What do you get when you mix a Texas Tornado with Nitro Nori? You get the winners of the 1996 Suzuki 8 Hour. Colin Edwards and Noriyuki Haga celebrate winning the prestigious race riding a factory Yamaha YZF750. It marked the first big international victory for Haga and served as a springboard to a long and illustrious World Superbike career. The Edwards-Haga team beat out ORICO Kawasaki Racing Team’s Anthony Gobert and Simon Crafar, who finished with the same number of laps (214) as the winners. Carl Fogarty and Takuma Aoki finished third on a factory Castro Honda with 213 laps. The race was filled with talented riders. In addition to the top Japan riders like Akira Yanagawa, Katsuaki Fujiwara, Nobuatsu Aoki and Tadayuki Okada, you had other leading names like Miguel Duhamel, Aaron Slight, Doug Polen, Scott Russell and Terry Rymer just to name a few.

What do you get when you mix a Texas Tornado with Nitro Nori? You get the winners of the 1996 Suzuki 8 Hour. Colin Edwards and Noriyuki Haga celebrate winning the prestigious race riding a factory Yamaha YZF750. It marked the first big international victory for Haga and served as a springboard to a long and illustrious World Superbike career. (Courtesy Yamaha WSBK)