Bonneville Motorcycle Speed Trials 2024

[jim reed]

I have been planning on getting to the MST for 5 years. Between the Covid outbreak, me getting it a week before Bonneville twice and the two weather cancellations I had begun to believe it would never happen. But at age 76 I finally made it this year for the 20th anniversary event. I have race bikes and laydown shifter karts since 1967 and wrenched in the AMA Pro road racing series during the TZ-750 era. Despite this lengthy experience and watching and reading everything I could find about running there I was still not fully prepared for the experience. Bonneville is like nothing else. I ran with ECTA for standing mile records for 4 years collecting several along the way hoping it would prep me for the event. It did partially. The salt flats environment is incredibly harsh to both man and machine. I have never experienced anything even remotely like it in motor racing. I joked it is like racing on the Moon but with the addition of oxygen. At my age in the future I will have to be much more conscious of the fact that the salt sucks fluids out of you like nothing else. Also the trip out and back is 6 twelve hour days. It took me a month to feel completely normal.

I had road raced bikes for so long it became automatic for me to load up for a race without a detailed written check list. I presumed the road race list would suffice. WRONG! Do a written BONNIVILLE check list and use it. I took what I thought would be every spare I would possibly need. Of course the one thing I did not take turned out to be the one thing I needed and which no one at the event had a spare like it.  That one thing was the petcock on the custom built tank for the bike. One of the pressed in fuel line outlets fell out and despite numerous attempts it refused to stay in. This petcock was built by a company purporting to be the best manufacturer of such items. The failure occurred while riding the bike to tech, drenching me and the bike in fuel. By some miracle there was no fire. I called the petcock manufacturer with the hope of getting one sent to me or at least info for it's repair. No luck. They said it was non repairable and they currently were out of stock of the type I needed. I considered mounting two single petcocks on each side of the tank. Unfortunately space problems made this impossible. So ended my first Bonneville.

Had it not been for the wonderful people I met I would have considered Bonneville an abject failure. I heard it often said that Bonneville racers will do what ever they can to help a fellow racer. I found that to be absolutely true. Everyone I met wanted me to succeed and were willing to help in any way they could. Such was not always the case with other racing I've done. I was one of 22 new riders at the salt and I was not the only one who had problems. And problems were not limited to rookies as others with much experience suffered problems. On the last day when I had to give up one racer gave me a piece of Bonneville wisdom. "If the salt does not want you to succeed nothing you can do will change that". They had been coming for 6 years with failure for the first 5. This year they got their record. They said they did nothing significantly different than they had done the previous 5. It has been decades since I felt like a complete novice at a race.

I will be back next year if my money and health hold out.

[gowing]

I was there this year,
What bike did you bring?

[jim reed]

I brought a 1970 Yamaha R-5 350 fitted with a TZ-350 engine. The engine is basically an early TZ-350 fitted with G model 6 transfer port cyclinders and an E model head fitted with removeable combustion chambers. The carbs are 38 mm round slide power jet Mikuni items. The pipes are British Swabricks and the ignition is PVL analog. The engine is out of my TZ vintage road racer.

The R-5 frame was raked to 36 deg, delugged and fitted with TZ style mounts for the Tach, radiator and fairing. Forks and triple tree are from my TZ. The swingarm is an alloy twin shock Suzuki RM item. With the rake and longer swingarm the bike has a wheelbase of 72 inches. The tank is a Suzuki fiberglass 2 gallon sold by Suzuki back in the X-6 250 Hustler days for people who modified the bike for flat track. The seat is a Vesco replica.

[Stainless1]

Jim, trials and tribulations are what make Bonneville what it is.... if it was easy, everybody would be doing it.... all in all, you actually had a good first Bonneville... I know it didn't seem like it at the time, but it seems you know it now.  When racing sucks, it is about the people.  You are better prepared for the next one... it's usually the things that don't ever fail that get you. 
that is why we try to race them all, opportunities sometime disappear....
You will be good to go the next time

[jim reed]

Thanks for the kind words. Have already started building the bike I really want to run. I brought the TZ because it was already done and did not want to spend the money on a new bike if Bonneville turned out not to be my thing. One injection of salt and I'm hooked. Can't wait. Counting the days.