Adventures of the Bonneville Flyer

I am sure of few of the local guys have already seen my build thread called "The Sportsman 200 on Steroids" in the board track racing section. That thread documented the build of an upgraded Sportsman 200 which became the Bonneville Flyer. This bike was a team effort between Sportsman Flyer, Shane of AGK, and Gunther Maier of Road House Pictures. Gunther gets all the credit for dreaming this all up and figuring out the rules and classes at Bonneville. I built the chassis and Shane built out a couple 175cc engines. Gunther was the pilot, I built and maintained the chassis and Shane was responsible for the survival of the engines. We started this project back in January of this year and did our best to keep it a secret until we were pretty sure it would really happen. Eight months to put it all together. No sweat, right? Yeah, right! Shane had two engines, the race engine and a spare shipped to my shop just four weeks before we left for the salt and I had the bikes running just one weekend before the departure date. Shane and I both suffered with supply issues on parts. It was enough to make the whole team wonder if we would be ready. We loaded the trailer and drove straight through to Wendover, Utah, an 11 1/2 hour drive.

Here is Rich and Skip loading up the trailer.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

As soon as we arrived in Wendover we found this wild rig.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

And here we are on the salt for the first time. From left to right that's my brother Rich, Dave who is our machinest, Skip who helps with tuning and testing, and myself. At this point Shane was on an airplane flying into Salt Lake City, where he rented a car and drove down to Wendover.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

So, once you arrive to race at Bonneville the first order of business is the mandatory tech inspection. Slightly before tech is of course the entry fee. $400 in advance and $600 if you wait till Speed Week begins. We paid up front because we KNEW we would be there and ready (yeah, right)!

Here we are lining up for tech inspection. It is a two part inspection. First you go to the first station where they intimidate the heck out of you and then you go to the second station where they intimidate the heck out of you again. This is make or break for many teams. Months of preparation and cash on the line to see if you did your homework. My approach was that failure was not acceptable.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Part two, tire inspection and ALL the mechanical stuff. They looked at the welds, they wrenched on the handlebars, looked for steering stops and a stabilizer, checked for DOT approved and SPEED RATED tires, then you have to fire it up and prove the safety systems actually work. Of course after all this scrutiny WE FAILED TECH! I couldn't believe it. They got us on a fork issue and had us add leather friction washers to the linkage arms. We scrounged up some leather, made and installed the washers and got our sign off.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Alright, so here it is, the all important tech inspection sticker to show you passed. The sticker also comes with a real racing log book! The inspector told me the sticker has to go on the frame, can never be removed, and is next to impossible to get replaced. This is without doubt the most important sticker I have ever owned! Ain't it sweet? LSR 4019 is now forever owned by Bonneville Flyer chassis #1. Two other big blue stickers were also applied to the other side of the gas tank and one of those is signed in tech. Each time you make a run these stickers are verified to be in place.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

That was the end of Friday afternoon. We passed tech and went back to enjoy a few cold beers. Best beer(s) I ever drank. Suddenly the winds came up, lighting started hitting the ground in the distance and the lightning and thunder were very close together. We scrambled around the pits, stuffed the bikes back into the trailer and got the **** out of there. It looked as though we might get rained out. All that hard work only to get rained out. Turns out the thunder storms, which happened the first three evenings we were there, came and went quickly. It did affect the salt conditions, though, making morning runs slower than afternoon runs in the heat of the day. We ran faster at 90 degrees plus air temp in the afternoon then we did at 75 degrees in the cooler mornings. This played with race strategy in a huge way.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Here is a really cool old Lakester. I thought these were all called streamliners, but turns out streamliners have their wheels located inside the bodywork and lakesters have exposed wheels and axles. I really like the lakesters.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Even the tow vehicle got salted out. It took hours to clean this beast.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Friday ended with a late dinner and back to hotel where we had five guys crowded into the hotel room. Rooms are expensive during speed week so you sleep where you can. We were up early, back out on the salt by 6 am to set the pits back up, then off to driver and crew rookie orientation. This took a good two hours to get through where we went over safety procedures, how to line up for runs, how to coordinate the chase vehicle with the race bike and retrive the bike off the course. You screw up on course you get chewed out or thrown out, so you don't make mistakes. They are serious and they make you well aware of this. From there you have to perform a rookie pass on course complete with chase truck. Rookie passes are to be performed below 150 mph, not a problem for us! Our pilot, Gunther did his part, ran the course at about 3/4 throttle and we followed down the chase road to pick him up. He had a huge smile on his face! He kept saying the bike ran great, really smooth with no stability issues and he was doing 60 mph easily. He realized at this point we might have a contender!

