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Terry Kizer was a novice flat-track racer with dreams of one day becoming AMA Grand National Champion. A Texan from the Houston area and an up-and-coming young steel-shoe ace traveling the country, Kizer looked up to 1970s AMA Grand National racing stars like Jay Springsteen, Corky Keener, Mert Lawwill and Kenny Roberts. Of course, today, anyone who has been around motorcycle drag racing for any length of time remembers Kizer as a drag-racing legend and winner of nine national championships and setter of countless records, but the path to switching from going in circles around dusty dirt tracks to hammering down quarter-mile drag strips in the blink of an eye happened quite by accident.
One day Kizer took his flat-track-racing hauler van into a pinstriping/lettering shop. Trav Clifton, the shop owner, happened to be roommates with a well-known local drag racer and builder named Mo Parsons. As Trav was lettering Kizer’s van, he was asking Kizer about his flat-track racing.
“At one point, he asked me if I had ever ridden a turbo bike,” Kizer recalled. “I had no idea what he was talking about. Trav invited me to come to the local drag strip to watch Mo on his turbo and told me to bring my flat-track bike along.”
Terry, his girlfriend Cindy (who later became Terry’s wife), and Terry’s brother Keith (who everyone called Scooter) went to the local drag races on a Wednesday night, and as Trav instructed, Terry brought his 250cc, Champion-frame flat track bike. He entered the event and began clicking off runs in the 12.9s right at 100 mph. This turned some heads.
“I didn’t have any reference or idea that was a really good time on a little 250,” Terry said. “That was my first time on a drag strip, and I was just messing around having some fun.”
This flat tracker’s unexpected drag-racing performance on his little flat-track machine prompted Trav to invite Kizer to come out and do some runs on one of Mo Parsons’ bikes. It was quite a jump from a few runs down the strip on his little flat-track machine to throw a leg over an open-class turbo machine, but Kizer was oblivious to the potential hazards.
“I was all over it because I was 19 or 20 years old and stupid,” he laughs. “They put me on a 1075cc [Kawasaki] KZ with smooth bores and wheelie bars. Since I was only about 120 pounds, I ran a lot faster than those guys. I think I was in the high 10s at over 130 miles per hour. To me, it was like I’d died and gone to heaven.
“Mo was a big guy, probably 230 pounds, and I came along at a perfect time when he was probably looking to put a smaller guy like me on his bikes and see what they could really do.”
Parsons invited Kizer to come along to a National drag meet in LaPlace, Louisiana. Once there, Kizer found himself in a turbo class with some of the sport’s heavy hitters.
“I was now facing guys with a lot of experience,” Kizer recalls. “Mo told me that when I finally got it right on the launch, I’d know it. We didn’t have two steps in those days, so getting a turbo bike off the line meant you had the wind the engine up and release the clutch just right or you would blow the tire away or bog the bike.
“When I finally got it right, I damn near went off the back of the bike. That thing bit and was hauling ass, and I was like, ‘Oh my God!’ I had to work myself back up to the handlebars. They were nearly jerked out of my hands. On that pass, I ran a 9.8, and that was below the national record. By the time we were done that day, we reset the national class record at 9.60 at a little over 160 miles per hour. I did not win the race because I hadn’t yet got my act together at the start line with the Christmas Tree. Hell, I was used to watching a guy with a flag in his hand and trying to read his eyes. I wasn’t looking at a light.”
So, at his first national in 1977, still wet behind the ears, Kizer had already set a new class national record. He said shortly after that, he gave away his flat-track machine. Drag racing was his future.
In 1978, Kizer moved up to the Pro Comp class with a Parsons-built turbo-charged Kawasaki, and he again experienced immediate success and set class records. He won the IDBA Pro Comp National Championship in ’78. Parsons and Kizer were on such a roll that, starting in 1979, Terry set a national record at every track he went to for the next three years—an accomplishment that will likely never be topped. One aspect of Kizer’s almost overnight success was that he knew so little about drag racing at the time.
“When I was flat tracking, and I was on the track against Springsteen or Roberts or somebody, I was intimidated,” Kizer admits. “My advantage in drag racing was I didn’t know these guys, so if I went up on the line against one of drag racing’s stars, I wasn’t intimidated simply because of my lack of knowledge in that sport.”
Kizer was so dominant in Pro Comp and shattering so many records that the IDBA actually changed the rules to set the bar higher for turbo bikes against normally aspirated ones.
