Give it wheels and an engine, and somebody will race it. In 2010 a Brit called Perry Watkins raced a nitrous-oxide-breathing V8 powered Queen Anne dining-room table with chairs, champagne, crockery, silver cutlery, an ice bucket and a roast dinner down the Santa Pod drag strip, reaching a top speed of 208km/h.
He was trying to break Ed China’s world speed record for furniture on a supposedly street-legal 145km/h V8 sofa.
Nobody really knows when the first impromptu motorcycle drag race took place, but it wouldn’t have been too long after the first two steam motorcycles crossed paths in the 1860s. Whatever their means of propulsion, you can guarantee that early motorcyclists saw any new arrival on their turf as a mortal insult demanding a challenge. The USA, followed by Sweden, is the home of formalised drag racing today, but it seems that Perry’s Pommy predecessors may just have got in first. According to trakbytes.co.uk the first organised sprint meeting in the UK took place on a public road near Colchester in June 1899, and by 1905 things were well enough organised for a Brighton road, clad with that new-fangled tarmac stuff, to host a four-day event incorporating a flying mile for the faster vehicles and a standing mile for the slowcoaches. A post-event dispute with residents over the cost of repairing the tarmac afterwards put paid to any ideas of a follow-up event, but it was revived after WW1 when in 1923 the Brighton & Hove Motor Cycle and Light Car Club staged a series of timed knockout races over a standing half-mile course. Similar tussles no doubt took place worldwide, and in the USA impromptu races were routinely held on dry lake beds, airfields and suitable public roads countrywide. The racers gradually formalised their sport with rules and classifications, and in 1950 a man called C.J. Hart introduced America’s first drag strip purpose-built for racing. A newly-formed controlling body, the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) then organised a travelling road show, the Safety Safari, to put on drag races across America to promote the sport and introduce rules and safety standards, and in the next decade hundreds of drag strips sprang up around the country. The Yanks have led the way in drag racing ever since.
Why is it called drag racing? One theory has it that would-be competitors would cajole their friends to drag their cars or bikes out of the garage or shed to test their mettle, but it’s more likely that the name evolved from the informal races that were so often held in the “main drags” of small towns across America.
Drag racing today is massive in the States, with 40 000 members of the NHRA alone competing in more than 200 classes on 300 racetracks, and the very specialised machinery competing at the highest level is explosively quick – and expensive. Four wheelers in the quickest class, burning nitro methane fuel, produce 10 000+ hp and reach top speeds of 530km/h in less than 4 seconds, using perhaps 80 litres of nitro methane at R225 per litre. The engines are completely rebuilt in just over an hour between every run, which means that at 10,500rpm over a four second run the engine has turned over only about 700 times, excluding the warm-up, staging and burnout phases. Top fuel motorcycles, with but one driven wheel, make do with 1000 – 1500hp to explode down the quarter-mile (400 metres) in around 5,7 seconds at speeds of around 400km/h, gulping down 20 litres of nitro methane per run. Because of the ever-increasing top speeds, top-fuel car competitors now race over 1000ft (305m) rather than the traditional 1440ft (1/4 mile, or 402m). As the cars (and bikes) reach close to maximum velocity within about 200m this doesn’t affect the cars’ 530km/h- top speeds but allows a crucial extra 100m and one second for braking. The bikes, because they only do a lowly 400, apparently don’t need this. None but the brave….
SuperBike Magazine contributor Bill Hunter of billysbikes.co.za, who moved to South Africa from the UK 15 years ago, has a dark secret. He was a five-time British drag racing champion in the Super Street Bike class in the 1980s, and spent a few years racing in the USA in the ‘90s. The Super Street Bikes had to be street legal, with treaded tyres, proper suspension and working lights. Turbochargers and nitrous oxide were allowed, but funny fuels and wheelie-bars were not. “I dominated the class for years and then the rules were changed to allow things like Pro Stock proper drag racing chassis with headlights simply painted onto the bodywork, running on methanol, and they were about a second quicker than everybody else,” says Bill. “Entries dropped to ten or so competitors, and that killed it. It was just too expensive so we walked away. I used mainly air-cooled Suzuki GSX-1100 R and 1150 engines because they had roller-bearing crankshafts, four valve heads and were the strongest motors Suzuki ever built. My bike ended up with 327hp at the end, with a Mr Turbo blower at 1,6 bars and an 80hp nitrous oxide kit in a Spondon frame. It was the first street-legal bike ever to break into the eights, with 8,82 seconds and 174m/ph (280km/h) and held two world records, for speed and elapsed time over the quarter, in 1983. And I used to use it to go to the pub..”
