used by John Deere in its snowmobiles. We sold a lot of pipes and engine mods for the Invader engine and it ran reliably at well over 9,000 rpm with our kits, so the engineer’s original conservative attitude was perhaps a little misplaced.
Sno Pro oval racing would have been the ideal test bed to find this engine’s limit, but the timing was not good, since Kawasaki landed in the midst of the industry’s most competitive season to date. Even Ski-Doo, Arctic Cat, Yamaha and Mercury ended up in a desperate game to “catch up” with all that new Polaris technology.
Where we are today
So what happened to Gary Mathers after Kawasaki’s race team was cancelled?
Well, there’s no reason to shed any tears for him. He was moved to the Kawasaki Motorcycle Division where he became its very successful race manager.
He later moved to Honda as its race manager for more than 20 years and between the two jobs his teams won more than 80 National and International Championships. He retired as perhaps the most successful motorcycle racing manager in U.S. racing history and was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame a couple of years ago.
Thirty years later I had the chance to get the last word in, finally.
When Kawasaki canceled its racing program, all the race sleds were crushed and buried, but engine parts were still around and Brad Warning commissioned Al Eno to build a replica of the Kawasaki “Shark Nose” Sno Pro sled, based on pictures. THEN he brought the sled to OUR firm to custom fit a set of 10,000-rpm Aaen race pipes to the sled.
Obviously they are not period correct, but they are what I felt should have been used on the sled originally to make it competitive. Brad Warning agreed!
Case closed.