Considering these are perhaps the fastest drag racers in the world, the chance to stand only a metre away and watch them wrench is pretty cool. One of the great things about the NHRA drag racing scene is the availability and openness of the racers and crews, both in the car and motorcycle scenes. Sunday morning, I headed back to the pits. At his final start, the clutch woes continued, and he once again spun his rear tire too hard after traveling all the way from Alberta to New Hampshire to race, he was headed home without even getting a chance at Sunday’s elimination round. Blink and you missed it! The Nitro Harleys run quarter mile times under seven seconds. But there wasn’t much time to talk, because he was due on-track soon for the final qualifying session, and I really didn’t want to distract him while he got ready. He explained his trouble earlier in the day: a problem with clutch adjustment meant he was putting too much power to the ground, which spun the tire. I could see the wrencher getting tired of my clueless questions, so I moved along through the pits and found Mike Scott’s area. ![]() Many of the bike’s components (like mechanical fuel injection and ignitions) are similar to what you see on the cars, if not the exact same parts. These engines are custom-built from scratch, not adaptations of existing Harley-Davidson machinery, and that means they have an industrial look to them, like they’ve been machined from raw metal and bolted together with fasteners from an industrial supply warehouse, not a fancy-pants race shop. One mechanic described his 45° V-twin engine as “a quarter of a Top Fuel V8.” And that is indeed what it looks like. They’re powered by nitromethane, same as the Top Fuel dragsters and funny cars, and the engines have a lot of similarities. The answer to the mystery: Nitro Harley is a separate class from the Pro Stock motorcycle series, and they run on alternating NHRA weekends, for the most part - I happened to be at the Nitro Harley weekend, which explained the lack of modified street-legal bikes.Īlthough these bikes aren’t production-based, it turns out they’re pretty cool when you see them up close. Time to find out more about Nitro Harleys. Once all the racers had made their passes, I headed to the pits. One of those racers is announced as Alberta’s Mike Scott, the only Canadian motorcycle racer here this weekend. A couple of racers ended up slowly puttering down the track after over-spinning their tire on take-off, causing them to abandon their run to avoid disaster. And they’re not going much slower than a V1 bomb, with top speeds over 320 km/h - as long as they can get launched. Running down the track, they almost sound like the pulse jet out of a V1 flying bomb. ![]() Regardless, they were running 1/4-mile times under seven seconds, and that certainly grabbed my attention! The sound is intriguing : when fired up, they don’t sound like a normal V-twin. Weird - the bikes I’d seen hadn’t looked much like Harleys. Instead, they announced the Nitro Harley class. Speaking of Suzukis, there were none when the bikes showed up on track. Al Gore would weep at the fuel consumption, David Suzuki would cry. They were running quarter-mile times around the four-second mark watching the takeoff felt like working next to an F14 on an aircraft carrier deck, the blast from the engines rattling my sinuses inside my skull. The dragsters were taking off from the line in an orgy of hydrocarbon combustion, the cars almost hidden by heat waves coming off their engines due to the instant explosion of fuel. The Nitro Harley pits don’t get anywhere near the attention of the big-money car teams.Īs it turned out, watching car after car blast by the bleachers wasn’t so bad anyway - the Top Fuel dragsters totally lived up to their advance billing.
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