I Built An Insane Motorcycle. Four Times.

A lot of car projects never get finished. People start with grand plans and then the interest fades, or the cost adds up, or sometimes life just gets in the way. I don't usually have this problem. I have the opposite problem, which is, I don't know when to quit. This leads to some pretty fun projects, but also some interesting failures. Perhaps the biggest of which is this guy right here. At first glance, you might think this is my land speed racing car, but no, this is, or rather was, my land speed racing motorcycle. A project from long past. The goal was lofty, the build troublesome, and though it did race, the results are not what you might call super fast. So join me as I tell the story of my biggest automotive project failure, the little motorcycle that couldn't. For any automotive project to be successful, you need four things. You need time, you need money, you need a place to build your project, and you need to have the passion and drive to see the project through. I had one of those things, so I decided to be smart about it. Land speed racing motorcycles. Motorcycles are smaller than cars, less expensive than cars, and while racing is usually complex and expensive, land speed racing is relatively simple. It was at this point that the logical reasoning voice in my brain handed the decision making off to the adolescent boy in my head who makes most of my important decisions. This person, we'll call him Matt, looked at the available options given to him and chose the one thing that is not small, nor inexpensive, nor simple at all. Streamliner motorcycles. Streamliners are fully enclosed torpedo-shaped vehicles. This is what I'm currently building with my car. They're fast, but they're also kind of complicated. For one, they are fully custom vehicles. You can't buy a streamliner from Honda and then modify it for racing. You have to build the whole thing. A motorcycle streamliner might seem like a simpler vehicle than a car streamliner, what with two of the wheels missing, but it's actually in a lot of ways more complicated. This used to be legal in the streamliner class, but no longer. You have to be fully enclosed, which means no sticking your leg down at the beginning or end of your run. You need skids or wheels or something. Also, you have to balance it while you're driving in a lay down position with the handlebars several feet away from the front axle. It's less about balancing the bike than it is about steering underneath it as it starts to fall over. If I had chosen any other motorcycle class, this project would have been much more successful, but I didn't because this guy makes the important decisions. Motorcycles have a different requirement for the frame structure than cars. The cars require a 1 5 8 inch diameter tubing, but motorcycles only require 1 1⁄4 inch. They had talked about changing this requirement a few years ago, so both cars and motorcycles would require 1 5⁄8 of an inch, but I don't know what happened to that. Anyway, a lot of the motorcycle guys will build using the larger tube so that in the future they can stick on four wheels instead of two and run in more classes. This would have been a great idea, but I didn't do it. I didn't want to add any extra capability because that would add frontal area. If you know about aerodynamic drag, you know that frontal area is bad. The larger the vehicle is when looking at it from the front, the slower it goes. Larger tubes mean larger frontal area, so I made it as small as possible. Too small, actually. I fit in wearing a t-shirt, but not so much when wearing the thick fireproof suit required for the race. This is actually not that uncommon. I've heard multiple stories of people building their frames too small and having to stick in a bottle jack to widen the inside near the shoulders. The engine I chose for this project was the Honda F4i. I chose this engine because I was very familiar with it. I had used it in race cars in college, I had rebuilt and tuned a number of them, and I owned one of the motorcycles. Good choice, right? No. For one, it wasn't even the most up-to-date 600cc engine that Honda had at the time. The bike had been replaced by the more powerful 600RR a few years prior. Even that engine wasn't the most powerful in that class. A Suzuki or Yamaha would have been a better choice. Also, there is no 600 class at Bonneville. It goes from 500 to 650, then 750. I could have had some bigger pistons made or a stroked crankshaft, but with the sport bike cylinder coatings and the cost of custom crankshafts, both of these things would add a lot of money to an already over-budget project. This brings me to possibly my biggest mistake, money. Auto racing is expensive. Always more expensive than you think it will be. By a lot. When I started this project, I was recently out of college. With student loan debt and a car payment, I was making $50,000 a year and living in California where the average monthly rent is $42 million. I could not afford to build this bike, but I did it anyway. I was also using half of a garage, which was actually enough space. Here's the thing about project car budgets. There are always things you don't think of, and always things that cost more than you think they will. Almost nothing costs less than you expect. And so what happens is that you start to cut corners where you really shouldn't. You start to buy cheap parts, hoping they will work, but then they don't, so you have to buy the right part instead, and now you've spent more money than if you'd just bought the right part to begin with, and you're further in the hole. This is especially a problem with race cars, because cutting corners always makes the car either slower or less safe, and nobody wants to go slower. Remember how I was talking about frontal area and how