Tales of the
American West: High Noon
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I just read that Sam Wheeler was killed in a testing crash on the Bonneville Salt Flats earlier this week. That's a bummer, as he was not just a great guy; he was also a brilliant and mostly self-taught engineer who had spent an entire lifetime in pursuit of the outright land-speed record for motorcycles. After I met him in 2006, he completely rebuilt his EZ-Hook streamliner and he was one of several guys who hoped that this would be the year he (or a rival) broke the 400 barrier for the first time.
After several consecutive years of crappy salt, this looks like a good year for the streamliners, but Wheeler will certainly be missed. After I wrote this story about the '06 showdown, I wrote profile of Sam for Classic Bike magazine. I'm bummed that I can't find that story in my digital files.
Anyway, here's an account of two high-tech, big-$$$ streamliners competing on the salt, and being beaten by Sam and a ZX-11 motor that was something like 15 years old at the time.
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The
town of Wendover sits right on the Nevada-Utah state line. On the west side of
town, there’s a fifty-foot tall neon cowboy nicknamed Wendover Will. If Will
could see, he’d see dead-eyed losers pulling off the highway into the garish
casinos on the Nevada side. Beyond that, he’d see flyblown cinderblock motels
and Mexican takeout places in Utah. Beyond that, he’d see the Bonneville Salt
Flats.
Will’s
been there a long time, but even he couldn’t remember the last time two
streamliners with world-record potential have traded shots at being the fastest
thing on two wheels. Normally, land speed racing meets are relatively sedate
deals that are man-and-machine vs. record. Not the 2006 Motorcycle Speed Trials
by BUB. It was a cross between a poker game and a flat-out duel.
Denis
Manning and Mike Akatiff are both heavyset guys within a year or two of being
sixty. When he was younger, Manning was known for his fast Triumphs, Nortons,
and Harleys; drag bikes and streamliners. Akatiff tuned trick BSA Gold Stars
for Grand National flat track stars like Jim Rice and Dick Mann.
The
collapse of the British bike business was the best thing that ever happened to
them. Both of them became successful, self-made entrepreneurs. Manning founded
BUB Enterprises, a company that sells aftermarket exhausts to the custom Harley
crowd. Akatiff’s ACK Technologies supplies electronic components to the aircraft
industry. Funded by BUB and ACK—and with sponsorship from Ford (for Manning)
and Top 1 Oil (Akatiff)—both men have spent the last ten years obsessively
building the world’s fastest motorcycle. If they’d been collaborators, building
one bike, they’d be best friends;
twins separated at birth. But each has built his own streamliner. So instead, they are rivals. And their rivalry is
all the fiercer and more personal, precisely because they are so similar.
Externally,
the two machines seem as similar as their builders, but under the skin they
rely on radically different sources of power. Manning worked with an engineer
named Joe Harralson to build his three-liter, 90-degree V-4 motor from scratch.
With dual overhead cams and a turbocharger, it came to the salt in a relatively
mild state of tune, producing about 500 horsepower. By contrast, Akatiff put a
pair of Suzuki Hayabusa motors behind his rider. The two motors (which are
fitted with proprietary heads) share a turbocharger and are linked by a
“Hy-Vo”-type chain. The “ACK Attack” ’liner produced close to 1000 hp.
You
don’t just go down to the shops and buy a pair of four hundred mph tires. There
too, Manning and Akatiff took different approaches. Manning prevailed on
Goodyear to make him a few rear tires that he could pair with a front tire from
a top-fuel dragster. Akatiff built his vehicle to run on Mickey Thompson car
tires. Both tire manufacturers then washed their hands of the affair; the odds
of a fiasco outweighed the publicity value of a motorcycle world record,
considering that neither company is even in the motorcycle tire business.
Land
speed racing may be high stakes poker with the fastest motorcycles on the
planet, but it is played out at an excruciatingly slow pace. Streamliner
records go unchallenged for years and stand for decades.
The
Southern California Timing Association (SCTA) sanctions most of the meets on
the Bonneville Salt Flats. Until recently, Sam Wheeler was acknowledged as the
outright motorcycle land speed record holder; his E-Z Hook streamliner averaged
332 miles per hour at an SCTA event. Those meets are not sanctioned by the FIM,
however, so they are not strictly “world records.” Manning didn’t even bother
to bring his machine to the SCTA’s recent Speed Week. In order to ensure his
place in the FIM’s record book (and perhaps just as important, the Guinness
World Records book) he staged his own meet, Motorcycle Speed Trials by BUB, a
few weeks later. He spent thousands of dollars flying an FIM steward in from
Switzerland to make it official. Mike Akatiff jumped at the chance, and
registered his ’liner at his rival’s event.
