Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/553925
P152 BY RENNIE SCAYSBROOK CN III LOWSIDE R iding motorcycles can be a surreal experience, an outer body deliverance of adrenalin and lust, like the drugs that lit- tered Hunter S. Thomp- son's existence, full of heady extremism, love, and terror of what lay beyond. Motorcycle riding is in itself a selfish pastime. Like eating at a fancy restaurant by yourself, there's a guilty pleasure in riding fast on the streets lined with the dan- gers ready to knock you into the next life at any opportunity. Yet for me, this maniacal pas- time, a curse that has befallen three generations of my family, has one King Kong. A motor- cycle that scared the smoldering crap out of me so much that, as time gradually eeks on and the hairline gets ever thinner, it's taken on a life of drunk house party and campfire stories that no doubt get taller with age. This is the story of when I went head-to-head with "Hunta". By the time Hunta and I met, I really didn't have any clue what I was doing. I'd ridden a few superbikes, crashed one, pissed my boss off to phone- breaking levels of anger and generally made a idiot of myself in my incoherent ramblings that hopefully only a few people were actually reading. I was getting better, slowly, but at the time I was as green as the 18 th at the Masters. The day of my rendezvous with Hunta, I was riding a beauti- fully sorted Aprilia RSV1000 Mille around Sydney's Eastern Creek. Happy as a backwards-swim- ming trout I dragged knees, left black lines and pulled wheelies, basically all things that are good about being a bike journo. Then Pete, Hunta's owner, came over and threw me the key. He didn't even ask if I wanted to ride it. Hunta was no ordinary motor- cycle, and Pete was no ordinary owner. Its owner christened Hunta so after his 13 years in the Australian Army as a paratrooper/ sniper. When questioned by one onlooker how he could afford to build such a monster, he replied sharply, "with rivers of blood." The Hunta T-713, to give its full and correct name, was a 2005 Suzuki GSX-R750. Nothing flash there. Except beneath the heavily modified tank and widened frame sat a 1999 turbo Suzuki Haya- busa engine, you know, the mental 200 mph one you could buy before the Japanese drank sake to a gentleman's agreement to limit bikes to 185 mph. Conservative estimates had the T-713 (mean- ing Turbo 750/1300) sitting at "around 340 hp, give or take." That was, give or take, about a 300 percent increase in power of a stock GSX-R750. This maniacal beast even came with a checker plate seat that looked like it'd been carved from Saddam Hu- sein's personal S&M den, not to mention all the crazy add-ons that either made it look terrifying or increased power to escape-the- atmosphere levels, or both. Firing up Hunta was like sum- moning the gods. The short dump-pipe exhaust made for a soundtrack unlike anything I'd heard before or since. If it was scary just sitting quietly in the pits, once it roared into life it was positively terrifying. I climbed on, feeling com- GETTING HUNTED