you want it to be as small as possible? Well, the best way to do that is with a really small front tire. The problem here is that smaller tire spins faster, so it has higher forces acting on it, and it heats up faster. You used to see small front tires in drag racing, but these days all the front runners are about two feet tall. This is no good, since I wanted the vehicle to be less than two feet tall, so I went with an airplane tire. This is not uncommon in land speed racing. Most of these tires have speed ratings, and most planes don't land at 200 miles per hour, even the really fast ones barely hit that on the runway, and only for a few seconds. So, you can find a tire rated for about 180 miles per hour, but if you try to run it on the salt at over 200 miles per hour for a mile straight, they heat up quickly and start to chunk off rubber. This is bad on a land speed racing car, and worse on a land speed motorcycle. You can shave them, and some people do that, but you also have to source the tires. Anyone who owns a plane will tell you that if you put the word aviation in front of any product, the price goes up five-fold. It's even worse than in racing. The trick is to find a used one, and that's what I did. I made a pretty detailed CAD model of this bike before I started building and went through a few iterations, but everything is packed in there pretty tightly. I designed suspension in the rear using pole shocks from a Harley. This worked pretty well. The intake manifold was really tight, super short runners and not very much volume. I leaned the motorcycle engine forward a bit, which gave less frontal area but made oil changes challenging. The rear wheel was a front wheel for a drag racing car. Steering was actually pretty similar to what I have on my car now. Handlebar steering with a frame that latches on the sides and pivots up out of the way to get out of the car. Except here, I used push-pull cables instead of solid links. The throttle body was machined down from something I bought used off of eBay. Engine cooling was accomplished with a tank of water behind the driver. I didn't use a heat exchanger here like I do on my current car. I just ran the hot coolant through the tank. Fire extinguishing bottles were shoved in the back, wiring and ECU packaged tightly with the engine. I can't even remember what I did for parachutes. This build was total chaos. I also did not allot enough time for the build, but the truth is you never have enough time. The last few bits of the car were thrown together haphazardly shortly before the race, as it is with all race cars. I managed to make a quick and dirty fiberglass body by stretching some plastic around the frame and just laying up some wet fiberglass over it. I riveted some plexiglass windows in, loaded up the car and headed to Bonneville. It did not go well. The last minute rush to get the car done was not enough and we couldn't get the car to start. Eventually we got it to fire up and by that I mean it caught on fire. It was a small fire but it ruined some of the wiring and the brake lines. We couldn't get the skids on the side to work properly and on top of that getting out of the car was super difficult with the fire suit on. The tech inspectors had some concerns we needed to fix up but with the fire and the fit and everything else it became clear that the car was not going to race. It was a crazy build. A mad race to the end. But at least for the time being that was the end. The bike got disassembled and put into a corner of the garage to be forgotten about. A couple of years later after getting tired of it taking up valuable garage space I resolved to decide. Do I change it up and try to get it back on the lakebed? Or do I set it on fire and roll it into the ocean? I chose to try to get it back into racing condition. This was a mistake. I should have rolled it to the ocean. But I would learn from my previous mistakes. I would not make them again. I would make completely new mistakes. That's really all life is. Making newer better mistakes. The streamliner class came with lots of challenges. The body, the enclosed cockpit, the skids to keep it upright, all the safety gear. The next fastest class behind streamliner is called special construction. These look more like actual motorcycles sometimes. It doesn't have all of the safety requirements of the streamliners. In fact you can't have a lot of it because you have to be able to see the rider from both sides. So no roll cage. And instead of a fire suit you need leathers because you won't be stuck inside while it's on fire. You will instead be skidding along the salt flats at some 100 miles per hour. So I started cutting and welding and soon came up with this insane machine. Less than two feet tall, lay down motorcycle with an actual racing tire up front and a rider in the middle who was absolutely out of his flipping mind. I bolted up some training wheels and did some shakedown runs in the parking lot behind SpaceX. With all the necessary safety gear of course. I did one run in this bike and it was terrifying. My eyeballs were lower than the top of the cones at the race course. They zoomed by at what must have been at least three or four hundred miles per hour. The dirt had been chewed up by the cars that had run earlier that day. I was bouncing all over the track trying to keep the bike from falling over in a cloud of dust. My top speed was 59 miles per hour. Slow but after lots of work and rework I had successfully completed a land speed run on that motorcycle. And I was sure I would never do it again. It was absolutely the least safe thing I had ever done and I've done a lot of stupid things. We had fun but the bike was not stable. Not predictable. And if I lost control I was not going to be thrown safely from the bike to skid along the ground. I was