Like a fire-breathing dragon, Jose Rodriguez showed up at last summer's inaugural Palm Beach Sportbike Build-Off and set the show on fire with this radical dragon-themed 2005 Suzuki Hayabusa. Covered with spikes, spines and a wild, scaled paintjob, Rodriguez's ride wowed the judges with exactly the sort of vision and creativity-not to mention flat-out fabrication skills-that made the bike worthy of winning the nation's premier custom sportbike prize. Not a bad result at all, especially considering Rodriguez has really only been building custom bikes for the past three years!
Though he's only been building bikes professionally since '02, Rodriguez has been tuned into motorcycles since he was born in Puerto Rico, where his father owned a motorcycle shop. Rodriguez moved to the states when he was a child and has been mostly involved with cars since then, making his living stateside as a successful auto wholesaler. In fact, when the custom bug originally bit Rodriguez, he says his first thought was to open a custom car shop. He shelved this plan, though, because his best friend owns Driver's Seat, a popular Florida custom car house, and Rodriguez didn't want to step on his toes. To keep the friendship running strong, Rodriguez instead returned to his first love: bikes.
Rodriguez soon bought an '02 Hayabusa and went to work giving it the usual chromed-out treatment, which led him to Nick Anglada of Florida's custom sportbike headquarters, Custom Sportbike Concepts in Winter Garden. Rodriguez and Anglada hit it off, and when he was exploring options to open his own shop, Rodriguez first entertained the idea of combining forces with Anglada and opening a south branch of Custom Sportbike Concepts. Eventually he ended up opening his own shop, Superbike Concepts (www.superbikefl.com) in Stuart, Florida, but he and Anglada remain good friends and frequent collaborators, as you can tell by studying the parts list for this bike.
Rodriguez says Superbike Concepts was busy from the beginning with the usual custom sportbike work, including lots of chrome and bolt-on bits, big tire kits, extended swingarms and run-of-the-mill mild performance work. To really break out big-time, though, Rodriguez knew he needed a radical, full-custom sportbike that would put Superbike Concepts on the map-bringing us to the bike we see here. Rodriguez says he wanted to do a theme bike right from the start. "It's good to have a theme that people can connect with," he says, "because it's something that people won't forget." This one didn't start out necessarily as a dragon, though: "I just knew I wanted something nasty, with lots of sharp thorns and spikes, and once I started working on it and molding the thorns, the dragon theme just naturally came out of that."
Rodriguez started with a brand-new '05 Hayabusa purchased from nearby Fort Pierce Yamaha/Suzuki, Superbike Concepts' new bike supplier. The bike showed just seven miles on the clock when Rodriguez tore it down to the ground and went to work. He started with the body, hand-molding the custom fiberglass thorns (which give the bike its name, "Thor") along the top of the tank and the upper fairing. While the fiberglass thorns set the theme off, it's really the paintwork, expertly applied by Volusia County Customs in Deland, Florida, that drives this dragon motif home. Featuring a scale pattern along the top of the bike set off with some medieval "armor" covering the fairing sides and a thin, neon green accent line to add a little color, it definitely adds up to, as Rodriguez says, "something people won't forget."