How to not go 300 miles per hour, Part 3

Part 3: I’m On Vacation

Utah isn’t so bad. Don’t get me wrong, you couldn’t pay me enough to live there, but there are surely worse places to be. Everyone is really nice, they place is fairly clean, and their speed limits are set appropriately high for me to exercise my favorite Utah pastime: getting the hell out of Utah as quickly as possible.



Well that’s not entirely fair. I had decided, even before we left, that I was going to enjoy my vacation. So with the trailer packed and nothing to do for a week, we cruised through Utah, admiring their giant white temples, Wikipediaing, and then making fun of, their insane religious beliefs, and trying to figure out what the symbol on their highway signs was.

It’s a beehive.

We stopped by an auto parts store to find a fuse, and when they didn’t have the right one, the dude at the counter drew us a map to a competitor store, complete with special directions to make it easier to enter the parking lot with a trailer. He also recommended the Chinese restaurant next to the store. We didn’t go, but I’m sure it would have been delicious. Mormons are such nice people when they’re not trying to make it illegal for other people to do things they don’t agree with.

Once in Vegas, we walked around for 45 minutes before deciding Vegas sucks. All along the sidewalks there were people handing out fliers for hookers. One right after another, we must have seen a hundred of them, all shoving high gloss fliers in our faces, and all looking very… illegal-immigrant-ish. “Open 24 hours. Girls to your door in 30 minutes.”

I’m surprised Utah and Nevada can exist right next to each other, with Utah’s uptight super conservative laws and Nevada’s state motto of “Buy a goddamn hooker!” There must be a thin barrier between them, preventing a collapse of the two and the subsequent displacement field which would no doubt transwarp California into the Paleolithic era.

Watch Star Trek.

Anyways, we headed back home just in time to see that Los Angeles was on fire again. We were not surprised; this happens about twice a year.



The next morning, we unpacked and headed out to Pismo Beach to test Toyota’s ability to build a truck that would survive a Dodge truck commercial. It did well.



Then we went out to the Hitching Post for THE BEST STEAK IN THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE. Some of you out there know. Some, sadly, do not.

The next day we enjoyed some fantastic Splash Café seafood before heading back home.



I had pretty much forgotten that there was a motorcycle involved at all in our trip. It was nice. Once I got back home, I disassembled it and stuffed it in the corner of the garage for hibernation.



And there it sits. Forgotten for at least a month, maybe more if I can resist the urge. After a month, I will probably take it out to El Mirage Dry lake and ride it around for a while at 50mph, just for fun.

After that, who knows. I can spend the $3000(times pi?) it will take me to get it rules compliant, but then I’m still left with borrowing a trailer and trying to get one or two people to take off work and help me run it next year. A streamliner takes too much. Too much time and money, too much support.

Or, I could call it a loss, sell all the valuable pieces on eBay, and throw away the rest. I know, “you should finish what you started,” and “it’s almost done,” and “don’t give up now.” But... and this is key, It’s not fun anymore. Hasn’t been for several months. And, it costs me a lot of money. Sure, it’s close to being done, but there’s no good reason to finish it. And, there are a lot of good reasons not to finish it. “You’ve come this far” just doesn’t seem like a valid reason anymore. It was for a while, for the past several months of working every evening and all weekend, spending all my money and not having any fun. It just pisses me off. It’s a hobby; it’s not supposed to piss me off.

Option three is taking a hacksaw to the frame and making it qualify for a different class. I can make it fit into the “Special Construction” category. This basically removes all of the crap that I’m having trouble with, and some other stuff I don’t want to deal with: the windshield, canopy, fire system, parachutes, landing gear, etc… I might be able to just modify the cockpit so that the rider is visible from either side, limit the streamlining, and call it good. I’ve still got to change the front tire, but I have to do that anyway.



It’ll be slower, but it should still be well over 200 and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun.

In any case, I’m out for at least a month, maybe more. I’m moving into the city and I’m going to enjoy all things not land-speed-motorcycle. After that I might regain my motivation. Judging by the fact that I just spent two hours modifying my CAD model and dreaming of speed, I’d say there’s a pretty good chance of that. We will see.

Stay tuned.

