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had already set a new class national record. He said shortly after that, he gave away his flat track machine. Drag racing was his future. In 1978, Kizer moved up to the Pro Comp class with a Parsons-built turbo- charged Kawasaki, and he again experienced immedi- ate success and set class records. He won the IDBA Pro Comp National Cham- pionship in '78. Parsons and Kizer were on such a roll that, starting in 1979, Terry set a national record at every track he went to for the next three years—an accomplishment that will likely never be topped. One aspect of Kizer's almost overnight success was that he knew so little about drag racing at the time. "When I was flat tracking, and I was on the track against Springsteen or Roberts or some- body, I was intimidated," Kizer admits. "My advantage in drag racing was I didn't know these guys, so if I went up on the line against one of drag racing's stars, I wasn't intimidated simply because of my lack of knowl- edge in that sport." Kizer was so dominant in Pro Comp and shattering so many records that the IDBA actually changed the rules to set the bar higher for turbo bikes against normally aspirated ones. Coming out of nowhere and winning so quickly raised suspi- cions. Tech officials and fellow competitors were just sure Par- sons and Kizer were somehow cheating. Their bikes started going through more scrutiny than their competitors. But Kizer proudly points out that cheat- ing wasn't what was causing their success, "We just worked harder than everybody else," he says. One of Kizer's competitors in those early years was Eraldo Ferracci. Ferracci once observed Kizer's unique burnout style. "Most riders would keep their feet on the ground during the burnout," Kizer said. "Being an old flat tracker, I was used to put- ting my feet up on the pegs. Dur- ing the burnout, the bike would sometimes drift to one side or the other, and Ferracci came up to me with a big smile and told me with those drifting skills, I needed to go road racing." Kizer was the first to race a gas-powered drag racer into the seven-second bracket. It hap- pened at Fremont Dragstrip in Fremont, California. Gas-pow- ered Funny Bikes were getting close to dipping into the sevens, and the conditions that weekend in Fremont were ideal. Being the first into the sevens would constitute major bragging rights and a place in history, and Kizer was poised to do it. "We were sitting there in line to be the first in our class down the strip," Kizer remembers. "We got distracted for a second, and when we looked up, our rival Jon Baugh on Jack O'Malley's Orient Express was wheeling into the burnout box in front of us. We were friends with those guys, but that made us steaming mad. The air was good, and the track was good, and now it was Jon who'd have the first shot of getting into the sevens. He ran an 8.13. CN III ARCHIVES P126 A poster made of Terry Kizer and the Orient Express after he became the quickest motorcycle drag racer ever in 1988.