Top Dead Center

Today. 0 to 100 and two seconds. It's motorcycling. Quickest the Pro Stock riders then, Doctor D on the art and science of jumping,

plus Tommy G buttons up our Yamaha and Project of the week.

Hey guys, welcome to Top Dead Center. I'm Alan neighbors.

Now, if you're into hot bikes, low ETS and 200 mile per hour runs, get ready for a seven second throw ride called Pro Stock.

It's just uh that heart of a game. I mean, it's like, you know, bang go,

this is the most fun you'll ever have. I mean, we go a quarter straight line for a quarter mile,

go get speeds of 100 and 95 miles an hour in 7.1 seconds and it's a blast. We run

0 to 100 and about 1.21 0.3

little nuts. I mean, that's big fee for a bike.

You know, you think your street bike probably went 100 and 50 horsepower is fast. Just imagine what over 300 horsepower is. You know,

it's, it's scary fast.

Motorcycling going 200 miles an hour.

It takes a real special person to do that. Got to be either a little bit crazy or a little bit stupid to ride one of these motorcycles.

Probably a little bit of both.

But

you got to be more than a monkey on a rocket ship to win races in the big show

where you got to visualize us on a motorcycle. I pull in a clutch in my left hand. I take my right hand and wrap the throttle full throttle. It hits the red

room

10,000 RPM. Si throw that clutch

as I throw it, the bike takes off. But then you got to come back and grab the handlebars.

It's between 3 to 5 G forces that wants to rip you off the bike. So if you don't like leave with the bike,

it's going to take you right off. There's guys that fall off back or you do a Bronco Billy and you go into the wall,

there might be a crosswind, moving my bike either right or left and I'm moving my body right or left to fix it.

So, I mean, all these things are happening so fast. It's the most exhilarating feeling when you let the clutch go wide open throttle, you know, push those gears go down track. It's so awesome.

It's just nuts. It's insane.

When Angel

Savoie

broke into the N Hr A in 1996 she was called worse things than nuts and insane.

But three titles later, she's considered one of the

racers of all time.

I've always been the type of person when you tell me I can't do something.

That's when I'm going to prove you wrong. Her mom says if she wants to get me to do something, she tells me that I can't and I'm for sure, you know, surely I'm going to find a way to make it happen

with her. Get it done. Attitude. She has made it happen. Competing aboard a machine that's as trick as they come. It's a 1500 cc pro stock Suzuki. This isn't a motorcycle. You can walk into a Suzuki dealership and buy. This is a very highly

five motorcycle. Um All the parts inside of it are custom made or aftermarket parts, you know, from pistons and Hams and valve springs to that. I mean, everything

is so highly modified which makes it very expensive.

The motorcycle is worth about $85,000 once it's completely built and ready to race,

it has 315 horsepower maybe, you know, give or take one or two.

We're always looking for one or two horsepower every single day.

It's got um just one quarter of fuel in it. That's all it takes to get from the starting line to the finish line.

There's a big 10 inch slick on the back. It's actually a car tire.

That's why I say we have to be crazy to ride one of these motorcycles. It's a normally aspirated engine. It's not like what you see in these top field drive says there's no turbo chargers, no nitro methane,

just a really high octane race fuel and all man made horsepower. My guys work really hard at the race shop to try to try to get me into the winner circle. Unlike the early days of her career,

Angel's competitors are now quick to give her props and cut her down.

Yeah,

she's top notch.

There ain't any better

with fame. Fortune and her name firmly cemented in the record books. It's the love of the quarter mile that keeps the fire to compete alive.

I'm 33 years old. You know, when am I gonna settle down and have kids? How long, how much long am I gonna do this? The determination is not going away, the will to win is not dying.

I still want to do this as much today as I did seven years ago and I can't imagine not racing anymore. So there's no telling. I may be out here for another 10 or 15 years. As long as they let an old lady ride a motorcycle, I guess we're gonna watch them do some burnouts and we're gonna watch them have some fun.

Harley Davidson jumped into the

drag racing game big last season, taking on, on gel and a field that's dominated by the Japanese bikes. We run a V twin engine combination and the Suzuki and the Kawasaki have in line four.

Well, we run 100 and 60 degree V twin

and uh, it's got push rods. I mean, we got a fuel injection system. We have

oxygen sensors, computers. I mean,

you basically plug a laptop into this thing and tune it

and, I mean, it's all top of the line stuff. This thing's a complete animal. It makes about 330 horsepower,

0 to 60 in one second. 0 to 100 and 95 and seven.

That's uh

it's about three Gs off the starting line. It's, it's a definite rush state of the art. It is, but out of the box it needed. 03 for development, they make roughly the same horsepower, but a Suzuki is a lot more aerodynamic.

