Bottle Bagger
BOTTLE BAGGER
A nitrous-injected Harley with a Dale Earnhardt Jr. paint scheme? Now that's an American Flyer!
IT'S HARD TO KEEP A straight face when a Harley-riding NASCAR fan boasts that his American Flyer goes 200 mph. It's only when you realize he's talking about one of his company's model-airplane engines—a diminutive .4-cubic-inch contraption that revs to 32,000 rpm and makes 5 horsepower—that your bemusement turns to amusement.
Then he starts to tell you about his 1988 Heritage Softail Classic doing 10second quarter-miles and your smirk returns. A pushrod bagger that can hold its own against a Hayabusa? When he Hips open the right saddlebag lid to show you the NOS bottle inside, you just know he’s been into the nitrous-doing Whippits!
But when he tells you about the various aftermarket engines he’s tried over the years, and the pile of pipes this deep in his garage, you have to wonder if you shouldn’t perhaps take this guy seriously.
The biker in question is Lars Larson, 52-year-old proprietor of California Speed Pros, who got fed up with the Golden State’s politics a few years ago and moved to rural South Dakota. After putting 100,000 miles on his cherished Heritage Softail, Larson said he, “figured my angel could fly faster’’ and bolted in a 121 -cubic-inch V-Twin from Connecticut-based Total Performance.
“They’re the kings of motors,” he declares.
That mega-motor inhales through a Mikuni 45mm carb and exhales through Larson’s favored Vance & Hines 2-into-1 pipe. Power is transmitted to the rear wheel via a 2002 transmission fitted with Andrews straight-cut gears, a BDL chain-drive clutch and the stock drive belt and pulleys.
Larson lives just 12 miles from Sturgis, so once during that town’s annual rally he seized the opportunity to run his bike in the Dyno Drags, which is where the 10.05-second quarter-mile time originated. Okay, so the bike wasn’t actually moving when it posted that time, but Larson claims he’s seen other bikes make good on their dyno times at the strip, so it’s fairly representative. And the horsepower and torque figures are accurate, even if they sound incredible: 118 bhp and 128 foot-pounds at the rear wheel, and that’s without nitrous; on the bottle, the engine pumps out 148 bhp and 158 ft.-lbs. !
“It’ll outrun a V-Rod easy, and beat most sportbikes to 100 mph,” Larson laughs.
Even with all that power, Larson still wants more, but can’t bring himself to bolt on a turbo. “I don’t want my $30,000 motorcycle to sound like it has an exhaust leak,” he says defiantly. He hasn’t ruled out a supercharger, though...
“The worst thing about this bike is its narrow wheels,” Larson says in summary. “1 put on Excel 4.25-inch-wide rims front and back, but that still only lets me use a 140mm rear tire. I got just 3200 miles on the last one, and 1 only did one burnout!” Brian Catterson