How to not go 300 miles per hour, Part 2

Part Duex: Woefully Unprepared

By way of state highways, between Bakersfield California and West Wendover Nevada, there is nothing. Empty, dry, soulless desert for nearly a thousand miles. Every hundred miles or so there is a sign indicating that there is a town ahead, but when we get to the town, every time, it is a desolate shell of a 1970’s town: abandon 12 room hotel, abandoned gas station, half of three houses and disused telephone poles next to each building, like grave markers for what I have a hard time believing was ever alive to begin with.

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We didn’t play the we-can-make-it-to-the-next-gas-station game. We filled up at every open pump. Better men than us had no doubt died out there; eaten by wolves and rabid possums and murdering hitchhiking hillbilly vampires. We passed a German man with a rented RV stopped on the side of the road. He asked if we had oil, and I suddenly remembered that we had forgotten to bring oil. We had zero cell phone coverage and hadn’t seen another vehicle for 45 minutes. It was only a matter of time before he would be eaten by desert creatures.

We arrived on the Bonneville Salt Flats around 1 o’clock in the morning, threw up the tent and went to sleep.

When morning came, we packed up and headed into town. The salt wouldn’t be open for a couple hours, so we decided to scout out restaurants and hardware stores. The salt flats are right near the edge of the Utah/Nevada border, and the closest town is on the Nevada side. West Wendover had all the things one would expect of a Nevada border town: sleazy strip clubs, sleazy trailer parks, sleazy casinos, sleazy trailer homes not in trailer parks, sleazy liquor stores, and a Burger King.

When the salt flats opened, we headed out and set up our pit area. One of the great things about racing is that everyone is so nice and helpful. Like this guy who was happy to advertize his helpful nature on the back of his not-at-all terrifyingly chainsaw massacre-esque truck.



After we set up the pit area, we walked around and looked at some of the other motorcycles. One of them was a land speed bike built in the 70’s, on loan from a museum.



It was similar to mine in a lot of ways: a streamliner built by a guy in his garage, very cramped and simple with limited visibility and mostly homemade components. I should fit in with this crowd just fine. It is 1978, right?

Spoiler alert: It’s not 1978.

There were about 7 other streamliners out for the week. Streamliners are “motorcycles” that you sit inside of. They are basically torpedoes with two wheels sticking out the bottom and a dude stuffed inside. This is my class. This is one of the other streamliners:



Here’s another:



Check this out; you see that swingarm, that big silver piece that is machined from a solid block of aluminum?



Yea, that almost definitely cost more than my entire project. That one piece. That is half of the swingarm, there’s another piece just like it on the other side. I mean, these are the big players, but even the other streamliners, the "little guys" have custom trailers and matching shirts and high tech custom made CNC billet festoonage.

Here is my bike for comparison:



See that giant 18 wheeler hauler in the background? That’s not mine. My hauler is a borrowed single-axel trailer and Bobby’s truck.

All of the streamliners had crews of at least 10 people. They all had enclosed trailers and push vehicles and sponsors out the ass.

The game had changed since 1978. I wasn’t even remotely in the same ballpark as these guys. In fact, the ballpark closed back in the 80’s, the team relocated, and the stadium was demolished and replaced with Mexican restaurants and section 8 housing units.

As if that wasn’t discouraging enough, the tech inspectors showed up and started making up rules that could very easily have been added to the rule book a fucking year ago.

“This front tire, though rated for 250 MPH, is not rated for sustained speed, so you can’t use that.”

“I don’t like these parachutes; they probably won’t work so you can’t use them.”

“Your landing gear doesn’t retract backwards and doesn’t have a signal indicating that it is retracted.”

“Your fire system needs to be two separate systems and it needs to have an indicator for one of them.”

“But hey, don’t get discouraged. We really like what you’ve got and you’re 90% there and blah blah blah”

The biggest problem was that I couldn’t actually get in the bike with some of the stuff I had added over the past couple months. “Make sure I fit” was on the should-probably-do list, somewhere between “Learn Swahili” and “Build a discotheque on the moon.” We could have modified it pretty easily with a cutoff wheel and welder, but our generator wasn’t big enough to power the air compressor OR the welder, and they weren’t going to let me run anyways, so what was the damn point.

