Street Sweepers

Kent Stotz's world-record-holding Blackbird has been retired and replaced with a newer, nastier version for 2003. See Signal2Noise for an update on this year's bike.

You think your hot-rodded Hayabusa is really something, huh? With a pipe and a Power Commander, it probably puts down, what, about 170 hp? Dropped an inch or two and finished off with a stretched swingarm, you probably think you're a real boulevard bad boy, don't you?

Think again, Binky. To the few good men who compete in AMA/Prostar's Streetbike Shootout--aka, the sickest racing class the straight-line world has ever seen--170 hp is kid's stuff. Most Shootout bikes are closer to 400 hp, and they usually complete a quarter-mile pass in around eight seconds at more than 180 mph. On a street tire. With no wheelie bar. Headlights blazing, and license plate flapping in the breeze.

The graphic on the tail section says it all--and dig that license plate

Wanna play at Streetbike Shootout? Here's the plan: Start with one honking-big superbike--preferably a Haybusa, a ZX-12R, or a Blackbird, though a Gixxer 1000 or even an old-school GS1100 will do in a pinch. Yank the motor and bore it out (1,400 cc is a good place to start), then take it within an inch of its life with a turned-up turbo (30 psi of boost!) or a heavy dose of nitrous oxide.

Once the motor is dialed, slam the chassis and stretch it until the wheelbase approaches 68 inches and it resembles a sportbike sent to the Twilight Zone and back. Then ride (remember, gotta be street-legal) this euthanizer-on-wheels to the nearest dragstrip and rocket for the other end without ripping your arms off or intro-ducing a piston to the atmosphere, and you're ready to play.

The Streetbike Shootout concept was cooked up by the AMA/Prostar powers-that-be in the mid '90s as an antidote to the increas-ingly bland Pro Mod and Pro Stock racing classes. Populated with dozens of cookie-cutter Kawasakis and Suzukis that all ran within four-tenths of the others' elapsed times, these races were, well, boooring! Might as well be watching the cars...

Shootout fixes that. It's an anything-goes class, and rules are kept to a minimum: 68 inches is the maximum allowable wheel-base, and all Shootout bikes must run DOT-approved tire. As far as rules go, that's about it. Unlimited motor mods are allowed (pro-vided you begin with stock cases), and the stock frame can be changed in any way the builder sees fit.

Factory Kawasaki racer (and Super Streetbike guest columnist) Rickey Gadson is a perennial Shootout competitor--though he will primarily focus on the Hot Rod Cruiser class in 2003.

Oh, yeah, one last thing--absolutely no wheelie bar ("wheelie bars are for wusses," one Shootout rider says). Also, the "Street-bike" in the title isn't hyperbolic--Shootout bikes must be street-legal, meaning they must have full lights, a starter, and a charging system that remains intact. On race day, these bikes have to com-plete a 10-mile road course, then shut down and restart within 30 seconds or risk disqualification. To find the fastest and quickest streetbikes in the world, look no farther than here.

Building a Shootout bike is a hot-rodder's dream, and the open-book rule structure encourages exactly the sort of creative thinking and backyard innovation that drag racing was originally celebrated for. Riders love it for the challenge. In other classes, advancing technology in tires, chassis design and electronic engine manage-ment have made drag racing increasingly a point-and-shoot affair. Remove equalizers like the wheelie bar and predictable slick tires, then toss in the most powerful engines in the paddock, and the result is (barely) controlled chaos--a hairball mix of wheelies, tire-hazing slides and amazing speeds. Needless to say, crowds love the Shootout bikes, too.

After a few years as a sideshow to the main event, Streetbike Shootout has since become one of the biggest draws on the AMA/Prostar circuit. There are now well over 100 competitive Shootout bikes in America, with more being built every day. Some of the best riders in the sport have taken the Shootout challenge, like Rickey Gadson, six-time champion and all-around AMA/Prostar golden boy, who competed exclusively in the Shootout category for the '02 season. More importantly, the factories are backing the game--Gadson's Muzzy/Kawasaki effort is a full-on factory part-nership (the first in American drag racing) and American Honda's only involvement in quarter-mile sport is through its sponsorship of Kent Stotz's world-record-holding Blackbird Shootout bike.