So these things are really finicky with uh the way you ride them and how you tuck in.

So just finding more power is our key to success.

Not only did the Milwaukee company introduce a new generation machine.

They also employ a couple of 20 year olds to head up the program, something I've never really expected in my life.

I grew up around drag racing, but I never thought I'd be this far and you wanna have fun with your life and you wanna

just really follow your dreams and I'm living my dream right now.

This is great. I'm on a

factory back team and

screaming eagle dancing irons, Harley Davidson. I mean, it's awesome. Uh my friends, my teammate and

can't life can't get much better

with 300 horsepower on gasoline. Wow. Well, hats off to Angel Gino and the Vinson Heinz guys

coming up drag race over Achiever Reggie Showers.

He's a superstar drag racer and one of the greatest competitors in any sport.

Meet Reggie Showers.

A lot of guts to go down the track

that fast on two wheels

with the NA

A

cream. The crap. It's the best of the best. So, coming over here, you know, you're the elite when you can come out here and qualify.

Drag racing is just in your blood. You, you don't ever take it.

Motorcycle drags entered Reggie Shower's blood after watching the races as a college student back in Philadelphia.

And I said, man, one day I want to do that. So I set a goal for myself at the age of 19 or 20 that I was gonna win

be a professional motorcycle racer. Setting. The goal was the

easy

overcoming. The obstacles would be the challenge. When I was 14 years old. I was uh playing on top of a train box car. Uh I, we had a dirt bike track set up next to the train yard

and uh I climbed on top of the box car and there was electric wire over top of the box car and I got too close to it

and got electrocuted with 13,000 volts of electricity.

He exited my feet

and killed all the muscles in my feet. So I had to have both legs amputated,

but I never cried about what happened to me. I never lost faith about what my future was going to be.

Uh always knew that I would be ok

and uh always knew that I was going to have some kind of a motorcycle in my future. Faith, determination and a little help from modern technology. Got Reggie to the start.

Uh

This

is my actual wrist leg. As you can see, it's kind of beat up. It's very lightweight,

very lightweight, very strong, it's made out of carbon fiber and

this is a composite material and Titanium,

some magnesium in there. Uh There's a locking mechanism down inside there. I wear a sleeve on my leg and it's got a pin

and that pin

goes down inside that locking mechanism

and the leg can't come off. The sleeve is silicone

and it sticks to my skin so it won't come on the sleeve won't, I'm like 55 inches shorter when I do wear these legs.

And you can see that the difference in the foot

is much shorter also.

And when I wear them, like I said, you know,

the toes are, are kind of pointed in. I had to teach myself how to spread my thighs and walk straight. You know, these are the cards that I'm dealt. I gotta play them. You know, when they say when you have lemons, you make lemonade right

after years of trying in 2003. His dream of N hr A victory was fulfilled when he won three consecutive events.

That was a, uh, a shot in the arm for all the disabled people in America. I have a friend in the world who saw us win.

Um It was a, uh,

it was a message uh, to all the quote unquote, able bodied people in America or, or, or the world, everybody who saw us win by a lot of people's standards. I'm not supposed to be racing a motorcycle,

you know, I'm supposed to be in a wheelchair somewhere or walking with a cane or

uh

just kind of hanging out, you know, just, you know,

hanging, you know,

but no man, I got goals, there's things I wanna do, you know, it's mountains that I wanna climb, you know.

So, uh

if I can use my life as a, as an example, I'm gonna continue to do it.

Reggie's accomplishments both on and off the track, inspire even his most race, heartened competitors

if I woke up one day and they told me my legs were gone. I don't know if I'd have the determination to get out of that bed. And that man not only gets out of his bed every day and walks around with a smile on his face, but he gets out of that racetrack and kicks everybody's butt. He is a great inspiration. He just,

you can't really say enough about a

situation like that. Reggie's, he's come a long way. I mean, for a guy that doubly amputee, I mean,

it's, it's unreal the stuff that he's done.

I'm not a saint or any, any in any way. But I do have a message

and a mission that I'm on just trying to, to inspire and encourage people, you know,

to believe in themselves and, and do the right thing, you know.

Well, Reggie Showers is a champion in more ways than one

up next. Doug du back on the art and science of jumping.

When

now jumping requires a lot of preparation and technique.

Doctor D shares his flight plan,

a racer and flight is one of the most spectacular images in all of sports,

but it can be dangerous. A

common mistake that a lot of beginning riders do when they're jumping

is they don't think through what they're trying to do, they don't take it in small steps,

they go over the jump a few times and then they just wing it and hope for the best.

There's

a whole system of building up to doing a jump.

When you hear people talk about a neutral position on the bike, it's just what it sounds kind of neutral. You got your knees a little bit bent, your elbows are a little bit bent in this position, you're ready for pretty much anything.

