How many of you have ever seen an eight-time world champion hustle a 500-horsepower motorcycle down the drag strip in anger? Now’s your chance, because Ricky Gadson’s here to break in Africa’s most powerful two-wheeler — the newly arrived Bear Ghost Rider Kawasaki ZX-12R Turbo.
“I set my sights on this bike when it was up for sale in the United States five years ago, but we didn’t know if South African drag racing could accommodate a class for it in 2003, so I let it slide, and Rob Muzzy sold it to Kawasaki Hungary,” says Bear Racing’s Pierre Labuschagne.
“Since then we’ve got the Pro Street class going well, and we’ll have a Top Bike class running in 2008, so the time was right. The Hungarians weren’t keen to sell, but Kawasaki Motors South Africa and Team Bear don’t give up easily. I went across to Europe and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse, and the bike is now proudly South African.”
Muzzy caused an uproar in American drag racing when he let his turbo monster loose on the track for the first time back in 2002. Although fuel injection and turbochargers were legal in the Pro Mod class, top racers all used naturally aspirated engines force-fed with nitrous oxide, because turbo motors traditionally bogged down on the start line, wasting valuable thousandths of a second while they built up sufficient boost to win races.
Muzzy wanted to prove that the modern, liquid-cooled, fuel-injected engines were better than the older designs commonly used in drag racing. On its first run, in the hands of Ryan Schnitz at Atlanta, Georgia, the Muzzy Turbo Kawasaki ran the standing quarter in 6,83 seconds with a terminal speed of 316,3km/h. Despite calls for the regs to be changed to outlaw the bike, it raced in the US for two years before setting off to frighten the women and children in Hungary.
The big Kawasaki is due for a bit of a freshen-up before it races here in earnest next year, but eight-time world champion Gadson has come out from the US to demo the machine and give rider JP Labuschagne a few tips on taming the monster, at the national championship race meeting at Tarlton on June 17.
Gadson already has a history with the bike. It was originally built with him in mind as the rider, and he did some practice runs on it five years ago, but circumstances prevented him ever racing it in anger. Now he intends trying for his quickest time yet outside the US. “Before we race the bike in the 2008 championship, we’ll incorporate some of the development Team Bear has done on our own Pro Street ZX-12 Turbo, along with some new goodies from Muzzy,” says Labuschagne.
Muzzy is a legendary motorcycle tuner, based in Oregon, whose machines have won 19 road-racing, drag-racing, motocross and flat-track American national championships, and a World Superbike title. He was closely involved with the local development of Bear Racing’s Pro Street Kawasaki ZX-12 — a machine that took third place in the World Championships and set a South African record that stood from 2004 to 2007.
Team Bear is a family enterprise, with Pierre and Bernadine managing off-track activities, while JP, Jan, Maureen (South Africa’s quickest woman) and 13-year-old Kuene do the riding.
Racing a machine like the Bear Ghost Rider Kawasaki ZX-12R Turbo can be an expensive game — to build anything remotely similar would cost close to R1-million. Although the average meeting sees the bike cover only about 2km in competition, the engine needs to be stripped after every second event, and worn components replaced.
A single 400m run sees the engine devour about five litres of 116-octane fuel at R125 per litre, and running costs amount to about R7Â 000 per meeting. With each run being completed in less than seven seconds, this amounts to R3Â 500 per kilometre, or R200 per second, for the dubious pleasure of scaring yourself witless! And, of course, if you crash or blow the engine up, costs escalate horribly.
The Bear Ghost Rider Kawasaki ZX12-R Turbo will be ridden in a demonstration at Tarlton Raceway by Gadson on Sunday June 17. Info: Tel 011 823 2460