Doesn’t matter if it’s a local lad’s LC or a Grand Prix team, what we’ve always tried to do is make every bike that’s passed through our workshops stop, turn, and go better than it did before. He said. And that, in a nutshell, was the genius of Steve Harris.
There really was no project too small, or challenge too big. No difference between a punter in off the street looking for a steering damper, or Barry Sheene popping in for a new frame for his XR45 Grand Prix Suzuki. The Harris mission was always to make the customer’s bike handle.
Steve died in June following a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s disease, but his razor-sharp brain, warmth, and enduring enthusiasm for a project means he leaves a glorious legacy, as well as many friends.
Very much the public face of Harris Performance, he co-founded the engineering company in 1972 with brother Lester and old mate Steve Bayford. For more than four decades this gang of racing-obsessed tube benders became serial winners on track as well as seriously influential players in road bike chassis design.
Of all the Harris creations, the Magnum 2 frame kit was perhaps the most important.
With its beefy Reynolds 531 tubing and perimeter design, it was a proper race bike chassis for the road. It had attitude, too, handled to a level the Japanese manufacturers were unable to match, and firmly established Harris’s reputation with British road riders.
“When the Yamaha FZ750 and Suzuki GSX-R750 arrived in 1985, a jo
