Sometimes in life, things don't go quite as planned. Maybe you miss that A on a paper by 1 point, your car breaks down on your way to a date with the girl of your dreams or you end up getting injured while at the top of your game. James "Bubba" Stewart has been climbing his way to the top in the dirt industry since 2002 with accomplishments that include several AMA 125 National Championships and being named Rookie of the Year. Stewart's rise to the top peaked in 2007 when he took home the coveted AMA Supercross Championship.
Going into 2008, the odds were on him to not only win, but dominate. But things soon changed. An aggravated knee injury finally became too much to bear, forcing Stewart to have surgery and sit out most of the 2008 Supercross season. "Going in for this surgery is the right thing to do. I want to be out there racing but I owe it to Kawasaki and my fans to be able to be at my best," Stewart said.
Two Brothers Racing hoped to help make his downtime a little less mundane when they presented him with a fully customized 2008 Kawasaki ZX-6R. Dave "Cully" Cullinan, project manager at Two Brother's Racing, was assigned the task of making the injured off-season a little more manageable. Cullinan explained why they wanted to build a bike for the injured Stewart: "Having a rider like James on our team is huge and we wanted to build a bike for him for the street. A couple of years ago we built him a ZX-6R that wasn't street legal. Also, the other bike was 24K gold plated and was not so low key. We saw an opportunity when he said he wanted a new bike."
Looking like a Huffy on steroids, one of the most pronounced pieces on the bike is the thick spoked wheels that match and complement the bike's overall appeal. Cullinan commented, "As a motocrosser, they use spoke wheels and I thought James's street bike should have them also."
The sexy silhouette of the ZX-6R was toned down from bling to blam for Stewart with a black-and-brown paint scheme from Tagger Designs that is both classic and modern. "With the last bike so bright and flashy, we wanted to do the opposite, but it was a big challenge. The guys at Tagger designed the final scheme with flat and gloss black. You have to paint the whole bike black and then sand it down to have the gloss as well as flat black. I thought the flat black and the copper really tied in well," explained Cullinan.
The dark tones were accented with a random black-and-white pattern that looks like a Zebra jumped in front of a wheelie.
To make sure Stewart couldn't part the bike out on eBay, Two Brothers had the frame and swingarm laser etched with his signature and racing number. The process, while seemingly simple, actually turned out to be a huge challenge because of the location. Cullinan explained: "The signature is one of the key elements that we wanted to put on the bike. We found a company that had a laser-etching machine that could actually burn into the material. They had to put the frame on the ceiling and point the lasers upward."
A champion on a bike that's all show and no go makes as much sense as a Hummer on 26-inch rims. Two Brothers Racing bumped up the power output with a few of the products from its research and development department including a full exhaust system and the Juice Box fuel-management system.