Manning
had been perfecting his BUB ’liner for years, and all the development riding
had been done by a BUB employee named Rocky Robinson. Somehow, the two had a
falling out last year, and Manning advertised for a new rider. Chris Carr
responded. Maybe he got the job because Manning thought he’d bring good luck;
the BUB machine was Manning’s seventh streamliner and Carr was a seven-time
Grand National champion. Or maybe it was simply that, at 5’5”, Chris easily fit
in the claustrophobic cockpit.
In
his first test, Carr familiarized himself with the two joysticks used to steer
the ’liner, while Manning towed it behind his pickup truck. Carr toppled it
first to one side, then the other. Not the most auspicious start for the most
talented rider to hit the salt since Cal Rayborn.
Mike
Akatiff immediately hired Robinson to pilot ACK Attack. Rocky was, after all,
the most experienced man available. So Akatiff didn’t necessarily hire him
because he relished beating Manning with his own rider. That would be a bonus.
The
FIM-sanctioned Motorcycle Speed Trials by BUB got its start the same weekend as
the Springfield Mile. There was no way Carr would skip Springfield, so
Manning’s crew pimped their ride while they waited for their star rider to
arrive on Monday afternoon.
ACK
attacked the flying kilometer in the middle of the course at 346-and-change.
According to FIM rules, they had two hours to turn the machine around and come
back through the kilo in the opposite direction. The average of those two
speeds would be their official record. They came back ten mph slower, but it
was still good enough to beat Sam Wheeler’s old record, and set a new FIM mark.
That night, Akatiff bought steaks for his crew.
On
Tuesday morning, when Chris Carr climbed into the BUB ’liner down at Mile 0, I
was in the ACK pits, directly across from the timing station in the middle of
the course. Akatiff and his crew were still euphoric, but they gradually fell
silent, to better hear the officials’ CB radio chatter. Carr appeared from over
the horizon, followed by his flat, V-4 exhaust note. A moment later, when he
heard 354-point-blahblahblah, Akatiff told someone to check and see if that had
been a speed quoted in kilometers per hour, not miles.
Carr’s
return run was slower, but still good for an average of 350 and change. Akatiff was practically still digesting his
steak when he lost his record. He ordered his crew to prepare for a second attempt.
Frustratingly,
Rocky knocked out two runs in the high 340s; he said the runs had been good, so
the question was, how could they even get more speed? And if Manning’s machine
could go over 350 right off the trailer, how much more did it have in it? One
thing was certain; a smart poker player would not show his cards until late in
the meet.
On
Tuesday night, Akatiff put in a call to his turbocharger guy, and was all
smiles Wednesday morning when he told his crew that they could crank the boost
to 32 psi. That would be good for at least 200 more[ital] horsepower.
But when they started working on the bike they discovered a disintegrating
bearing in the drive system.
The
two principals’ relationship is formal, but their crews are on genuinely
friendly terms. So when the ACK guys needed some epoxy to reinforce the area
around the failing bearing, they walked across and borrowed it from Manning’s
team. And when Carr’s rear tire chunked and had to be replaced, a couple of Top
1 mechanics rolled the new hoop over to the ACK trailer and asked them if
they’d mind putting it on their balancer. Carr said, “That’s like Grand
National racing,” meaning that the racing is no-holds-barred on the track, but
the atmosphere in the pits is friendly. That said, Manning specifically
instructed his guys not to let the wheel and tire out of their sight.
On
Wednesday morning, as far as Denis Manning was concerned, the world was a
beautiful place. Having pushed the record over 350 mph–a nice, round number–he
was not inclined to run his ’liner again unless Akatiff beat his record.
Sitting in a folding chair in the shade of his canopy, he was in a voluble mood
as I interviewed him. Within earshot, an ACK mechanic came over and chatted
with a BUB mechanic about tricky problem they were having with their
intercooler. Under his breath but dripping with sarcasm, Manning said, “Yeah,
that’s a shame.”
Wednesday
was all about waiting. Akatiff’s crew gave that bearing the MacGyver treatment.
