Steve Harris 1949-2022
Steve Harris, founder of Harris Performance, died on 15 June of Parkinson’s disease, aged 73. He leaves wife Gill, son James and daughter Katie.
His legacy is dynamic and colourful, Harris products bringing high octane excitement to the world of performance motorcycles on street and track.
Fuelled by enthusiasm and a can-do attitude, Harris took on any and every project, with younger brother Lester and school pal Steve Bayford as fellow directors.
His welding skills were honed at Racing Frames (Ware, Hertfordshire), constructing multi-tube race car chassis for the F1 fraternity, including Lotus. But motorcycles were his first love. He took up road racing from 1969 to 1974 and started his own workshop in Roydon, Essex, in 1972 in a shed behind the local butcher’s shop to improve his bikes and take on work to help pay for racing.
From this humble start and following a move to a bigger shed on a mushroom farm, the brothers and Bayford took a lease on a factory in Hertford. “We were just boys,” says Lester Harris, reflecting on their boldness at the time.
They welcomed all types of engineering work, making their first Harris race frame for a 250 Suzuki engine tuned by Martin Hines of Zipkarts in 1974.
Their reputation for tackling any project and problem, to agreed deadlines and high standards, resulted in a growing customer base. Among those customers was world champion Barry Sheene who commissioned Harris to build race frames for his GP Yamaha engines after he had left Suzuki.
On the street scene, Harris introduced the Magnum frame kit selling 2000 kits over five iterations, the Magnum 2 selling 1000-plus.
The heyday of the glamorous kits was in the 1980s and 1990s. Demand faded as chassis designs from Japan improved after this time.
Always involved in race bikes, Harris made GP frames for the 500 V4 Yamaha two-stroke, Steve running a team and signing riders as well as constructing the bikes. Harris also produced bikes for world-level competition, including Moto2, 125 GPs, WSB and endurance racing.
F1 race car team Sauber, backed by Petronas, commissioned Harris to build a race bike for the first year of four-stroke MotoGP (2002). They were given only three and a half months for the project, yet they hit the deadline only for Petronas to say it had changed its mind and now wanted a World Superbike racer within six months. They turned this one down, the only time Harris remembers refusing a project.
Harris took on engineering work for Royal Enfield importers Watsonian Squire. This led to them being asked to design the chassis for the 535 cafe racer single and become involved with improvements for the Interceptor and Himalayan models.
In 2015 Royal Enfield, now with R&D headquarters in Bruntingthorpe, Leicestershire, bought Harris lock stock and barrel, getting Harris engineers to build a Bonneville record twin which topped 160mph and twin cylinder racers for AMA flat track in America.
Lester Harris, paying tribute to his brother said: “Steve was always the face of our business. He was friendly, gregarious and loved doing shows and talking to people. And everyone wanted to talk to him. His real assets were his positivity and enthusiasm. He was never daunted. His attitude was always, “We can do that’. He was the driving force.”