Blazin' Busa

American FLYERS

BLAZIN' BUSA

Delivering the goods on the Big Dyno

ADMITTEDLY, THERE aren't a lot of road hazards on the Bonneville Salt Flats. But you still have to respect a guy with a turbocharged, 492-horsepower, 246-mph Suzuki Hayabusa landspeed-record bike who says, “I don’t need brakes.”

It’s when bike owner/builder John Noonan adds that he’s also ridden this very same bike-still adorned with the Southern California Timing Association tech stickers from its record run-down to Bike Night at the local burger joint that you begin to suspect he might be just a little nuts.

At least he did keep the tiny rear disc. But how was his little ffont-brakeless foray onto public roads? “That was a mistake,” he says with a chuckle.

But I bet the crowd was impressed. And actually, since then Noonan has put front brakes on his bike, mostly due to the fact that during a recent television commercial shoot at El Mirage Dry Lake the rear brake failed, sending him off the course at 80 mph into the uncleared scrub of the open desert.

“I mowed some weeds, got airborne, cleared off four layers of paint from the lower part of the bodywork, put my kidneys and bladder into my neck, but I rode it out,” he says. “We threw brakes on right away from a spare bike, then went back to do several runs over 200.”

Which brings up the point that old-salt Bonneville types may lament the fact that any whippersnapper with a Hayabusa and some safety wire are about 99 percent of the way to breaking into the 200-mph club. Even so, that other 1 percent is pretty damn important.

And if you want to push 250 mph, how do you do that? You take your lowered and raked, longwheelbase Hayabusa, fit a Batter Air-Tech fuel tank, slap on $8000 worth of Very Large Turbo from Nxt Level Racing, then throw down $4500 or so to beef up the engine and transmission using all the right stuff: Carrillo rods, APE lightened/balanced crankshaft and custom overdrive gears from TTS in England. It’s cool if you can ask your bosses at JE Pistons (where Noonan works) to kick down with a sweet set of forged 83mm-diameter slugs to fatten up displacement to 1363cc, then go to the Salt Flats and impress the ladies and gents with 246-mph and 242-mph records in the SCTA and Bonneville Nationals groups. In your secondever try.

That’s right, it was only his second trip out to the Big Flat. On his first foray, he topped out at 229, but wanted more, so he fitted a bigger turbo, cranked up boost to 27 psi and tweaked fuel and ignition maps. He also reinforced the bodywork-it gets kind of windy at 200-plus.

“I stood next to a guy at the awards banquet who’d been trying to get in the 200-mph club for 50 years. Fifty years. 1 felt a little guilty.. .for about half a second!”

Seriously, though, Noonan says he owes his quick success to the Bonneville lifers.

“You have to listen to the people who have done it 20 years,” he says. “Everybody there wants to see you go fast, even if you’re in the same class, because they know if you can go that fast, so can they.”

To put some perspective on Noonan's accomplishments, it’s important to point out that he races in the up-to-1650cc class, and the bike that previously held the fastest open-wheel record was a twin-engined Triumph that ran in the 3000cc class.

“We also have the fastest two records in the entire 1650cc class,” adds Noonan. “Not even any streamliners in my class have been faster than me.”

Noonan has more recordbreaking on his mind, and is stepping up his efforts with new parts, more boost and more aerodynamic bodywork. First step, though?

“All my bikes are going to have front brakes from here on out!” Mark Hoyer