The highlight came when Sam Wheeler took a run in his well-tested machine,
powered by a nearly vintage ZX-11 motor. The contrast was stark: Sam’s crew was
about half the size of Manning’s or Akatiff’s mobs. Five or six old friends
fussed over the 60-something Wheeler. Not to belittle the creative efforts of
the other guys, but Sam literally built the entire E-Z Hook ’liner with his own
hands. Unlike Carr, who had to be towed off the line, or Robinson, who had to
be pushed to 30 or 40 mph, Sam just climbed into his green machine, punched the
starter button, and slipped the clutch away from a dead stop.
When
Rocky Robinson went over 340, eyebrows were raised. When Chris Carr went 354,
jaws dropped. But when the radio crackled back that Sam had gone three hundred
and fifty five, the volunteers at
Mile 0 was spontaneously cheered. A total stranger hugged me. But that elation
died a moment later, when word came that the machine had come to a stop on its
side, with a blown front tire. A record return run was out of the question.
Wheeler’s
single pass did make him, again, the fastest man on two wheels. But Manning
didn’t even tell Carr to suit up. All he cared about was the official record,
and time was on his side, not Akatiff’s. The meet was scheduled to end–it would
lose its FIM sanction–at high noon, Thursday.
At
first light on Thursday morning, Manning grilled Charles Hennekam, the FIM
steward, on the exact rules that would govern the meet’s final hours. Manning
was afraid that Akatiff might hold Rocky on the line until the end of the meet
and, at the last minute, set a record leaving him no time to respond.
That
begged more questions of Hennekam: Did the runs in both directions have to be
completed by noon? No, just the first run; after that the usual two hours were
allowed for a return. Did the first run have to be over the existing record to
allow a record return run, per SCTA rules? No. What if, just before noon, two
machines were lined up and waiting? If one went before noon, could the other
follow even though the deadline had passed?
The official was frustrated; the rules didn’t anticipate this kind of
gamesmanship.
But
Akatiff wasn’t waiting for Manning to draw; he desperately wanted to get two
runs in the book right away. Manning decided that if Akatiff’s ’liner even got
close to his record on an initial run, he’d send Carr down the course right
after him to try and raise the target. So both machines were prepped on the
line; whenever Rocky suited up, Chris would suit up, too.
Talk
about anticlimaxes. Rocky was blown off course. ACK Attack got stuck on its
push truck. Some time around mid-morning, it launched and stopped a mile or two
down the course. From the sound of things, that bearing had, literally, brought
the ’liner to a grinding halt. Back at Mile 0, Carr climbed out of the BUB
cockpit for the third time without having turned a wheel. Denis Manning was
finally sure the record was his. He told his crew to move the ’liner back to
the pit area for a photo session.
When
the BUB crew reached the pit area, they were dumbfounded to see ACK Attack
heading back to the start. Their
problem had only been a broken chain. Manning’s crew rushed after them, acutely
aware of the noon deadline. Again, Chris suited up, and at about 11:30, BUB was
ready to go while ACK was still counting down. Although a few onlookers thought
Carr should run first and try to raise the record, Denis Manning waited for
Akatiff to give it his best shot. After being plagued with so much trouble, ACK
Attack didn’t seem like much of a threat–unless Mike Akatiff was bluffing.
Once
more, Rocky motored away, but the twin ’busas popped and sputtered. Again, the
radio brought word that Akatiff’s machine had stopped on the course. The noon
deadline passed. Finally, Carr and Manning popped champagne and sprayed each
other.
But
it wasn’t only the racing that took place over the horizon; so did the strategy
and mind games. Still soaked in champagne, Manning got wind of a rumor that
Akatiff’s crew was going to go to Mile 11 and make a return run, then scrub the
first run and make a third pass for the required two way average. Manning asked
if Top 1 could make a run and was told no, the first pass had to be made before
noon. The deadline had passed, even for the event promoter. No one could
believe that a third pass by ACK Attack would be legal and it didn’t satisfy
them that the AMA’s steward agreed. Carr finally got mad. “Get that FIM guy
down here! I want him to tell me to my face.”
In the end Akatiff folded. He told his crew, we’re
done, pack up. Denis Manning got his record, but there was no crystalline
moment for Carr; no checkered flag or victory lap. So, I had to ask him, was
riding the streamliner fun? Or just an opportunity to lose, without the
corresponding chance to win?
“It’s
fun,” he said, “when they open that hatch at other end of the course.”
