ro Circuit is celebrating their 30th anniversary this year. That’s 30 years of excellence in developing some of the finest performance products for Supercross, motocross, and off-road motorcycles in the world today. And 30 years of racing, testing, and then winning more races and titles with some of the greatest riders in history. Pro Circuit is truly an American success story that continues to this day.
     But, like most great stories, Pro Circuit started small. Mitch Payton was a top pro desert-racer when a tragic crash ended his career as a rider. He could have left motorcycling altogether, but he loved the sport and wanted to be part of the industry. So he took his savings and with the help of his parents bought a small Husqvarna dealership in Anaheim, California. “I really liked Huskys, I raced them in the desert.” says Mitch. “The Japanese bikes were taking over motocross, but Huskys were still strong in off-road racing. They were solid, but slow and the people making them in Finland kept saying that ‘stock is good’ but they were hard to win races with stock.      Our shop was pushing Huskys in the desert, but then the gas crisis hit and people just couldn’t get enough gas to go race in the desert. You could only buy gas on odd or even days for a while, so riders started going to their local motocross track instead of out to the desert and the bikes I was selling needed to be faster to win at motocross.”
     At the time, night racing was big in southern California. A pro rider could race 5-6 days a week following a circuit of local tracks with lights and decent pro purses. Mitch wanted his Husky riders to be competitive on these night MX tracks but, “The Husky was slow, but we could make them faster,” says Mitch. “So I read some books and talked to people and had a lot of help from guys like Goat and Harry Klem and people from DG. The Husky was so mild that almost anything you did to it was decent. So we kept working on it. We did a 125 and got it so it was really fast and we won a lot of night races with it. We took it to Saddleback, raced the Golden State Series and had a lot of success.”
     The earliest Pro Circuit customers were mostly Husqvarna-mounted desert racers and motocrossers who wanted Mitch to provide the same speed set-ups that he developed for that Husky 125. Word regarding the success of Mitch’s motor-building skills traveled quickly around southern California racetracks and the cult of Pro Circuit riders began to form. Then, advice from a friend changed Mitch’s thinking about Huskys altogether. “Actually, it was Jody,” says Mitch (Jody Weisel/Editor of Motocross Action magazine). “He came in the shop and asked why I was building 125 Huskys? I was like, they’re cool and anyone who has a Husky is going to want our stuff. Jody said that was true but Husky sold maybe 400 125s a year and I should be developing products for Japanese bikes that sold 4,000-5,000 bikes a year. It made sense, but I didn’t think anyone would want anything from us because we were Anaheim Husky. Why would a Honda guy buy a pipe from a Husky shop? So we needed to come up with a name for the pipes and porting and stuff that wasn’t Anaheim Husky. So we kicked around a lot of ideas and came up with the Pro Circuit name and we thought that was so cool. And that was where Pro Circuit started. We were just trying to sell pipes for Japanese bikes out of a Husky shop.”
     Mitch continued to perfect his skills in the arts of cylinder porting and polishing, and his small-but-elite team of speed specialists focused their collective energy on other bike parts and other brands. Custom-tuned exhaust pipes were the first Pro Circuit high-performance accessory to roll out of Mitch’s cluttered speed shop, followed by racing silencers. “The first Japanese bike we made a pipe for was the RM465,” says Mitch. “I went with the same theory as the Huskys; the RM was slow so I knew we could find ways to make it faster. And that pipe sold more then any of the Husky pipes. So we picked another bike, I think a CR125, and that sold more then all the other pipes we’d ever made combined. Soon, I was spending 75 percent of my time on products and only 25 percent of my time on the dealership, so we decided to focus on the products and we sold the shop.”
     Mitch closed his family’s Husqvarna dealership in 1980 to focus his energy on the shop’s aftermarket hop-hop service business full-time, which was the embryo that would become the Pro Circuit dynasty. Pipe business was brisk, and pretty soon every PC-equipped racer was requesting PC performance modifications for other parts of their bike. Pro Circuit obliged by opening a suspension shop and expanding the available line of Pro Circuit exhaust systems and motor accessories for different bike brands. With so many Honda, Kawasaki, Yamaha, and Suzuki mounted racers across the nation running Pro Circuit equipment, it didn’t take long for the PC brand to start racking up championships. Pro Circuit’s racing success rekindled Mitch’s competitive fires. Soon, he set his sights on bigger races and titles and dared to dream the unthinkable; could a small local company like Pro Circuit take on the factory teams and win a National Championship?
     We’ll learn how that came to be in the next installment of this story, 1983-1987: Pro Circuit Attacks Japan.
     “We race, we win, you benefit” is the Pro Circuit credo. Let your customers share in the 30 Year anniversary Pro Circuit success story and stock up through your Parts Unlimited rep today.

In the company’s 30 year existence, Pro Circuit has earned numerous titles, the latest being Ryan Villopoto’s 2007 Supercross Lites West and Motocross Lites Championships. Joe Colombero photo