Ode To Big Blue
ODE TO BIG BLUE
THE QUESTION IS ONE WHICH HAS DEFINED THE art of the hot-rodder from the very beginning of the internal-combustion age. It is simply this: At what point do you cease developing an engine?
Alan Shephard, who owns the 1984 Suzuki GS1150ES you see here, clearly doesn’t know the answer, and neither does John Cordona of Fours N' More (7116 Canby St., Canoga Park, CA 91335; 818/ 996-8109), who built the bike for Shephard.
We don’t know the answer either, but what we do know, after riding Shephard's Big Blue, is that it is one fast-mutha motorcyclejTSffenUpPP maWTts forget what the question was in the first place.
Big Blue’s frame, swingarm, fork and fork internals are about all of the original Suzuki that hasn’t been modified or replaced. The Mitchell wheels, Performance Machine brakes and Works Performance rear shock are race quality, and the bike’s engine, which Cordona claims produces 170 horsepower, is easily as at home on a dragstrip as it is on the street.
That’s fine, because once you get past Big Blue’s custom paint and knock-down good looks, part of which are courtesy its 1983 GSI 100ESD fairing, its engine is the point of the exercise. How fast is it? Using a slick but no wheeiie bar. Big Blue has turned a 9.97-second, 144-mph quarter-mile. It is, in other words, a thunderbolt of a streetbike, and when you > crank its twistgrip, you’d best be ready for some excitement.
In its current stage of development, the Suzuki’s motor runs a Wiseco big-block, which gives it 1327cc, and uses Wiseco pistons, which run at a compression ratio of about 1 1.5:1, thanks to the use of two base gaskets. With just one base gasket. Cordona says, the c.r. would be 12.2:1, too high for pump gas. The head has been flowed and ported, the combustion chambers reshaped, and the piston crowns reconfigured to match the new combustion-chamber shape. Also, each combustion chamber is fired by two spark plugs, each in freshly drilled-and-tapped holes on either side of the stock plug position. Camshafts are Web-Cam’s Pro Stock #212 grind, carbs are Mikuni flat-slide units, and the exhaust exits via a Kerker pipe and carbon-fiber silencer. That silencer, by the way, doesn’t, much, leaving the bike’s exhaust note sufficient to disturb the slumber of an Egyptian mummy.
With a motor like this, you'd expect Big Blue to be just a bit temperamental, and you’d be right. It idles at 2000 rpm, and doesn’t care to pull much of a load
until it reaches 4000 rpm. Once there, it pulls strongly, if unspectacularly. The spectacular part it saves until 7000 rpm: When the tach needle gets that far around, the rider had better be hanging on, he’d better be poised to repeatedly punch the bike’s airshifter button and he'd better be ready for the road to get real narrow and real short, real fast. He’s going to accelerate through all five transmission cogs and arrive at top gear and the bike’s 1 1,000-rpm rev limit— perhaps 1 50 miles per hour—before he can say, “Only kidding, officer.”
When I asked how much money had been spent on Big Blue, Cordona said, “We stopped counting at $16.000.” But, explains Cordona, “Alan is a sporty gent. He likes performance.” And he adds that with the bike’s engine making “adequate” power, he now intends to turn his attentions to the bike’s chassis.
But even if Cordona never lays another wrench to the bike, we’re still impressed. The project may have cost the equivalent of a pair of FZR 1000s, but as an exercise in wringing performance from an older bike, it’s been wildly successful.
Jon F. Thompson
