YADBS - Yet Another Drag Bike Story
This is a dragbike story - a long long one, and still as i write this, its nowhere near its ending. and god knows what the ending is going to be. in a way it all started way way back in 2000 or so when a bunch of crazy maniacs met out here in blore, thanks to one other maniac, a major one. thanks to chief maniac ron chinoy we all met - me, jaggu, tom, killer, leppard, danny...the list goes on.
all of us had the thrill of speed inside us, though in varying levels. many RD meets happened, each one a haze of screaming smoke and flowing spirits. not much time passed before the first drag meet descended upon us. it was an awesome experience, and many followed. each time the atmosphere was electric, screaming 2strokes and ridiculously fast bigbikes and not to mention crazy cars of all sorts. i dont think we missed a single drag meet - been there for every one of them, armed with tons of beer bottles loaded into ikons boot, jaggus ikon. but then we were never participants. not then.
Now if you know tom, then you also know that mr tom can never sit apart from the action, well not for long. so one fine day toms brain spits out this idea - why dont we build our own dragbike. nice nice. im generally weak at decision making, so when it comes to making a critical decision, i use a simple technic - dont think much, jump into it. now jaggu; while not being a big friend of caution, he yet prefers to do things slowly and at his own pace - so while not saying no to the project, he grumbles and hmmmphs and decides to watch how the proceedings go. so preliminary agreements are more or less in place, and the first problem looms big and hard. we need a donor bike to be converted into a full blown drag bike. to cut a long story short, our attempt at procuring a junk RD for a dream bargain failed miserably. and soon it was decided that my bike will be the donor bike. this is the one
she is going to change, she is going to change a lot. but then we had no clue about what it takes and how much. so somwhere in june 2003, ignorance is bliss dude.
little were we to know the effort needed, the troubles, the damn sweat blood and beer. little did we know that as the journey progresses we would pick up an invisible team member - one mr murphy.
well not its not that we had zero clue about what was ahead. we been there for a few drags watching the whole thing, and had a fair bit of idea about the competition involved as well as the bikes out there. in 350cc class there were at least 4 of them, all strong - Joe, Nissar, Haji, Joshua. all are quick machines and do close to 160kmph at the quarter, with ET in low 13s. all full blown engines with pipes doing the rest. not to mention considerable weight reduction, what with fibre glass fake tanks, lightweight seats etc. for example, take a look at Joes bike at one of the drags -
if it doesnt look like much, it will, when it goes past the finish at well above 155kmph. of course, compared to what the US guys do, this may not seem like much, may even appear worse thank stock - but try checking out what the stock bikes out here do, and then you realize its much ahead of the stock specs produced out here. good stock bikes probably do what, like 130kmph max or so at the quarter. if you pick some random RDs off our roads and check them at the quarter, 99% of them will fail to touch even 120kmph.
then check out Nissars bike. this is even more violent, easily does 100mph at the quarter and makes an eeire whooshing boom as it flashes past.
meanwhile ron did something that provided to be of immeasurable benefit - he organized a club group buy and we got a speed gun. me and killer spent countless hours in the sun out there at the finish line and got so much data that would later prove to be benchmarks for a lot of decisions. for example the speed listing might go like this -
RX (BALI) -----> 148KMPH
SHOGUN -----> 102KMPH
RD350 (RAJAN JOSHUA) -----> 141KMPH
RD350 (JOE'S) -----> 147KMPH
RD350 (NISSAR'S) -----> 162KMPH
YAMAHA R6 (SHABBIR) -----> 192KMPH
SUZUKI GSXR1000 (UNKNOWN) -----> 208KMPH
FORD IKON -----> 123KMPH
anyway coming back to the dragbike project, we now faced the logical next step of approaching ron chinoy, and asking for his help, without which the project wont budge another inch beyond a planning stage. and thats next.