Steve McLaughlin wins the very first AMA Superbike Championship Series race held at Daytona International Speedway on March 5, 1976.
McLaughlin won this historic event in a photo finish riding a Butler & Smith BMW R90S slipping past BMW teammate and eventual series champ Reg Pridmore by mere inches.
As impressive as McLaughlin’s racing career was, he is even better known for being one of the true visionaries in the history of the sport. He was a driving force behind getting the AMA to grant national championship status to Superbike racing. McLaughlin also later became known as the father of the World Superbike Championship, which launched in 1988.
Born on September 13, 1948 in Pasadena, California, you could say racing was in his blood. His grandfather was an early car racer and his father, John, also an AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame member, was a leading desert racer in Southern California who came to national acclaim by winning the Catalina Grand Prix in 1953. The elder McLaughlin also helped form the American Federation of Motorcyclists (AFM) roadracing organization.
1976, BMW approached McLaughlin, (who had been racing ill-handling Kawasaki Z1s in Superbike Production for the previous couple of seasons), and asked him to ride a factory-backed Superbike. It came as a big surprise that the conservative German company, then known for its touring machines, decided to enter the new roadracing series. With a lot of engine work and chassis innovation by master builder Udo Gietl, combined with the riding of McLaughlin, Pridmore and Gary Fisher, BMW was successful from the start.
"What the BMW lacked in horsepower to Japanese multi-cylinder machines it more than made up for in handling," McLaughlin explained years later. "I rode both and I can tell you those early Z1s were more than just a handful. Those bikes would get into tremendous high-speed wobbles and it’s not a pleasurable experience to have handlebars shaken out of your hands at 125 mph. The BMWs presented unique challenges on their own, but were certainly more civilized."
So much for loyalty and the "civilized bike", McLaughlin returned in the 1977 season racing for Yoshimura, at first aboard Kawasakis, and later on the first of the famous Yoshimura Suzukis. With Yoshimura, McLaughlin earned another important first, at Laguna Seca Raceway in 1977 he gave Suzuki its original AMA Superbike victory.
Steve McLaughlin was inducted into the AMA Motorcycle Hall of Fame in 2004.
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