If the bike's getting kicked from the rear, it can rotate up and you've got a lot of room here for the bike to move around.

The same as

if you're climbing up the jump. As a bike starts to climb up a jump, the front of the bike is climbing and you just kind of allow it to come into you with your arms bending.

And then as you

take off the jump, you want to flatten it back out, you just kind of pushing your arm. So everything happens on a rotation of the foot pegs.

There is a lot of things that you can do once you're in the air to correct the attitude of your motorcycle.

And this is where you see guys lock up the rear wheel while they're in the air.

And also doing by that is you're using that gyro effect to their advantage.

If you take a spinning object and all of a sudden you grab it to stop it, it's going to rotate that bike downward.

So it's a little

of an advanced technique, but you can use it. If you come off that jump a little bit front end high,

you can use that to help level yourself out.

When you see guys whipping their bikes in the air.

Sometimes it's just a showboat. But most of the time it's an effective way to keep that bike low. Because any time you climb the face of a jump,

that jump is

to send you up this way, the energy of that is sending you up. Well,

you can stand tall and absorb it. That's one way of keeping low. But then by actually rotating your bike off, the take off your center point here of the gravity of the bike is now lower.

So you rotate the bike and that helps you stay low from take off point to landing.

There's a lot more to know before you start, get a trainer and take it step by step

into these things. Understand what you're trying to accomplish with your body position, your bike set up and everything

because everybody wants to have a good safe fun ride

next Tommy G and our project of the week.

Welcome back to Top Dead Center. I'm Toler G.

I hope you guys can see. We're well on our way on our project bike, the YZ 250

last time, we opted for some serious race bike performance with new triple clamps and a custom suspension upgrade from factory connection.

They completely rebuilt the shock and both front p.

We'll get better handling less shakes through turns better bottomy when we're coming off the jumps and of course, better rebound.

Today, we're going to finish the YZ 250 F with some top of the line aftermarket parts.

First is the rental

twin wall handle bar. It's got twin alloy tubes, one within the other

and it's virtually guaranteed not to fail. We're going to go with the Jeremy mcgrath bend

on Ryz

first. I'll mount the risers to the top clamp and attach the bar,

then transfer all the cables.

Now for some new rubber, this is the new race replica. 756 RR from Dunlop. These are the closest you'll come to a factory racing tire,

providing less wheel spin off the pad and increased traction in a variety of conditions.

You can see the different tread pattern on the stock. 739

they're designed for soft intermediate tracks.

90% of racers that race for Dunlop are using the 756 RR

These babies are easy to mount yourself.

Place the tube inside the tire valve stem first and work it around.

Dunlop provides you a dot Where you can line up your stem,

hit it with air,

make sure the tube isn't twisted

before you finish up

with the rear tire mounted. We'll put on this trick, noose sprocket from tag metals.

It's made from heat treated T six aluminum.

It's much lighter than stock

and will improve the bike's overall performance.

Of course, any time you install a new sprocket,

it's a great idea to also put on a new chain.

I told you guys we're going total high performance. So every little bit helps.

This is a one piece aluminum high flow water pump cover from bois

it will provide up to 10 degree difference and cool it. Temperature.

Nobody likes a grip that slips.

So if you don't have any grip, glue, shoot some spray paint in the grip before you slide it on,

works just as good.

And so your ass doesn't slide off at high speeds.

Check out this gripper seat from SDG USA

Sweet.

Well, what do you guys think this bike is far from stock? And that's exactly what we wanted.

The best thing about this project,

it doesn't take any special tools and you can do it yourself. The last thing we gotta do

is take it to the track and tune the suspension.

Ok. Let's check out some new products. Now there's a new trend in sport bikes. Guys are swapping clip ons for the comfort of a more upright bar. This new LSL kit from Germany lets you convert with a billet aluminum top clamp, low rise alloy bars and a longer clutch cable. LSLK

will get you upright on your sport bike for about $450. Now, for your off road bike, check out this performance clutch basket from Barnett.

It's machined from billet aluminum with a hard

anodized finish. Barnett also uses stainless steel inserts to prevent grooving from plate impact

list. On this competition clutch basket is $240. Ok. Now, how about a little fashion? We all know Smith is known for their Motocross goggles, but they also make eyewear for off the track. This is their street series

hemi with black line frames and filtered polarized lenses. They retail for $80 and this one is their stance series with carbonic lenses and nylon frame,

they styling with a pair of these shades will set you back about $70. Well, that's all the time we have for today, but check out next week's show.

It's a season finale of the World off road racing series with superstar Ty Davis and a few 100 of his closest friends.

Well, thanks for watching Ride Safe. We'll see you then.