Photo by Chris Glaister

Salt Flat Rookies Set Speed Record At Bonneville, Part 1

Chris Glaister and Jeff Henise catch “The Salt Bug”

Nick’s Note: The Bonneville Salt Flats offer a pure but complex challenge, and who better to sum up that challenge than my gifted friend Gregg Bonelli? Here, the verbose Bonelli discusses Bonneville, record setting, vintage challenges, and the success of a rookie team aboard a “highly modified” Yamaha TZ350. Tune in next week for the second installment of “The Salt Bug.”

If you've been surfing, you know not every set of waves yields a good ride. It's an effort to fight the waves at the beach and get out beyond the shore break so you can turn around and wait for the one you hope is coming that will give you a ride worth the effort. For some who race vintage motorcycles, Bonneville is like that. If that's what matters in the ocean of things you have done with a motorcycle, then you need to go there.

Once you’ve seen motorcycles ridden to world-record speed, you will have to decide for yourself if you have what it takes to do that. It is not for everyone. Perhaps you only have some vague understanding of how it’s done. If you do, you should know that it can be expensive, a waste of time and effort, and you could die in the process.

There is no prize money, just a timing slip and a certificate of verification from the timing body confirming that you now hold the record for whatever class it might be. The list of obstacles to setting a record is long, and the list of record holders is short. It requires something unique from those of us in the racing world that is simply too much trouble for all but the truly dedicated.

Chris Glaister and Jeff Henise are truly dedicated. The former is a design engineer and the latter is a research chemist, but both have an interest in motorcycles and speed. They collaborated this past season in the design, construction, and riding of a record-setting Yamaha TZ350-powered motorcycle that set two land-speed records its first time at Bonneville.

The "Orange Bird" is finally completed, a few days before Chris Glaister and Jeff Henise had to leave for the Bonneville Salt Flats. What a good feeling!Photo by Scott Mock

Early in the building stages, I saw on Jeff’s Facebook page, where he documented the effort, that he was planning to use a Yamaha twin. I have many left over from my competition days and know him from his championship season of vintage roadracing with a club in which I officiated.

I introduced myself to him at a race in Alabama after hearing some unhappiness circulating that his self-made machine simply could not be legal. It was the final meet of the year and by winning he clinched the championship. My journalistic nature sensed a story, and I went to investigate. While there had never been anything like it before, the naysayers had not read the rule book as closely as he had and were wrong about Henise’s bike being non-compliant. The bike was legal.

Henise is seen here racing the Highwayman F37—a hybrid Kawasaki in a custom chassis—during the AHRMA nationals at Barber Motorsports Park in 2014.Photo by etechphoto.com

Rather than starting with an existing motorcycle and then hunting for the best class to race in, he had chosen a class and then made a purpose-built machine from scratch, frame and all, even casting his own chrome-bore cylinder. While the rules allowed a bike like it, such a thing had never before existed. This offended some purists. Nostalgia is one thing but the rules are made for competition, which is another.

To race vintage motorcycles, some homage must be paid to the past otherwise you’re just poking people with power and some take it badly. All rules have inherent structural problems after all, and the challenge of classifying vintage motorcycles into grids of sufficient size to be economically feasible while classing them to be mutually competitive is doubly difficult. Some issues have to do with safety, some with updates that made the old ways of building things obsolete, and some with parts that are simply no longer available. Despite the desire to race again on the bikes my friends and I raced 50 years ago, the realities are enough to keep it from ever happening again. We should all stay young forever too, but that’s not going to happen either.

The completed machine, its sidecover removed, the highly modified Yamaha TZ350 parallel twin sitting in front of co-conspirator Henise's hand-built expansion chambers.Photo by Chris Glaister

Still, the past is always with us, and I am reminded that we in the vintage motorcycle world are linked to one another in a number of obscure ways. Chris and Jeff named their machine the “Orange Bird” in honor of Don Vesco’s Silver Bird and in recognition of his contribution to the sport in general and Bonneville in particular. The record that they decided to challenge had stood for 40 years and was set at 159.9 mph by Brian Erickson. While those of us who have never set a record may think the decimals are trivial, getting it right is one of the things that separates those who have done it from those who don’t really understand what it means.

