I’m super busy with some year-end features I’m working on so I haven’t been able to update the site much these last few days and probably won’t do much until Friday. I had a memorable day hanging with Jared Mess, Nichole Cheza, Brent Armbruster and the great Scotty Parker up in Flint. What a blast. More on that later.

Here’s a feature on one of my favorite riders from back in the day – Pat Hernon. I did this feature on an old short-lived Blog I had a few years ago. Today Pat’s living in California and I heard has generously taken in the wayward road racer James Randolph to get the kid off the street.

Pat Hernon was one very fast road racer who had the misfortune of being at his peak when there were precious few factory rides to be had in AMA road racing. The lanky Ohioan was also one of the most fun-loving racers I’d ever had the privilege to meet. More on that later, but first a little background on Pat.

Hernon was one of the many privateers who went into deep debt trying to campaign HRC-kitted Honda Interceptors in the AMA Superbike Championship in the mid-1980s. Seems that Honda was granting easy credit to these guys to the tunes of tens of thousands of dollars and were surprised to find most of these guys had little ability to repay for the mega-expensive HRC parts.

Pat scored five top-10 AMA Superbike finishes in 1984, including a very solid ninth in the Daytona Superbike race in March of that year. A year later Hernon suffered a slew of mechanical problems and only managed one top-10 superbike result. Purse payouts being what they were Hernon was fresh out of racing funds at the end of the season in spite of the promising results he’d managed on his privateer Honda.

In 1986 Hernon took an offer from John Ulrich to ride for Team Hammer (later to be known as Team Suzuki Endurance, Valvoline Suzuki and today Team M4 EMGO Suzuki). Ulrich was deadly serious about winning back the WERA National Endurance Championship, which Team Hammer had lost the year before to Cycle Tech Racing and its talent-laden team of John Kocinski, Wes Cooley, David Aldana and Joey Osowski.

Team Hammer came cocked and loaded with some serious ammo in ’86. Hernon, David Sadowski and Doug Toland were one of the most talented group of riders ever assembled in the WERA National Endurance Series. The team rode the new Suzuki GSX-R1100. They mostly laid waste to the rest of the teams that year and won back the title.

Hernon was fast. He broke a long-standing motorcycle track record at Indianapolis Raceway Park, but throughout the year Ski and Toland overshadowed him. Nevertheless, Hernon always seemed to be in high spirits.

Once at a race in Rockingham, N.C., Hernon came rolling into the pits just minutes before the race was to start. He had left his Columbus, Ohio-area home in the wee hours of the morning and hammered a Ford Thunderbird rental car at triple-digit speed and drove straight through to the race.

He said the Thunderbird topped out at 105 mph and he’d apparently set it on cruise at that speed and made the drive from Columbus to Rockingham in just over five hours! He should have been given a trophy of some sort for that feat alone.

I shook my head and expressed doubts that Pat’s rental would actually make it back to Columbus.

Hernon was always quick with a joke, or good-natured ribbing towards a fellow competitor. He came to me at one race, he and his teammates trying to figure out how I managed to come to nearly every club and pro race in the country. “We’ve narrowed it down Larry,” he said. “Either your independently wealthy or you’re the craziest son-of-a-bitch on the face of the planet.”

I pointed at the well-worn Dodge Colt I racked up thousands of miles in and said, “Pat, look what I’m driving. You can scratch off your first theory.”

Pat gradually faded from the racing scene. He attempted to cash in on the Suzuki GSXR Cup races, but tried to do it on the cheap by buying a totaled bike from a junkyard. I watched Pat fight the patched-up Gixxer down the long Grattan Raceway straightway one weekend as it wobbled worse than any bike I’d ever seen. Lap after lap Pat would come speeding out of the last turn and tuck in for the straight just in time for the front end to start oscillating like a grocery cart. A sane rider would have simply pulled in the pits, but Hernon’s bravado seemed limitless.

Years later I saw Pat at the AMA Superbike race at Mid-Ohio. He was hanging out drinking beer with friends on the hill overlooking Madness. He yelled over when he saw me. He had a big smile on his face as always and we talked old times. I think he said he was selling hot tubs.

That was Pat, always looking to help someone have a good time.