Photography by Mark Hoyer

Just your basic ZX-6R-powered 150-mph trike

If you’re trying to raise awareness about a thing, rolling around in a Scorpion P6 trike is a good way to do it. At the start of a cross-country tour to raise awareness and funds for the Susan G. Komen breast cancer foundation, Scorpion’s Director of Marketing Shannon Serig rolled into the Cycle World compound to say hello and to raise awareness also about this sick Kawasaki ZX-6R-powered trike his Miami-based company produces.

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Wes Cooley, Daytona International Speedway, 1981

It’s interesting to consider just what it is that makes motorcycles fast in a given era. In our own time, we can see that tires have reached a high level of both grip and durability. In racing, it is no longer unusual for a rider to set the fastest lap of the race two laps from the end. Thirty years ago, wide bias-ply tires used in 500cc Grand Prix racing were so short-lived that they were being brought to the starting line without even being scuffed. Even at the end of that era, five-time 500cc World Champion Mick Doohan would say that a rider with a 10-second lead on lap 15 would “spend the last 10 laps sliding around” because of tire deterioration.

Tire and rim sizes have grown at the same time. A 1978 1025cc Superbike rolled on 2.5-inch front and 3.5-inch rear rims—sizes that were being used by 125cc GP bikes in 2009.

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You don’t get to choose your genotype, so I blame it for my instant desire to know by experience what it’s like to ride every motorcycle I see if it’s new to me. (Same goes for cars and airplanes, but that’s another story.) That’s one reason why I like to read first-hand accounts of riders who rode hardware in different times. Take the stories of guys who rode as dispatch (or if you’re British, “despatch”) riders in wartime. What was it like, especially back in, say, 1914, when all forms of motorized transportation were still new, and everyone from back-garden tinkerers to degreed engineers was pushing the boundaries of what could be done with their contemporary technology?

Such tales have been hard to find, but Project Gutenberg and other attempts to bring old books back to life using digital technology and the Internet are helping. And although, as I found out just now by searching for the origins of the expression, “There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” the truth of the expression used back in the saloon era of “free” lunches to lure people in who’d buy drinks hasn’t changed. So, when we read about Amazon.com having free e-books for its Kindle users or Kindle-reader users, we can be naturally suspicious: What does Amazon get out of the deal?

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Ready to test: Eric Bostrom at Buttonwillow Raceway.

Team Cycle World Attack Performance spent two days last week at Buttonwillow Raceway testing its 2011 Kawasaki ZX-10R AMA Pro American SuperBike and ZX-6R Daytona SportBike. Veteran racer Eric Bostrom and team newcomer JD Beach each completed more than 100 laps around the bumpy, 2.7-mile Central California racetrack.

This was the third time Bostrom had ridden the all-new 10R that he will debut at the AMA season opener at Daytona next month. Bostrom participated in the Dunlop tire test at the recently repaved Florida track in mid-January and later that same month signed up for three classes—A Superbike Expert, Formula 1 Expert and Heavyweight Solo 20 Expert—at a WERA West race weekend at Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Beach had ridden the ZX-6R just once before—at Daytona during the aforementioned tire test.

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Racing pic: Don Canet, on his nitrous-powered Formula USA Suzuki, leads Barry Burke. Burke later got an unexpected face full of flames from the tailpipe of Canet's Suzuki while drafting down the front straight. (Photo by Larry Lawrence)

The old Formula USA Series, a run-what-you-brung roadracing championship that started out as a Willow Springs Raceway club series and then went national under the WERA Pro Series banner, brought out some of the most unusual roadracing bikes ever.

So unusual were they that A lot of these racebikes had names. There was the Terminator, a pumped-up 1986 Kawasaki Ninja ZX1000 campaigned by early F-USA champ Earl Roloff; Yoshimura Suzuki’s Big Papa ridden by Scott Gray and Valvoline Suzuki’s Methanol Monster, ridden primarily by Kurt Hall, to name a few. Rich Oliver and Robbie Petersen even raced factory Marlboro Team Roberts Yamaha YZR500 Grand Prix bikes in the series. There were turbocharged bikes, punched-out 250 Grand Prix machines and Doug Polen once even rolled up to a race with a Suzuki that burned methane (which was promptly banned).

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Photo by Jeff Allen

Since 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner declared the closing of the American Frontier, the United States has been urbanizing and suburbanizing faster and faster. This has inevitably produced traffic jams of sometimes epic proportions, prompting my former Car and Driver colleague Brock Yates to conclude decades ago that whenever the roads are perceived as “too open,” the ever-watchful members of the Anti-Destination League mobilize and fill them up with slow-moving vehicles, usually in the supposedly fast lanes. American motorcyclists have responded to the ever-increasing congestion with the technique of filtering, or lane-sharing, just as their fellow riders in Europe and Asia have.

It’s not just motorcyclists who filter, either. Back in the late 1970s when I was an executive editor at Car and Driver, living and working in downtown Manhattan, I realized that everyone who used the roads or sidewalks there understood what I called “New York Rules.” These rules were triggered by any traffic jam at any time. For example, where I lived, at the intersection of East 32nd Street and 3rd Avenue, I could see that every morning and afternoon, the lane-dividing stripes on 3rd Avenue would magically cease to mean anything. What might be four lanes turned into six, or however many cars, trucks, buses or other conveyances that could fit would fill every inch of space available between the sidewalks on the one-way street. It was entirely reasonable, and I never saw a cop bother to try to force people back into the official lanes.

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Shayna Texter at the Springfield Short Track in one of the rare times she actually had her foot down. (Photo by Larry Lawrence)

Flat Track racing is a motorsport reserved for the brave at heart and quick of body. Stand on the inside of the first turn at any Grand National Mile watching riders charge in four and five abreast at 120 mph and see if you don’t get chills. Women who’ve excelled in flat track racing are few and far between, but fans of the sport have the good fortune today to be able to watch two of the most talented female riders ever to don steel shoes: Meet Nichole Cheza and Shayna Texter.

Cheza, 23, of Clio, Michigan, is the sole female racing in AMA Grand Nationals. She had a successful career as an amateur and then, in the class that is now called Pro Singles, she earned podium results. Cheza moved up to the top level, the GNC class, in 2005. She spent most of her rookie year injured or recovering from injuries and in ’06 she came back slowly, trying to regain her confidence. The breakthrough for Cheza came on the half-mile at Route 66 Raceway in Joliet, Illinois, on July 7, 2007 (Nichole says it’s easy to remember, 7-7-07) when she qualified for her first Grand National. It marked the first time a female rider scored points in the historic championship since Tammy Kirk in 1988.

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