During his years in the USA in the ‘90s Bill raced NRA Pro-Stock and Funny Bikes. “The core essence of drag racing is still in the USA,” he says. “It’s the purest, most natural form of motorsport – two people, side by side, racing to a given point.” Bill’s best time there was a 7,4 second quarter mile on a 500hp Funny Bike with a turbocharged nitrous-oxide assisted Suzuki GSX motor that ran to 320km/h in the quarter mile. His career highlight, though, was back at Santa Pod in the UK when he won the World Finals in ’88. “There was the biggest crowd ever, with a four-day build-up to the final that was held at midnight. There was no recognised World Championship then, and still isn’t, but I’d also won the World Finals (Europe) rounds in Sweden and France.”
What of the dangers? “People don’t realise that it’s not when you’re racing at 320km/h, it’s when you shut off at the end that the danger starts,” he says. “You’re running a fat back tyre with about 0.1 bar pressure, and that’s when it gets scary, when it’s bouncing all over and you’re trying to stop it.”
Ah. Trying to stop it! Mike Bramley, the Grand Old Man of South African motorcycle drag racing knows all about that. His only injury in his 2,5 decades of drag racing that saw him win countless (unofficial) championships happened at the Tarlton drag strip when his 1 300cc twin-engined Triumph’s brake went on strike after he’d crossed the line at 240km/h. “We had no front brakes on the bikes in those days, and I was running in the nines at about 240km/h when the back brake failed” he says. “I went through two barbed wire fences and broke my right hand on a fence post. I wore the soles of my boots right through trying to slow down with my feet!” He got off remarkably lightly, though, because he stayed on the bike all the way.
Mike has always been an interesting character, having in the 1960s been a founder member of the Hells Angels, a multiple SA drag-racing champion and a traffic cop, all at the same time. He was also a genius at getting his bikes to go fast enough to allow him to take full advantage of his lightning-fast reaction times when the lights changed. “Reaction times are very important – the first 60 feet are what drag racing is all about,” he says, “After that you just hang on and go.” Most people don’t know that in drag racing the clock starts only when you launch, not when the lights change, so a slow starter can run a faster time than his opponent but still lose because the laurels go to the first rider to cross the line.
When it came to developing, preparing and riding his drag bikes Mike was some sort of a genius. He built a devilishly quick twin-engined Triumph 1300, and when the Honda 750 Four arrived in 1969 bought one of the very first in South Africa for drag racing. “I was the first in South Africa to get into the 14 second bracket, then the 13’s, 12’s – right down to the 8’s. Wynand Strydom was the first into the 7’s but in my next run I was quicker so I was the second.” Mike’s love of his life was the very special Yamaha XS1100 he developed as a Top Fuel bike in the late ‘70s and ‘80s. “I wanted to put the supercharger in the front, so had to turn the motor around but then it turned the wrong way and the bike would have gone backwards. I had to change the firing order, the camshafts – everything. I put in a big-bore kit but when I got into the 8’s it couldn’t stay together – it started blowing the crankcases in half. I put in big studs and steel plates underneath but it didn’t stop.” Mike went to the USA to pick up some tips, came back and signed up at Wits University for a course in metallurgy, and then built his own engine – crankshaft, crank-cases, connection rods and all. In his home-built frame with Steve Roth riding it after Mike retired it set track records at Tarlton that still stand today – 7,520 seconds (1986) and 302,39km/h (1991) for the quarter mile.
With superbikes being as powerful as they are today anybody with R80,000 for a second-hand bike can, with reasonable skills, run a sub-11 second quarter mile off the showroom floor. Even a 600cc Supersport machine will run within a second or so of that, but in drag racing a tenth of a second is like 20 seconds on a Grand Prix circuit. Those who want to explore the adrenaline-pumping world of top-fuel racing with 400km/h top speeds reached in under six seconds had better have a lot of money to throw at their sport. These days you can build your own 1000hp machine with components supplied by various performance shops, but that will still give you the same equipment as a host of other brave wannabe racers who have a couple of million rand and a need for speed. That’s where reaction time, mechanical ingenuity and, well, cunning come into play…