Here we are getting ready for the rookie pass. Plan was for me to fire up the bike with the remote electric starter and run back to the chase truck, then Rich and Shane would push Gunther as fast as they possibly could into the course because of the tall gearing, then jump into the truck and we would chase after Gunther to recover the bike. This worked well. We would accelerate into the course, hit the mile marker timed section at maximum speed, then hold it wide open through the two mile timing light.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Shane was trying to play it cool right before the rookie run and didn't catch the hot babe. I told him there was a totally hot looking chick right behind him in a see through shirt with a pink bra on. Of course he didn't believe me. She later ran past 200 mph.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

chainmaker said:

Awesome thread, cant wait to see the video...there is one right?

Click to expand...

I will update this thread with the rest of the story soon. I am sure there is some video floating around and will add it once I get my hands on it. In the mean time here is a cool action shot at speed on the salt. Just add engine sounds.....


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

cobrafreak said:

So enlighten me on what leather friction washers are. Did they make you put those on because you didn't have a front shock and they didn't want uncontrolled spring action on the fork? AKG said some of the former record holders had some sort of bad attitude towards your entry or something along those lines. Could you elaborate?

Click to expand...

So, here is the story on the forks. I had read in the rules that any sprung suspension must have a dampening device. We had sent the tech guys pictures of our forks before hand and had tenative approval on our design. Well, during the actual inspection one of the two inspectors said we needed additional dampening. He suggested a simple leather washer placed between the fork swing arm brackets and bronze bushings. It seemed easy enough to add so we found some leather, cut the washers and added them in. This allowed us to pass. There were plenty of old Harleys with friction dampening and they passed tech, too.
As far as bad attitudes, we got wind of some people questioning if our design and engine were legal. Again, we covered our bases, I have a legitimate business building these bikes, which makes me a manufacturer, so I was allowed to enter my bike. No formal complaints were filed so it became a non issue.

Back to the important stuff, racing! Here we are taking off for our first timed run. Rich and Shane pushing and Gunther under power. Tall gears make for slow launches for everybody. In this respect we were no different than anyone else.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

And here it is, our first time slip. We did 69.186 against the previous record of 64.5 mph so we were feeling pretty good! Air temp 88.8 degrees, 12 mph wind, and density altitude of 7088 ft. These conditions can really slow a bike down. Still, I was pretty happy with this run so we took the bike to impound where it sat over night till we could make a back-up pass for a two run average. No official record till you do it twice. That's the cover of the log book in the backround.


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

Up early the next morning and back to impound to collect the bike. All record runs require a back-up pass and that happens at 7am the next morning before the courses are opened to everyone else. We went back out and lined up for our run. Same routine, I start the bike, Rich and Shane push Gunther into the course, and we follow in the chase truck. After this run Gunther was not smiling. He said everything was going great and he ran up to like 72 mph, but at the 3/4 mile marker in the timed section the engine just quit. All he could do was coast through the last of the timed section and roll off the course. We were pretty bummed as our back-up run was toast. Anyway we went and collected our time slip and were in luck. Gunther was running at 72 mph when the engine quit, coasted through the end of the run at 64 mph and that gave us an average of 69 mph! Our two run average was still 69.361 mph and good enough to take the record! Back to impound to tear the engine down for the displacement measurement. Once that is passed the record stands. Here we are getting the engine measured.

Since the engine quit on course I guess you can say we coasted our way to a land speed record!


Bonneville Adventure by Sportsman Flyer, on Flickr

I have been meaning to get back to this thread, but never seem to get out of the shop. So We backed up our first record run with a dead engine. I mentioned how we had to tear the engine down and have a tech inspector measure the cc's. We were under the 175cc limit, so we bolted it back together. While reinstalling the flywheel cover I found the kill switch wire had worn through and grounded out! A little black tape and we were back in business. We took our bike back to the pits and planned our next runs.