going to be wadded up with a rolling death trap, legs and arms mixing with a tumbling steel frame like an octopus in a blender. It was wild and I like wild. But this was too much. Even for this guy. So naturally I went out and did it one more time. But that was it. 80 miles per hour was as fast as this bike would go. For now. The bike got disassembled and put into a corner of the garage to be forgotten about. A couple of years later after getting tired of it taking up valuable garage space I resolved to decide. Do I change it up and try to get back on the lakebed? Or do I set it on fire and roll it into the ocean? Streamliner was a mistake. Laydown special construction, also a mistake. But after a while the bike beckoned me. It said to me, Matt, you have wasted a lot of time and money on this project. You know the only thing to do now is to waste more time and money. I decided to make the motorcycle into what it should have been all along. A motorcycle. A proper sit-on motorcycle. I kept most of what came behind the roll hoop. The sit-on bike needed down tubes and of course the front forks. I had the triple trees water jet out of some thick plate and then machined the insides for the forks and the bearing. I got some shocks from a sport bike and shortened them by cutting the springs inside and welding the tube shorter. And I lowered the front even more by making clamp-on mounts for the front axle. The coolant tank went on one side of the down tubes and the fuel tank went on the other. Initially I had a nitrous bottle below the seat, but I decided to save that for later and remade the seat lower. I added some foot pegs to the rear frame and I was good to go. I did some shakedown runs at my favorite test track, the parking lot behind SpaceX, attracting some attention. This thing was actually super fun to drive. I took it out to the lakebed and did some low speed passes with it. Then I took it to an El Mirage event and did a faster pass. 132 miles per hour. Not bad, but I had lots of problems with it. I couldn't get a good tune on the engine. I had problems with the sensors and the injectors. The intake was too small and I wasn't getting good air distribution. Parts were breaking. It was getting frustrating. And it was the end of the season. So the bike was put into a corner of the garage to be forgotten about. A couple of years later, after getting tired of it taking up valuable garage space, I resolved to decide. Do I change it up and try to get it back on the lakebed? Or do I set it on fire and roll it into the ocean? This bike had been nothing but danger and trouble. Unsafe at any speed and plagued with nothing but problems. So I dug deep into my enormous depth of wisdom and decided to do the only reasonable thing there was to do. I made it street legal. I don't actually know why I thought this was anything but a terrible idea. I had the wheels and tires. I had the title and frame for the bike that the engine came out of. To make a motorcycle street legal in the United States takes almost no effort. The thought process was something like this. If the bike is street legal, I can get it tuned up and shaken down easier. And I'll also have a cool bike to take to bike meets or something. This was an easy mistake. Took me a weekend to get it ready to go. For some reason, I decided to add the nitrous bottle back on, which seems like an odd choice. But then again, this is a story of odd choices. I rode it around the block one time before I realized this was a real dumb idea, even by my standards. I considered disassembling the bike and putting it in the corner of the garage to be forgotten about. I looked around the bike and saw all the welds. The cuts. Rewelds. Hacked up parts. Modified wiring. Rusted tubes. And I realized this thing looked less like a motorcycle than an old dying dog with one foot in the grave. An old dog that will probably kill me. I liked this version of the bike, not so much these street legal parts, but the sit-on bike. I kind of wanted to clean it back up and take it out to the races, but it had become such a hack job. To do it right, to make it fast and safe, I would have had to redo so much of the bike that I might as well start over. I also knew nobody else should ride this bike either, so I pulled off a couple of key components and sold it as a parts bike. And that was it. That was the end of the project. I imagine it's in several pieces scattered around the junkyards of California. It was not a particularly successful bike, nor was it a fulfilling project. But it didn't kill me, which, looking back, is kind of surprising. In the end, after years of work, several rebuilds, and dragging it all around California, I managed to build a racing motorcycle that went 30 miles per hour slower than the motorcycle I got the engine out of. There is an old story about someone asking Thomas Edison about his failure to make the light bulb after a thousand tries. He replied, I have not failed a thousand times. I have successfully found a thousand ways not to make a light bulb. You may look at this and say that I failed to make a land speed racing motorcycle, but the truth is, I did not fail to make a land speed racing motorcycle. I failed to make a land speed racing motorcycle four times. Some of you are looking at your half-finished project car, wishing you could find the time, the money, or the motivation to finish it. But maybe that's a good thing. Maybe life getting in the way is a better choice anyway. You don't always need to follow your dreams, because sometimes, your dreams are dumb. I cannot afford to keep making these mistakes. Unless you support the channel through Patreon, then I can afford to make all sorts of mistakes. Hit that thumbs up if you liked the video, subscribe to PleaseTheAlgorithm, check out the Discord, and I'll see you next time.