Up, Up, and Away! - Superman Yamaha R6

Riding a sportbike is Like flying: There's just something about stretching out over the front of the bike, face first into the wind, cruising along at barely subsonic speeds, that makes a sportbike pilot feel more than a little like Superman slicing through the upper atmosphere. For Todd McNamee, who owns this wild, fat-tire Yamaha R6, the sensation of riding his low-flying missile was no different, making the life-size Superman graphics that cover his bike a natural choice. Not that McNamee needed crazy graphics to draw attention to his ride - the 300mm Avon rear tire already had a handle on that, thank you very much.

Unlike Clark Kent, McNamee is not a mild-mannered newspaper reporter. The 24-year-old Knoxville, Tennessee, resident works construction by day and tends bar at night, in addition to operating RT Motorsports (www.rtmotorsports.net), a start-up motorcycle venture co-owned by McNamee and his friend Ron Marnell. This R6 is a joint effort between McNamee and Marnell, and if it's any indication of the duo's creativity and talent, we predict McNamee won't have that day (or night) job much longer.

McNamee's pro-streeter began life as a used, factory-stock 2001-model R6 with just 700 miles on the odometer. McNamee finished the bike's break-in period the hard way with back-to-back weekends at the local dragstrip plus plenty of back-street stunting in between. After a few seasons all those high-rev launches and multigear wheelies finally took a toll on the R6's notoriously feeble second-gear engagement dogs, lunching the transmission. Off went the little R6 to local mechanical ace Chris Hill at Performance Psycle in Knoxville for a transmission rebuild plus a little performance tweaking. Hill added a full Ti-Force exhaust system, Dynojet jet kit, ignition advancer and BMC air filter, which all added up to a respectable 110 hp with some good VP race fuel in the tank.

The engine work was child's play, though, compared to what McNamee had envisioned for the R6's chassis. Shortly after the bike emerged from Performance Psycle, McNamee got word of RC Components' new spinner wheels and decided he just had to have a set - preferably with the absolute fattest tire available. McNamee was understandably disappointed when he found out said spinners weren't available off-the-shelf to fit his R6, but he hardly let that stop him. He dropped a cool $4800 on a set of RC's Wicked-model spinners anyway, the rear a massive 18 x 10.5 originally intended for choppers, and decided to make them fit. Getting the wheels in-hand was one thing - getting that huge hoop on the back of the bike was another problem entirely. After some searching McNamee and Marnell located a fabrication company capable of building an extended swingarm that Could carry a foot-wide rear tire. With a final price tag close to $3500 for thE prototype swingarm, this piece is anything but a hack job. Check out the hidden jackshaft concealed inside the swingarm's box section that connects two individual 530 drive chains, which allows McNamee to maintain perfect front/rear wheel alignment and chain geometry while still clearing the massive rear tire. Like what you see? All the various pieces, including the RC wheels, 300-series Avon tire and trick swingarm, are available through RT Motorsports to fit most popular sportbikes - including R6s, of course.

The Wicked wheel is completely unobstructed on the right side - there's nothing but a whole bunch of empty space where you would typically expect to see the rear brake rotor. The braking bits haven't been stripped off for show; instead, McNamee borrowed another trick from the chopper builder's playbook and mounted a "sprotor," a combo sprocket/brake rotor, on the left side. Look closely at the sprotor and you'll see it's cross-drilled just like a typical brake rotor, betraying its dual function - the integral brake caliper actually squeezes against the sprocket instead of a separate rotor to slow the bike down. Unless you look very closely you can't even see the brake caliper, which is hidden behind the swingarm. Very clean, very cool and very trick - exactly what you would expect, in other words, from a $3500 swingarm.

While the bike was stripped down McNamee powdercoated the frame and swingarm gloss black to provide maximum contrast with the Dodge Viper-Red basecoat laid down by David Moore of Knoxville. The lifelike Superman graphics are the work of Mike Gima, who owns a paint shop in Knoxville called, appropriately, Art-Rageous. The graphics extend to every surface of the bike (even the undertail, which features Superman's feet enclosing the taillights), and Gima estimates he invested 48 hours on this bike for $2000.

McNamee didn't overlook any details on his custom R6. Hanging off the front spinner's left side is a single Galfer Wave rotor plus Galfer hard brake lines. A Hyperpro steering damper keeps the front end tracking true, and Arata rearsets keep McNamee's boots off the deck. Cleaning up the front of the bike are a handful of bolt-on goodies, including Harris Performance Python handgrips, polished mirror block-off plates, Gregg's Customs flush-mount LED turn signals and chromed bar ends.

Although this R6, with its double-wide rear end, doesn't handle quite as sprightly as a stocker, that doesn't stop McNamee from hitting the streets as often as possible. The biggest problem riding the bike, McNamee says, is that he has to plan extra time to accommodate the dozens of questions he invariably has to answer from the curious crowds that gather every time he ventures out. The R6 currently has 14,000 clicks on the odometer, and McNamee has even ridden it down to the corner-carver's paradise of Deals Gap more than a few times.

In other words, don't be surprised to see the Man of Steel flying behind you AS you carvE some of Tennessee's finest back roads. It's probably just McNamee behind the cape, putting a few more miles on his fat-tire flyer.