The next morning, I got in the bike without my helmet and gear so we could get some low speed tooling around done away from the track. The bike was having trouble staying running without a battery hooked up, and an electrical fire topped off a big pile of frustration. We packed it away and called it quits.

“Yea, these things are expensive,” A man said “I used to race Formula Fords, which is supposed to be a cheap form of racing. I did the math and realized I could buy a fishing boat, completely outfit it, go fishing for an entire season, and then sink the boat at the end of the year and still spend less than I did on racing”

Thank you sir, that was very helpful and motivating.

For the next few hours, there was a trickle of people saying stuff that probably seemed encouraging to them, but sounded drearily depressing to me.

“Wow, I can’t believe you did this yourself, and in only 2 years? Keep up the work; most of the streamliner guys take five years before they even get to run.”

Awesome, three more years of this shit and thousands more dollars before I can even run.

Fuck you Bonneville.

I quit.

How to not go 300 miles per hour

Part 1: Prelude to salt

I’m not the type of person to quit something partway through. I feel that it’s important to finish what I’ve started. I’m also not the type of person to sit down and think about things before I start them. That is, I don’t think about how much time and money it will cost me in the end.

Well, that’s not entirely true; I usually sit down for about 15 seconds and pull some numbers straight out of my ass. But then I forget to incorporate the rule of Pi. The rule of Pi goes something like this:

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If you think it will take you a week to build a desk, it will actually take you about 3.14 weeks. And if the budget for said desk is $100, you will be out $314 before it’s all over.

Auto racing is a little bit different than desk building. They equation for time and money spent on any auto racing venture looks like this:



Where M_oney is all the money you will make in the next ten years, and G_f is any semblance of a relationship you expect to maintain (Note: If you substitute G_f with W_ife, then you have to add Lawyer_Divorce and then M_oney approaches an asymptote which is roughly equal to that giant pile of money that the joker set fire to in The Dark Knight, it’s all very complicated…). Anyways, the graphical representation looks something like this:



The X axis represents the number of months spent on the project. Of course, you expected to be done around month 8, but when 8 comes around and you’re not even close, you start to frantically spend money and time trying to finish you project. Expectations swing wildly between “world’s fastest motorcycle” and “I swear to god I’m going to set this fucking thing on fire and push it into the ocean”. Around month 15 your roommate starts to suspect that your wild mood swings are the result of a cocaine addiction, you’re mounting debt looks suspiciously like you have a cocaine addiction, and you start to wish you had spent all your time and money on something less addicting and less destructive to your health and social life. Cocaine, for instance.

Month 20 rolls around. Your expectations are nil, you now have three credit cards all carrying balances composed entirely of racing purchases, you start to confuse your net worth with the national debt clock, and you’ve actually scouted an area near Malibu where you can easily roll a flaming motorcycle off a cliff and into the Pacific Ocean.

About then, your friend Bobby moves back to California and offers to help finish the project. You resist the urge to shake him violently, slap him in the face and yell “Get out while you still can! Don’t worry about me, I’m already gone! You have to live on! Live on without auto racing!”

Instead, you hand him a wrench and put him to work. For the two months approaching the race (which you will probably not make, but you’ve already paid $800 in registration and fees for), you spend all of your time on the bike. Wake up, work on bike, go to work, come home for lunch and work on the bike for an hour, go back to work only to return in five hours and work on the bike until midnight when you finally manage to squeeze in a shower before going to sleep. You were supposed to go running today, but you didn’t because you were busy with the bike. Clean the bathroom? No time, just strap a bomb to a can of Lysol and shut the door.

You ask your boss if you can add a day to the beginning of your vacation, because you won’t be able to finish in time. Everything is behind schedule: the final bits and pieces, the packing, the laundry, leaving. Things on your “must do” list reach a new level of half-assery, and your “should probably do” list might as well include “catch a unicorn” and “fart rainbows” ‘cause that crap is never going to happen.

Finally, six hours after your planned departure time, you leave with a hastily packed motorcycle, thinking about what you might have forgotten and hoping your roommate doesn’t mind too much that you left your half of the garage looking like the Tasmanian Devil had a seizure.