It's easy to understand the fan appeal of the Shootout class. Similar to NASCAR, which offers mind-bending performance from race cars that sorta look like the door-slammers fans drive to the office every day, fans can relate to Shootout bikes. Unlike the cartoon-caricature Pro Stock bikes with 2-foot-wide tails and airbrushed-on headlights, the Shootout bikes, most of which retain stock bodywork, look pretty much like the 'Busas and Blackbirds that bike fans ride everyday.

The Nxt Level Racing machine lays claim to the title of "World's Fastest Hayabusa" (7.97 seconds at 184.39 mph). It's also a rolling development lab for NLR's turbo systems and other go-fast products.

Asphalt-folding power aside, the engine in a Shootout bike is surprisingly pedestrian--many use stock bottom ends (including Gadson and Stotz), and the go-fast goodies are mostly bolt-ons readily available through the aftermarket for an almost-reasonable price. This undeniable element of possibility makes the Shootout irresistible to chumps in the stands--"Hey, slap a stretched swinger and a nitrous kit on my bike, and I could do that, too."

Only you couldn't--unless you possessed jackrabbit reflexes, the self-preservation instinct of a banana slug and dingers the size of bowling balls. Short of a full-on Top Fuel bike--supercharged, 1,000hp, 230mph land missiles--a Shootout bike is the most diffi-cult machine in the paddock to ride. Riding a Pro Stock bike is a fairly straightforward affair. Point, shoot and hold on while the bike packs up on the wheelie bar ("training wheels," Shootout guys call them) and rockets down the strip.

Hurry up and wait. The staging lanes are a place for making mental preparations, visualizating the run, settling any last-minute adjust-ments, tanning, rubber-necking and soul-crushing boredom.

Going fast on a Shootout bike requires substantially more skill. The first step is to get the skinny tire to hook up without going up in smoke. Once you get it to hook, the next challenge is keeping the front end down--no small feat with 450 hp and no bar. Do it all at once, in less than eight seconds, and you da man. "Anyone can run a seven on a Pro Stock bike," says Mike Haislip, who pilots a Shootout-prepped Hayabusa. "Running in the sevens on a Shootout bike is really doing something. That's real riding."

Considering the differences in machinery, the times put down by Shootout bikes are remarkable. Kent Stotz currently holds both the elapsed time and speed records for Shootout bikes with a run of 7.64 seconds at 192.33 mph on his turbo Blackbird. Compare this to a very fast Pro Stock run, which is around 7.10 at about 190 mph. Remember that a Pro Stock bike runs a custom-fabbed rigid chassis, with a 10-inch drag slick with three feet of wheelie bar off the ass end. Shootout bikes have a horsepower advantage--most punch out around 450 horsepower, compared to 325 for a com-petitive Pro Stock bike. But this can do more harm than good.

"We're definitely making too much power," Stotz says. "This bike flexes all the way down the track. We're probably losing 60-70 hp to chassis flex that gets wasted as torque on the chain and swingarm instead of transferred into forward motion."

Given this, why waste all the time and money chasing big numbers? "It's an ego thing," says Rickey Gadson, laughing. "These guys are all hardcore hot rodders who just want to say 'I've got 500 hp.' But it doesn't matter, because you can't use all of that. We can make around 500, but probably only use about 375 horsepower on the track. Just to get 375 horsepower to stick to the racetrack is a big problem."

Having the latest and greatest motorcycle often isn't neccessary to win at Streetbike Shootout. Some of the fastest and quickest bikes in the class are 10 or more years old.

Big problems, but a great show. Imagine trying to steer a 650-pound bike in a straight line, with the front wheel two feet in the air and the rear wheel stepped out and spinning, all at 150 mph. A clean, mid-seven second pass is a remarkable feat of clutch and throttle control.

