With earnings of maybe R40-million from the movie The World’s Fastest Indian, Sir Anthony Hopkins did much better from Herbert James Munro’s love for his 1920 Indian Scout than the eccentric genius from New Zealand did.
Burt Munro bought his Indian Scout for £120 in 1920 and continuously modified it for the rest of his life, with his efforts climaxing in a one-way run of 305,9km/h on the Bonneville Salt Flats in 1967, on his way to setting a new official 1 000cc class record of 295,44km/h. That’s pretty remarkable for a 63-year-old man on a home-tuned 47 year-old motorcycle.
Two books have been written about Munro’s life, and they probably stick closer to the truth than the movie, which, like most of its ilk, adjusts the facts here and there to make for a more entertaining story.
Hopkins is on record as saying he enjoyed making the film, because there was “”no sex or violence, and that’s refreshing”. By the looks of things, Munro’s life was pretty bereft of the first, because he devoted so much energy to speed that he had little left to spread his seed, but violence there was aplenty in his real life, with our hero being flung down the road many times at velocities only Hopkins could only dream of.
Extracts from Munro’s correspondence with a friend in England, John Andrews, published on the web make for interesting reading. In 1916, he was “out all day after landing on head”. Moving on to 1921, he says, he was “riding standing on seat of Scout waiting for uncle Alf to get his Dick King going. I looked around and woke up that evening after a whole day’s absence from what was going on.”
In 1927, he says, he “caught a dog on the rebound” after it ran out in front of the bike ahead of him, and came around later “concussed and bloody from a deep scalp wound”. That seems to have been a bad year for crashing — the same year, he says, “I jumped off at 90 mph+ when in a bad wobble with one hand on the oil pump. I was pretty sick in bed for a week or two with concussion and many bruises.”
Ten years later, things were much the same. In a 32km beach race, he tells his English friend, he hit another rider at 176km/h and “my bash hat was split from crown to rim in two places. Weeks later he told me what knocked me out and split the hat. The underside of his engine landed square on my head. When he was repairing his bike, he found the varnish marks from my hat on the cases.
“I had all my teeth knocked out and my brother picked up numerous gold-filled ones from the sand. That was one of the saddest moments of my life, when I found my priceless teeth no more.”
As you may have gathered by now, Munro was one tough cookie. When he was 60 years old, he spent nearly two months in hospital after crashing at 180km/h in a drag race.
“When I finished the crash I had bash hat still on, waistband of pants, tennis shoes and pieces of socks. I was only slightly concussed … One finger was ground halfway through the bone and still works but one joint is crook. All the other crashes involved just bones or scars or burns and one arm ripped apart at the shoulder. In five-and-a-half months it grew back but still hurts at rest when I lie on it.”
By the sound of things, Munro’s arm didn’t get too much time to hurt, because the man never rested. In his letters he claims that he spent 16 hours every day working on his bike for 10 years, “but on Christmas day took afternoon off”. Then his doctor told him to slow down, so he cut his hours back to 10 a day, seven days a week.
With not much in the way of resources, Munro virtually remanufactured the motorcycle, giving it a top speed more than three times higher than when new — try that with a modern superbike! He hand-carved new connecting rods from an old Ford truck axle because the factory ones kept breaking, and his lasted 20 years.
He used a steam hammer to make flywheels, also from an old axle, and cast his own aluminium cylinder heads to convert the engine from a side valve to an overhead valve design. He also converted the V-twin to a four-cam design of his own, and made his own camshafts, using a file.
The cylinder sleeves, he says, he made from “old city gasworks pipe”, while the barrels were cast from “old pistons melted in a small pot on the two-gallon-can furnace”. The same furnace was used to make pistons in batches of eight or so at a time.
Hollywood, as usual, has indulged its politically correct leanings by having Munro befriended and assisted by a Native-American Indian and a transvestite as he struggles to get his entry accepted for the Speed Week at Bonneville. The movie gets a little schmaltzy at times, but it’s a thrilling story about one of the real characters that nature tends to pull out of the hat now and again.