Mike Landrum races his new Suzuki GSXR750 into the carousel at Indianapolis Raceway Park in 1986 during a WERA Sprint weekend at the central Indiana circuit.

Landrum was a flat tracker out of Chillecothe, Ohio, who started road racing 250GP bikes in the mid-1970s. He scored some solid finishes in AMA 250 Grand Prix, including an eighth at Brainerd in 1983. Around that same time he bought a Honda Interceptor and started racing both AMA Superbike and Formula 1.

Mike has a funny line about going around the Daytona banking on his not far from stock Interceptor when Kenny Robert came by at maybe 40 miles per our faster on Yamaha’s blazing OW69. “I was running down low on the banking and Roberts comes blowing by me up by the wall and I thought, ‘Well maybe I should be running up there.’”

Roberts was complaining loudly about all the slow street bikes he had maneuver through on the high banks that year and Landrum freely admits he was one of those guys.

In 1986 Mike bought a new Suzuki GSXR750 and raced WERA and select AMA Superbike rounds. He said, “At Daytona in ’87 the factory bikes were still going by me on the banking at 15 mph faster, this after I poured a ton of money into his Gixxer to make it faster. That’s when I knew it was time to get out.”

It was Mike’s son Scott – who out of the blue after graduating from college decided he wanted to race – that got Mike back into the sport years later. The two did AHRMA events together (Mike won an AHRMA national title on a Harley Sprint that’s been in the Landrum family for three generations) and he finally got back to race Daytona last year for the first time since ’87 and said he was thrilled to get back on the track.