Even as the number of sportbikes continues to increase at Daytona Beach Bike Week, you can still feel like an outsider if you show up on a Japanese sportbike. Find yourself in the wrong neighborhood and it's as if Bike Week is just an enormous reunion for every American V-twin ever made, and if you're not wearing a fringed leather vest and a slip-on, elasticized bandanna (excuse us, "do-rag") complete with a "badass" flame motif, you're the odd man out. Secretly, of course, we like it like this-it's always more fun to crash the gate at someone else's party, isn't it?
Of all the gates to crash at Bike Week, perhaps none is as secure and well-fortified as that which surrounds the world-famous Rat's Hole chopper show and competition. Among the world's most prestigious chopper events, this is traditionally the venue where the best chopper builders debut their craziest and most creative bikes. Rat's Hole is also pretty much exclusively an American V-twin event, which makes it the absolute last place on earth you'd expect to encounter the ultimate rice-burner, Suzuki's Hayabusa. But as you can see from these pictures, Jason Sapp's wild, Hayabusa-based chopper is hardly your average 'Busa. And for a full-throttle gate-crasher like Sapp, the holy hell that is the Rat's Hole show was the ultimate gate to break down-which is exactly what he attempted to do at this year's event.
Jason Sapp, you're our hero.
While it might seem unlikely to most of us, chopping a Hayabusa seemed completely natural to Sapp. Get one thing straight-Sapp is a sportbike guy to the core. His daily rider is a stretched and slammed 2001 GSX-R1000, and his day job is running C&S Customs (www.candscustom.com), a sportbike hot-rod shop in Mocksville, North Carolina, that fabricates, among other performance parts, the extended swingarms on Star Racing's championship-winning dragbikes. Sapp and his business partner, Tommy Clark, also happen to be huge fans of one-off, handbuilt choppers, and both had an unnaturally strong desire to build a radical chopper that could take the cake at the prestigious Rat's Hole. Neither, however, have any affinity for what they see as underpowered, unreliable, vibrating V-twin motors, so when they started sketching their dream chopper, it had a Hayabusa motor. Who cares what the purists might think-when you've got 180-plus horsepower tucked under the tank, you can write your own rules.
Not that using the 'Busa mill saved the C&S team any headaches. One reason most chopper builders prefer American V-twins is their visual simplicity. With just two cylinders and no cumbersome liquid cooling, the Harley-Davidson V-twin motor looks clean and uncluttered in a stripped-down chopper frame. Not so the liquid-cooled inline-four that powers the 'Busa-typically hidden behind plastic bodywork, the 'Busa motor is an ugly lump covered with unfinished surfaces, exposed wiring and industrial rubber cooling hoses. A huge part of this project, then, involved cleaning the engine in preparation for its full-frontal nude debut. First the motor was stripped to the bare cases and every external surface was polished by Greg Rose at Reflections in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The wiring was rerouted behind the body panels, and any hoses that couldn't be hidden were dressed up with braided stainless steel sheathing. While the engine was in pieces the C&S team also ported the head and fitted some high-performance cams, and once the motor was back in the frame they topped things off with a quartet of Sudco flat-slide carbs for more power. The finishing touch is a custom radiator from local supplier Ron's Radiator that tucks in almost invisibly between the frame downtubes.