Doherty dominating world of Harley drag racing (7/1)

Posted July 1, 2009 at 12:07 am
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By ZACK WALKER
SPECIAL TO THE AMERICAN PRESS

During the week, Billy Doherty is in the back of the Lake Charles Harley Davidson store, working on motorcycles. Come the weekend, he’s on top of his own, rocketing across drag strips all over the country.

Doherty, the store’s general manager, is a professional drag racer in the American Motorcycle Racing Association and travels all over Louisiana, and sometimes as far as Kentucky, to compete in national events.

“Usually, I’m gone 10-12 weekends a year,” Doherty said.

The competitions are essentially tournaments consisting of several rounds of one-on-one drag races down quarter-mile straight-aways. After each round, the winners advance to face new opponents.

“It’s you against somebody else all the way to the championship,” Doherty said. “Kind of like how you’d see a March Madness bracket.”

Over the past couple of years, Doherty has dominated the brackets. Prior to 2008, he won three national championships — two in 2006 and another in 2007 — and was named AMRA Racer of the Year.

In 2008 though, Doherty didn’t just dominate the brackets, he owned them.

He won national championships in four divisions, shattering the old record for most championships in one year, which was two.

“I kind of felt like Michael Phelps at the end of it,” Doherty said. “During it, though, I didn’t realize what I was doing.”

For his efforts, he was voted AMRA Racer of the Year for the second straight season.

“As a family, we are very proud of what he’s accomplished,” Billy’s father, William Doherty, said.

Perhaps more impressive than what he accomplished in 2008 though was how he did it.

Typically, racers are aided by pit crews who take care of bike maintenance before, after, and in between races. On average, these crews consist of about five people.

Before the 2008 season, Doherty was using a one-man crew that was constantly in flux.

“Each week, I was having to retrain somebody to help me,” Doherty said. “That got old, so I decided to see what I could do by myself.”

Alone, he encountered sweltering bedlam.

“The heat last summer on the concrete was 145 degrees,” Doherty said. “I was stuck in a full leather race suit, running around sweating. I kept my bikes staggered at my tent so that after a race, I could come in and grab the bike I needed for the next race. Usually when I got to the starting line, the other guys were sitting there waiting. Every race is organized chaos for me.”

Doherty didn’t mind the chaos and out of it came pure, unaided brilliance.

“He broke the record 100 percent by himself,” Dammon Goss, one of Doherty’s former pit crew members, said.

All it started with what his opponents thought was harmless trash talk.

In 2004, he and a friend were attending a Gulfport motorcycle rally, when he found his initial motivation.

“Some guys up there where yah-yahing about motorcycles,” Doherty said. “My friend was good at instigating. He would say, ‘Aw man, you hear that. You need to bring something out.’ The next year I was ready to roll.”

Doherty now sits at the top of the Harley drag racing world and has been featured in several magazines.

For Doherty, the experience has been surreal.

The first time he was asked for an autograph by a kid in Georgia, he thought someone was playing a joke on him. “I asked him, ‘who put you up to this,’” Doherty said. “‘Where’s my dad?’”

But Doherty will have to get used to it, because he isn’t planning on slowing down anytime soon. He’s headed to Kentucky this weekend.

“I’m going to be pushing the envelope now,” Doherty said. “I’m going to be racing in five different classes. The four from last year plus one more. We’ll see what happens.”

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