2004 Yamaha YZF-R1 - A Bug's Life

Exactly why would anyone build an "ant" bike anyway? It's a perfectly good question, especially when you consider that for most of us they're on par with rats and other such creepy critters. Look a little closer, though, and ants are impressive little...buggers. For a start, they can carry five times their own body weight. That would be like you carrying seven or eight curvy "dancers" (complete with tattoos, silicone and spray tan) on your shoulders (don't kid yourself, studs-you can't do it). But we're losing our focus here, so why build an ant bike?

We obviously had to go to the owner for the answer, and Houston's Jaime Gutierrez explained, "I like ants, and the head of the R1 looks like an ant's head to me."

Now that makes sense-not the bit about him liking ants-the part about an R1 looking like an ant. You've got to admit, it sort of does. R1s are beautiful-looking bikes, but in a very weird insect-like way, which means he's just playing on it rather than ignoring it.

So what's the full story on his huge insect? It started out as a stock 2004 Yamaha YZF-R1, but stock isn't what Jaime wanted. He trusted his custom ideas to a shop called Grand Prix Motoring down in hot and sticky Houston, and the challenge was to make Yamaha's stock worker ant stand out from the rest of the colony.

The shop crew figured that most of the visual changes needed to be in the upper fairing, so the mirrors now double as antennae, the headlights have red angel eyes, and the guys even fitted a pair of Hayabusa custom grab-bars just below the headlight lenses (or eyes, depending on your ant enthusiasm), which now look just like its mandibles (that's jaws for you school dodgers).

Once the insect's head was finished it was time to work on its thorax (middle section for the biology dropouts), so the GP Motoring guys sent out the plastics to the local paint specialist, a shop called Rush. Marcel at Rush airbrushed ants all over the bike; he even painted the NOS bottle to look like a can of ant poison. While he did a great job on the Raid-themed bottle, isn't Raid kind of a party pooper if you're an ant lover? They're coming for you Marcel, in their millions-through the walls and under the floors...

In the interests of general customization the guys also fitted lots of Altered Chrome's goodies, such as the heel guards and the spikes found throughout the machine. They also wanted to tidy up the bike somewhat so fitted some flush-mount front turn signals and an integrated taillight-the sort of thing that we love to have and police love to bust our balls over.

The bike's overall stance was created by fitting a 12-inch stretched swingarm and a set of RC Components "Gladiator" wheels, complete with a 240 size out back. Just in case this ant gets lost there's also a Sony touch-screen GPS system molded into the gas tank (though getting lost is very unlikely for ants, which have quite an unbelievable sense of direction).

Once it's pointed in the right direction this ant gets its legs moving pretty quickly with the help of a wet nitrous system, full Arata titanium exhaust and Power Commander.

Though there are several different "jobs" that each ant in the colony is responsible for, we'd imagine this particular bug pretty much does as it pleases. With sharp looks and performance to push them there's really not much to interfere with this ant's ambition, and we all know that we're not supposed to tangle with the red ones anyway.