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VOLUME 56 ISSUE 41 OCTOBER 15, 2019 P117 a streamlined body shell, moved the record up by almost four- miles-per-hour when he hit 214.4 at Bonneville. Allen's record then held for six years. Then in 1962, Joe Dudek, chief mechanic Aero-Space Divi- sion at North American Aviation, brought his streamliner to the Utah salt. Inspired by NAA's X-15 rocket plane and powered by a bored out T120 Bonneville nitro methane-burning engine, rider Bill Johnson (not to be confused with the Bill Johnson who was the West Coast Distributor for Tri- umph) piloted Dudek's machine to set a new world motorcycle speed record of 224.57 mph. Dudek was one of the leading aerospace engineers in the coun- try. He had an amazing amount of technical expertise and top-notch facilities to fabricate his stream- liner. Suffice to say that under Dudek's direction, the upper-limits of the most powerful four-stroke motorcycle engines of the 1960s were being reached. But then Bob Leppan, a Detroit Triumph dealer who, with mechan- ic Jim Bruflodt, had been building legendary twin-engine Triumph drag racing bikes, decided to take his twin-engine design and put it to the test at Bonneville. With help from an innovative former Ford engineer Alex Tremulis, the team designed a streamliner called the Gyronaut X-1. With the power of two engines, Leppan was able to get close to 250 when he reached 245.667 mph. Even more power was needed to get past 250 mph, and by 1970 Vesco had the powerplant that could finally produce the kind of horsepower to reach the elusive 250-mph mark, Yamaha's TR-2-based 350cc two-stroke road racing engine. Unlike the engineering tour de force from a leading aero- space company and former Ford Motor Company engineer in the previous records, Vesco's effort at building his LSR machine was mainly shade tree, hot-rod know-how. "Big Red," as Vesco's machine was dubbed by his wife, was five and a half meters long and built from an auxiliary fuel tank for a Korean War-era Grum- man F9F Panther fighter jet. The Yamaha engines ran regular pump gas! In 1969 Vesco got 227 mph out of Big Red. Then the next year, with the experience he gained on the previous year's attempt, Vesco finally eclipsed the 250- mph mark, when on September 17, 1970, at the Bonneville Salt Flats, Vesco clocked a two-way average at 251.66 mph aboard his twin-engine Yamaha. Vesco overcame a crash during one of his preliminary runs at close to 250 mph caused by a blown tire. The shredding tire cut the cable release for Big Red's parachute, and the machine slid on its side, chute deployed, 300-yards past the timing lights, still fast enough to establish a record. Big Red came back repaired two weeks later and set the new LSR record. Less than a month after that, the Harley-Davidson factory broke the record with Vesco's longtime friend Cal Rayborn at the controls. "Since Cal (Rayborn) and I were good friends, I knew Harley was going to set the record," remembered Vesco. "I made sure I got my contingency money from Yamaha and all my other spon- sors real quick." In 1975, Vesco came back and became the first rider to break the 300-mph barrier in the Silver Bird Yamaha (powered by twin Yamaha TZ750 motors), when he went 302.92 mph. To be the guy who broke 250 mph first and then turn around and also be the first to break 300 mph? It was an incredible accom- plishment. Vesco wasn't done. For an encore, he put a four-stroke powered machine back atop the all-time land-speed record when, in 1978, he broke his own record, turning 318.598 mph in a twin Kawasaki KXZ1000 turbo rig. That record held for 12 years. In a 1975 interview, Vesco said he chased speed because "basi- cally, it's my hobby. Some people play golf, some go fishing and some ride bikes in the desert. I get my enjoyment from the chal- lenge on the salt." Today Vesco's "Big Red" number-11 streamliner is part of the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum collection. CN Subscribe to nearly 50 years of Cycle News Archive issues: www.CycleNews.com/Archives