Obviously the streamliner is the real deal and objective for Bonneville, but realistically its going to take time to get it through Technical Inspection and there is a school of thought that says the USFRA event in September is more relaxed, you get more runs due to less people and it takes the stress away.
So that's the plan, ship the bike to go to Speedweek in August but to let the Tech boys crawl all over it and give me a shopping list of things to do, sort them out and run at USFRA, where the records are the same records as speedweek so nothing to lose.
Whilst at Speedweek i want to set records, of course, and have shipped a sidecar platform to Wall's that we re-assembled and welded and set up whilst i was staying in New Mexico. To save on freight cost i cut it in 3 and thus it needed welding together and have it toe in and bike to platform angle set up. this took a surprising amount of time.
I will run with the engine set up from 2 years ago to start with as the current records are about 30 mph, and the solo bike did over 40mph.
However i am prepping an "extreme" engine for the Monet using new cylinder liners in the original casting with modern port timing, reed valve induction, modified original cylinder head for squish and high compression and modern conrod and piston to allow revs to climb to 9000rpm+.
My challenge is it may not run before being shipped, but all depends on timings, and if i can find a working ignition in the my spares, as 2 sets are in the US.
This set up should give double the power of the current record holding bike.
I will run this engine in both sidecar and solo classes to up my current record and set an enhanced sidecar class record.
I could do gas and fuel class records for either but each class change is £300 plus, and if you set a record run, the bike goes to impound overnight before the record confirming return run, so you run out of days to do too many classes.
The trip to Wally in New Mexico certainly got the juices going, and he is now talking of building a streamliner with a Kawasaki 636 engine, he's 77 by the way and has held records at 231 mph and has the much sought after "red Hat".