The rule book having been digested and the target having been established, they began the process of designing a machine to accomplish their ends. Jeff had previously done such a project to become a 250cc roadrace champion so the bones of the deed were known. The particulars of this challenge were a mystery, however, even though they had seen it done. The human imagination is a spectacular thing, and there are as many ways to do things as men can think of. In terms of motorcycles meant to go fast, some may look fast but never actually be fast while others, which may look like they eat turnips and may even be called “The Turnip Eater,” prove to be record-setting machines.

Engineers tend to think less romantically so the combining of hard numbers and intuitive thinking made the project a labor of measurement, calculation, and welding for Chris and Jeff. They also had friendly collaboration with a number of notable builders and speed racers in the area including Ralph Hudson, a world record holder, and Bill Woods who had also made a laydown chassis in the past. Both were indispensable in their counsel and assistance and hats are tipped here to them for their benevolent good will. Ralph is so good natured about such things that his name has been put forward for a knighthood, and while we all agree that he has he proper bearing and character to be worthy of the honor, none of us are quite sure who to talk to about it.

In the end, Chris and Jeff shared the work and are gracious about the credit, each giving the other full measure with the exception of the engine build which was entirely done by Jeff. He in turn acknowledges the technical insight and assistance of Wayne “Wobbly” Wright, who was responsible for Jon Ekerold’s 350cc GP world championship engines. Jeff didn’t just build the motor and the expansion chambers, however, he built it online with everyone watching. In the process, he turned a production engine for a commuter bike into a fire-breathing, 11-port, reed-valved monster making more than twice its original horsepower. Once the work was finally done, they set off for the salt without the luxury of a test ride, having run completely out of time.

Test fire day for the engine: The float bowls on the Lectron carburetors overflowed heavily and Glaister and Henise didn’t know why, which was stressful because they were scheduled to leave for Bonneville in just 48 hours.Photo by Chris Glaister

I donated a motor to the project after speaking with Jeff about my interest in writing about the process and finding out that I had a vintage set of cases that might be useful. My vintage connection was not just with him, however; it stretched back over time to the day I first recognized a motorcycle as a device connected to speed. I knew about speed already from cars, my family having generations of Detroit dealerships in its past. My mother had bragged often that her ’36 Ford would run 100 mph and then complain that it needed that many again to be stopped. The family went to the Indianapolis 500 every year and Gasoline Alley, where they worked on the cars in rows of wooden garages open on one end so you could see men making things, bolting them together, and then wheeling them out to the track to see how fast they’d go.

I grew up there, at least the racing part of me did, and from 1958 through the big fire in turn 4 on the opening lap of the 1964 race, I had the ambition to be a driver there. That same year, Roger Reiman was clocked at 149.78 mph on an overhead-valve single-cylinder Harley-Davidson at Bonneville. I saw an ad in a magazine about it and was impressed, having watched the far more sophisticated four- and eight-cylinder Indy cars barely manage 150 in qualifying. Decades later, after he and I had both retired from active competition, we shared a campfire and a few beers one night at Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin’s Road America road course swapping racing tales. While his accomplishments were far greater than my own, we had common acquaintances and stories to tell about them over our long careers.

His observation about it at that distance was that he was most grateful he had not been the one to build it because he wouldn’t have known where to begin. “They can wobble,” he noted, as if none of us would know that, “and they can fall over.” There was a bit of silence afterward as the dozen or so of us sitting around listening to him imagined what it might be like to slide down the salt at 150 mph trapped in a metal tube. Having never tried it, none of us had anything to add so we sipped our beers. We were as far from that sort of claustrophobia as one might get, under the starry sky of the Northwoods but still, even there, the thought of it gave us all pause.

Henise and support crew member John Patton discuss how to fix the overflowing float bowls.Photo by Chris Glaister

How do you go about building yourself a record-setting speed racer? I’ve asked myself that question after watching the incredible variety of things that run at Bonneville. Then too you may have encountered a speed wobble while riding and been rattled by it, not being sure what caused it or how to avoid it. I literally left dents in the sides of a Kawasaki GPz750 gas tank at Daytona as the evil snake nearly killed me. No amount of muscle or determination can hold a poor design steady and if I’m building something to run wide open for several miles, I don’t want to find out that it’s going to start some unmanageable oscillations if a crosswind upsets it or because I can’t remember whether it’s time to steer left to go right or not.

Part 2 Next Tuesday!

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