At 170 miles an hour, the bike feels like it’s going to come apart at the seams, frame sundered, fairing shredded, its rider flung into oblivion. The pitted and rutted surface of the salt looks smooth only from a distance; at this speed, everything shakes violently, blurring vision.
There’s little traction to be found here on the boundless white plains. The needles of a gauge repurposed from a twin-engined aircraft show that the rear wheel is spinning 15 per cent faster than the front. Still, already at 8000 rpm, the rider eases on more throttle – the thin grey shape flicks across the landscape like a thrown knife.
And then, disaster. A mild crosswind springs from nowhere, pressing against the streamliner’s flat side and pushing it out of line, towards the edge of the track. The rider can’t tell how bad the drift is, peering through a tiny homemade periscope that shows only a brilliant, featureless vastness. Motes of salt hover around his head, getting everywhere, sucked into his helmet, stinging his eyes.
The lane markers for the long track are four-foot lengths of PVC piping stuck into the ground approximately an arm’s breadth apart, with a flag tied between both tops. The bike drifts farther to the right, rattling and shaking over the bumps.
It happens nearly too fast to see – motorcycle and rider hit the verge and thread the needle between the PVC pipes and, in the same instant, the head gasket lets go. Studs break with a rifle-crack to go tumbling off into the slipstream, and flames shoot out of the combustion chamber, flickering around the rider’s left leg.
It’s getting hot fast, but the slick salt surface means that an emergency stop is impossible. Fighting the instinct to simply hit the brakes, the rider eases back gently on the throttle, bringing his charcoal grey wedge back from the brink. 150 mph, 140, 120, 100, 80, 55, 30, 10, stopped at last.
The rider looks out across the salt as his support crew hurries out on the parallel access road, their images flickering in the heat waves.
It is 2011, and his quest to break 200 mph won’t happen this year. Not this time. Not yet.
Standing by the workbench that holds his now-retired record-setting motorcycle, Tom Mellor – the rider – tells me this story in an off-handed manner.
“It was getting pretty warm in there,” he chuckles, adding later, “But that’s how I learn – I break stuff.”
There’s certainly plenty of broken stuff here in his workshop. In the spring, just prior to his 2013 Salt Flats expedition, the motorcycle’s 1000cc three-cylinder engine exploded on the dyno, vomiting flame and shrapnel.
Better that it happened in testing rather than at-speed, but it was back to the drawing board – Mellor shows me the scorched and crumpled remains of the piston, stored in an aluminium aircraft tray.
While there’s an air of mad scientist about this gentleman speed junkie, Tom Mellor is a born Anglophile, BC boy, and an adept mechanic. He’s a member of the British Motorcycle Owner’s Club (BMOC), and also the mechanic for the local Rolls-Royce club. As if showing up at the Bonneville speed trials with a hand-shaped stiletto of a motorcycle weren’t eyebrow-raising enough, he trailers the bike down using a stately green 1950 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. It’s the workhorse of the two Rolls he owns, and he’s just finished a valve job on it.
The motorcycle itself is something special, shaped by the need for speed. It started life as a 1969 Triumph Trident, an air-cooled, square-tanked touring bike. Bonneville is all about classification, and the bike now holds records in the 1000cc altered, partially-streamlined, pushrod, gasoline class. All those modifiers are important.
Born with a wrench in his hand, and with a quarter-century of aircraft maintenance for CP Air under his belt, Mellor has always tinkered with machinery. Originally, he built the Triumph up for road-racing, hand-shaping a streamlined fuel tank, and stripping parts to get the weight down.
The original race-bike is parked next to the English wheel upon which many hours were spent carefully easing metal into a more slippery shape. There’s a huge dent on the Triumph’s fuel tank – Tom didn’t hold back on the racetrack.
One year, on the way down to race at Miller Motorsports Park, Mellor was given the chance to “run whatcha brung” at Bonneville for 75 bucks. He lined his race bike up on the roughly-surfaced track and went 144 mph.
The hook was set.
It took eight years to go 200 mph, eight excursions to Bonneville and whole bunch of lessons learned along the way. The original Triumph motorcycle is a far cry from its original shape: the sleek fairing is all handmade by Mellor, the frame cut and chopped down by him. The original engine is stroked-out from 750cc to 1000cc, but cleverly done: rather than simply lengthening the stroke with a taller engine, Mellor made his own piston prototype with the mounting point moved slightly upwards. He sent the piece off to a custom piston shop who now supplies them.
The three-cylinder, air-cooled engine runs a compression ratio of 14.3:1 and revs to 9000 rpm. A kidney-shaped intake mounted on the nose that rams air into the engine, fighting back against the thin air of the salt flats. The crankshaft is hand ground, with precious grams painstakingly shaved off for increased responsiveness; the airbox is custom-made, the carburetors carefully jetted and tuned. Almost every part of the engine has been finely crafted, but even so, it makes just 100 hp.
The narrow rear wheel looks like some sort of device for cutting up an enormous pizza, and its tire is blistered from the speed. The rest of the bike is blade-thin, with a cut-out shape for the rider: to fit within the rules, Tom’s partially streamlined bike has to be made so the rider is visible.
Setting the record is no sprint to a final velocity. In the first mile, the rider must fight the low traction of the salt pan and get his bike up to operating temperature. In the second and third mile, speed is gradually increased, but the throttle still has to be feathered; Mellor’s 100 hp gets to the ground more easily than some of the newer bikes with 400 and 500 hp, but it’s still capable of getting the tail wandering around at speed, something he calls, “a really lousy feeling.”
“It’s fun with the old bike going faster than the new bike,” he grins, “Gets them scratching their heads.”
At the fifth mile, the bike passes the timing post and has to hold its speed over a full mile. At 200 mph, that’s 18 seconds or so at maximum speed – it might not sound like a lot, but count it off in your head. Do it twice, too, because once a record-setting run is in, it must be replicated in the other direction, and no mechanical tinkering is allowed in-between.
Last August, with the cool morning air nice and still, and the salt relatively dry, Mellor finally cracked the 200 mph barrier, hitting his personal goal, and setting yet another world record. His bike now stands among the fastest pushrod vehicles in the world.
Its retirement is only partial – the engine will be swapped over to the new frame that Mellor is building. This is currently just a latticework of wood strips and cardboard, but it’ll be even more slippery than the record bike, and should go even faster. While the 200mph barrier might have been passed, the speed itch clearly hasn’t been scratched.
You can see Tom Mellor’s bike at this year’s Vancouver Motorcycle show, which runs from January 24-26 at the Abbotsford Tradex Centre. Fourteen bucks gets you in the door, where there’ll be stunt riding and gleaming sport bikes, and a display of British-built motorcycles from the rest of the BMOC members.
Then, in August, Mellor will hitch the trailer to his vintage Rolls, strap down his latest streamlined creation and head down to Bonneville once again. Like he says, the salt gets everywhere, in your eyes, in the carburetors, in the doorsills of the big green Roller.
And, ultimately, it gets under your skin, and into your blood.
brendanmcaleer@gmail.com