A good launch is key to winning. The 60-foot time of a Shootout bike is slower than other types of bikes, because they don't leave as hard. This is the main reason Shootout e.t.'s are slower, despite faster trap speeds. Fast e.t.'s are only possible with fast 60-foot times. "You need to get all you can get and as fast as you can get it," says Gadson, describing his race strategy. "We accelerate to 150 mph in five seconds. That tells you how hard the bike is accelerating in the first half of the track."

Wheelspin is one enemy, and it remains a factor for the entire run--according to telemetrical equipment carried on Gadson's bike, when he crosses the finish at 185 mph, the real wheel is often spinning at 210 mph. On the rare occasion when everything comes together just right, a Shootout machine can launch amazingly hard. There's a famous picture of Stotz from a few years ago leaving the lights with both the front and rear wheels off the ground. The bike literally leaps forward.

Successful Shootout racing is all about the launch. With 400 hp being transferred to a 7-inch-wide DOT tire, keeping your weight forward on the bike to keep the front wheel down at the launch is essential.

Wheelies are the other wild card. "These bikes can wheelie at any time, especially in First or Second gear," says Stotz. The results can be spectacular--some bikes wheelie so hard on the shift into Second that they leave a shower of sparks when they slam back to earth. "You have to be aware of that and be very conscious at all times of just how high that front tire is, so you can shut down soon enough so you don't flip. Or hold it--on my world record 7.64 run, I was carrying the front tire pretty much the whole way," he says.

The third and final component of a fast run is going straight. Like all aspects of Shootout performance, this is simply a matter of brute force. "You don't steer these motorcycles once you get going--no way!" Gadson says. "They accelerate too hard for that. You have to keep the bike upright, bring your shoulders and your body one way and yank the bike over where you want it." That's an awful lot of drama to pack into just seven-and-a-half seconds.

Mid-sevens is screaming for a streetbike. At the end of the day, a surprising number of these machines still see street action. You didn't hear it from us, but some Shootout bikes pull double duty in the high-risk, high-stakes world of illicit street racing. Even Stotz occasionally takes his world-record-holding bike out on the town (but never to race--"my contract with Honda would be over in an instant if I got caught racing on the street!" he says).

"My son and I like to go up to the hot dog stand back home and hang out some nights," Stotz says. "The turbo bike doesn't develop much heat and is actually pretty calm at low revs, so sometimes I ride it up there just for fun."

A seven-second, 190mph, boulevard cruiser--you gotta love that.

Heavy Metal
Cruisers in a sportbike mag? Quit your laughing--these bikes, built to compete in AMA/Prostar's Hot Rod Cruiser class, ain't nothing like your father's Fat Boy.

Yamaha's title sponsorship of Hot Rod Cruiser last year paid off. Warriors like the one built by Orient Express (left) and the championship-winning Patrick Racing entry (above) rule the class.

Racing cruisers is something of an oxymoron. After all, the basic premise of cruising--tooling along as slowly as possible so onlookers have more time to eyeball you and your ride--seems like the antithesis of racing. But that's not the case in Hot Rod Cruiser class, where "cruising" happens nine seconds at a time and at speeds around 130 mph.

Hot Rod Cruiser was launched two years ago in an attempt to attract some of America's huge cruiser-riding enthusiast base (more than 50 percent of all bikes sold here are cruisers) into the drag racing fold. Hot Rod Cruiser is open to all types of import cruisers, as well as select Harley-Davidson models. Nearly unlimited engine mods are allowed, providing certain engine components remain stock and one adheres to displacement limits.

"We want really fast bikes in this class," says Keith Kizer, AMA/Prostar president. "If you've got 13-second cruisers, who cares? But once we got into the nines, people started to get excited."

Hot Rod Cruiser bikes are plenty fast. The current class records (e.t. and speed) are 9.86 seconds and 133 mph, both held by Mark Underwood on the Patrick Racing Yamaha Warrior. The racing is a romp--110 lb-ft of torque and an 800-pound minimum weight turns these bikes into metal pretzels off the line. OEM marketeers might try to pass off piggish bikes like Warriors and Mean Streaks as "performance cruisers," but those showroom slugs are pale imitations compared to the heavy-metal monsters that compete in Hot Rod Cruiser.