Coming out of nowhere and winning so quickly raised suspicions. Tech officials and fellow competitors were just sure Parsons and Kizer were somehow cheating. Their bikes started going through more scrutiny than their competitors. But Kizer proudly points out that cheating wasn’t what was causing their success, “We just worked harder than everybody else,” he says.
One of Kizer’s competitors in those early years was Eraldo Ferracci. Ferracci once observed Kizer’s unique burnout style.
“Most riders would keep their feet on the ground during the burnout,” Kizer said. “Being an old flat tracker, I was used to putting my feet up on the pegs. During the burnout, the bike would sometimes drift to one side or the other, and Ferracci came up to me with a big smile and told me with those drifting skills, I needed to go road racing.”
Kizer was the first to race a gas-powered drag racer into the seven-second bracket. It happened at Fremont Dragstrip in Fremont, California. Gas-powered Funny Bikes were getting close to dipping into the sevens, and the conditions that weekend in Fremont were ideal. Being the first into the sevens would constitute major bragging rights and a place in history, and Kizer was poised to do it.
“We were sitting there in line to be the first in our class down the strip,” Kizer remembers. “We got distracted for a second, and when we looked up, our rival Jon Baugh on Jack O’Malley’s Orient Express was wheeling into the burnout box in front of us. We were friends with those guys, but that made us steaming mad. The air was good, and the track was good, and now it was Jon who’d have the first shot of getting into the sevens. He ran an 8.13.
“So I get up to the line, and I’m still mad. I revved the bike so high in the burnout box that Mo told me later that he thought I was going to float the valves out of the thing. I did the run and got such a bad case of tire shake that I couldn’t see where I was going. When I stuck it in second, everything cleared up, and when I crossed the line, I knew I had a pretty good run.
“I looked up, and I could see Jack [O’Malley] riding right past Jon [Baugh] on the return road and heading towards me. I thought, ‘This is about to get serious. We’re going to have it out right now.’ He rolls up on his minibike and sticks his hand out and says, ‘congratulations, you just did the first-ever seven-second pass.’”
Kizer had turned a 7.92 to become the first seven-second bike on gas. “I found out later we were the first seven-second pass by any gas-powered machine, bikes, or cars.”
Ironically by 1986, Kizer was racing for Jack O’Malley on the famous Orient Express drag bikes. The opportunity came at the right time since Parson’s was building a house and no longer had the time to put into building drag bikes. He would race with O’Malley through the early 1990s. With the new pairing, more records and championships were won.
Kizer once unloaded on an Orient Express Funny Bike at over 150 mph. The bike was so destroyed it was put in a dumpster. “When I got home, Mo had me back racing a turbo bike the next weekend, so I could shake it off and get the crash out of my mind,” Kizer said.
At one point in 1988, on O’Malley’s Funny Bike, Kizer was the quickest motorcycle in all of drag racing.
Terry also took over the well-known Mr. Turbo and, through that company, built successful drag bikes and even contributed to Land Speed Record efforts along the way. Famously a Mr. Turbo Kawasaki ZX11 became the first street-legal motorcycle to crack the 200-mph barrier in Sport Bike magazine’s famous “Superbikes from Hell” series in 1992. They also won the annual Horsepower Shootout at Daytona with 498 horsepower! “And that was spinning the rear wheel so bad that the Dyno was reading 130 mph, and with the gearing we had, the rear wheel was actually turning at 180 mph. So you can figure we easily had over 500 horses.”
Kizer once unloaded on an Orient Express Funny Bike at over 150 mph. The bike was so destroyed, it was put in a dumpster.
With such a career of successes, we asked Kizer what year or championship stood out for him, and without hesitation, he said the 1988 season. They were dealing with issues on a new bike with full bodywork. After a big crash, Sandy Kosman had built an entirely new chassis, and Kizer won the Memphis National on the brand-new machine still in primer paint. After celebrating and settling in for the night at a hotel, a late-night phone call came in. Terry’s wife hysterically told him their house had burned to the ground. She barely made it out with their nine-month-old daughter. Not long after, Kizer came to the last race and needed to set a record and win the race to win the championship. The team did it, and it was pretty emotional at the awards banquet. “It was quite a celebration that night,” Terry remembers.
Kizer never officially retired. He was recently involved in the building of a new Top Fuel bike with the intention of making a comeback. After all, several of his contemporaries, most notably Larry “Spiderman” McBride, are still racing, but the pandemic and economy have kept Terry’s latest project on the sidelines. So, it’s possible the final chapter of Kizer’s drag-racing story is yet to be written. CN
Larry Lawrence | Archives Editor In addition to writing our Archives section on a weekly basis, Lawrence is another who is capable of covering any event we throw his way.
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