James Compton calls his outrageous GSX-R custom "The Crusher" not because, from a distance of 50 feet away, it looks like a stripped-down sportbike destined to be crushed at the salvage yard. It's also not because the owner/builder looks big enough to crush us with his little finger for even mentioning his bike and the words "salvage yard" in the same sentence. No, Compton calls his bike The Crusher because, with a gross vehicle weight of just over 300 pounds and 200 hp at the crank, this wild ride can and will crush pretty much anything that moves in a quarter-mile acceleration contest. Come closer and you'll quickly realize that The Crusher isn't a junkyard dog at all, but one of the most meticulously machined and assembled custom sportbikes that we've ever featured in this magazine, resembling a refugee from the NHRA Pro Stock staging lanes and capable of blazing that fat rear tire through all six gears.
Based in the small town of Boerne, Texas, located 30 miles northwest of San Antonio, James Compton owns a small fabrication workshop known as Compton Custom Design where he hand-crafted the chromoly frame and almost all of the exquisite billet-aluminum parts that make up the rest of the bike. And when he's not fabricating parts for roadrace and drag bikes in his shop, or building engines and tuning suspension systems for the same, James works as the crew chief on rider Jake Holden's #59 Suzuki as part of basketball superstar Michael Jordan's three-rider AMA Superbike race team.
Approach Compton's ride and you'll see that what looks like a bare frame awaiting bodywork is actually a finished and fully functioning motorcycle, complete with a headlight and a taillight and, if not exactly creature comforts, all the necessary accommodations to get the bike and rider down the road. Thanks to an aluminum fuel cell under the saddle, the bike runs without any bodywork at all-looking at it from above, all you see are the four massive throttle bodies jutting up into the rider's face. It's perhaps the purest expression of a high-performance motorcycle that you've ever seen: just a big motor, two wheels and the bare minimum of mechanical bits necessary to get it down the road as fast as possible.
Preparing Jake Holden's engines for both his Superbike and 1000 Superstock bikes, Compton used the same expertise and experience to balance and blueprint The Crusher's GSX-R1000 engine to a similar Superstock spec as the Jordan race bikes-albeit with a little extra oomph in the shape of an exhaust cam of his own design and a very special BPD fuel injection system and modified Motec ignition. For anyone unfamiliar with the Superbike scene, the "B" in BPD stands for Bazzaz, namely one Ammar Bazzaz, the electronics and suspension whiz (formerly the crew chief for Yoshimura Suzuki's six-time AMA Superbike champ Mat Mladin), who is the Superbike crew chief and attends to the technical data acquisition and electronic management systems and the suspension maintenance for all three riders on the Jordan race team. For Compton's GSX-R1000 engine, Bazzaz created an ECU with a fully programmable system using the stock Suzuki double-barreled, dual-stage throttle bodies with some trick remapping that makes the motor perform smoothly, despite the deletion of the stock, 10.2-liter airbox. It's good to have friends, isn't it?
At the other end of the combustion chain, a Compton Custom Design exhaust system exits spent gasses, and RC51 Honda radiator cores in specially designed and fabricated aluminum tanks (likewise by Compton Custom Design) keep everything cool, along with a race-spec aluminum oil-cooler with Goodridge braided stainless steel lines located just behind the rider's right foot. All buttoned up, it's good for 175 hp at the rear tire on the dyno and can generate enough intake suction to pull the T-shirt right off your belly and into the throttle bodies if you're not careful.