In Brainerd’s victory circle Muzzy Kawasaki Doug Chandler was incandescent with anger and disappointment.

After setting pole for his first world championship race, he was a handful of laps from the checkered flag--how many riders win their first ever world championship race?--when his left foot slipped from the footpeg on the long Brainerd straight. A racer since he was a kid, Chandler knew it wasn’t a problem with his boot, or the footpeg of his Muzzy Kawasaki Superbike.

It was the engine.

One more lap and after a long, greasy broadslide he exited Brainerd’s turn ten on a line that would take him close to the cement pitwall where the Muzzy Kawasaki team were flashing him his pit board. In full tuck and accelerating through 165 mph to 185 Chandler took his left hand off the clip-on, turned his head full left and as he went by he simultaneously tapped on the Kawasaki’s shifter while giving his crew a dead glare.

His Muzzy crew looked at each other in sudden realization that the engine was failing, it was leaking oil on the left side of the bike. This meant that the race was no longer theirs to win. Doug Chandler and Rob Muzzy were not going to win the first 1990 Brainerd WSBK race.

Now, for Chandler, the race was a matter of survival.

Soon the Chandler’s lead was gone and he was in second place. He never again looked at his crew as he passed them at Brainerd’s pit wall.

And then it wasn’t second place he found himself in; he was in third and going backwards. If not horizontal.

That was all Roche and Mertens needed to get back past him.

Mertens took the lead for the first time just in time for the checkered flag, winning by 2.1 seconds over Roche. Chandler held on for third, nursing his bike home and nearly being caught by a charging Terry Rymer, who had stormed through the field.

“The long wheelbase of the Kawasaki made it easy for me to stay on the gas and get the back end kicked out pretty far. Only once did I get it a little too sideways. I was looking back behind me in a turn to see where (Stephen) Mertens was and I wasn’t paying much attention, got hard on the gas and (then) was almost staring Mertens in the face with the bike completely crossed up,” a dour Chandler told writer Larry Lawrence in Brainerd’s victory circle after the race.

Chandler and his crew were grim in victory circle. Winning your debut World Championship race should be a career-defining high—but his was overshadowed by a mechanical failure. A faulty shifter seal seeped oil onto the rear tire, and worse, it had come from the good engine. While his mechanic, Billy Oliver, knew there was time to swap in a backup before race two, but that engine made less power, had more hours on it, and also used the exact same type of shifter seal. The only option? Fix the leaking engine. Somehow.




Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace spans 1,200 pages and weaves so many storylines that summarizing it in a few sentences feels futile. Still, if you cracked it open, you might expect Rob Muzzy to stride in from a chapter—his handlebar mustache and flowing hair were a perfect fit for a sweeping tale of love and war during Napoleon’s invasion of Russia. But instead of dueling in ballrooms, Muzzy was building a Kawasaki Superbike team from scratch—and within two years, Muzzy’s Kawasaki Superbikes were racing in a world championship.

Team Muzzy Kawasaki started as a card table. With Rob Muzzy standing behind it in the sun for an entire weekend at Laguna Seca, more or less. No E-Z Up, no umbrella. He did so at the 1988 USGP where he introduced his exhaust system solutions for sport bikes to the 100,000 spectators in attendance. He had already been producing “Muzzy” pipes on a limited basis since leaving Honda but that weekend at Laguna was an important moment in Team Muzzy Kawasaki history. After that event, and that exposure, his “pipe business” exploded with orders from new customers all over the USA. And that was just the beginning: a major motorcycle parts distributor contacted him after Laguna Seca and put in a gigantic order for hundreds of pipes for a variety of different models.

Muzzy had support for his Superbike team from Kawasaki USA and also other motorcycle industry sponsors like the California Superbike School and Dunlop tires, but everything Muzzy had his fingers in was bolstered after TWotCT (The Weekend of the Card Table).

However selling exhaust pipes was about the last thing on Doug Chandler’s mind after race one at Brainerd WSBK. They needed a solution for the oil leak, or race two was going to be even worse.

A meeting was held in Chandler’s motorhome. Muzzy, Chandler and Chandler’s mechanics, Merlyn Plumlee and Billy Oliver, were inside trying to find a solution for the oil leak. Chandler’s first child, Jett, had been born a few months prior and Chandler’s wife, Sherry, had all of the new parent gear laying on the counter of the motorhome. Baby bottles, formula, wipes and diapers were stacked up and ready for use.
The oil seal failed after around 10 laps so different scenarios were discussed, like skipping the sighting lap of the race to try and prolong the inevitable oil seal failure. However no one on the team was comfortable intentionally racing a motorcycle which was going to start leaking oil.

Team Muzzy Kawasaki wasn’t racing for the World Superbike championship, so hypothetically they could simply opt to not race the second “leg” of the WSBK weekend. But that would be a humbling end to an effort that led the first race and finished on the podium.

The motorhome meeting went on, with different scenarios discussed. Ex-racer and now chief mechanic for Chandler’s Superbike, Merlyn Plumlee, saw Sherry Chandler grab everything needed for a diaper change and retreat to the rear bedroom. He looked at the line-up of supplies needed to care for a brand new human being and was struck by how tiny yet substantial it all seemed—each item a reminder of just how delicate life begins.

He reached over and picked up one of the tiny diapers made for a new born. He didn’t have kids of his own so was surprised when he saw how well made a diaper for a newborn is-- absorbent and strong.

Later that day Muzzy Kawasaki Doug Chandler won the second World Superbike race he entered. Chandler went on to claim what may have been the most significant victory of his roadracing career, crossing the line 2.6 seconds ahead of all the best Superbike riders in the world. A roaring crowd welcomed him at the winner’s podium, where he stood tall as the US national anthem played.

That win set off a bunch of success for Chandler and Muzzy. Here in America, Chandler followed his Brainerd win by winning the AMA Superbike races at Loudon, Road America, Miami and Mid-Ohio.

Additionally somebody in the Brainerd paddock was dumb enough to suggest to Muzzy and Chandler that his win was simply because it was an American on an American track. Muzzy said to that person “that so?”. In Muzzy land “that so” usually means you are going to eat those words.

It’s now an obscure detail for most, but no one who was close to the Muzzy Kawasaki team back then will forget that Muzzy shipped his Superbikes and Chandler all the way to Japan for the Sugo round of the WSBK championship later that season. Muzzy’s Kawasaki Superbike, and Doug Chandler, beat everyone in Japan, even the factory Kawasaki entry.

“That so?” indeed.

Muzzy and Kawasaki designed a new custom brace for the shifter shaft shortly after the Brainerd weekend and the engine never leaked again.

When Doug Chandler crossed the finish line first at Brainerd in 1990, few in the crowd knew the hidden hero of his victory. Deep inside his Kawasaki, absorbing oil from a troublesome leak, sat the most unlikely piece of equipment ever to grace a World Superbike race: a baby diaper.