2004 Bonneville Speed Week

The turning point of this project is when Race Tech redesigned the shock, giving us more room to cram the turbo in.

You've been hearing about our land speed record assault and our fleet of unique-looking Hondas for several months. Now, we can finally show you the world-fastest turbo 125cc two-stroke built by Rod Falkner of Dumonde Tech. It features and IHI turbo and a variety of exotic custom-built hardware. There are reports that the plumber's union actually got a little concerned about how much plumbing went on behind their back. Regardless of who did the work, we managed to get her into the mid 90mph range several times, and believe that she's capable of doing over 125mph. This was the first stage in a long-term development program for this engine by Falkner/Livingston Racing. The bike was still fast enough that I managed to set three land speed records, and somewhere in the middle, managed to blow it up on the salt at 94mph.

Rod Faulkner of Dumond Tech and Paul Livingston of Spider Grips built this fleet of Honda CR125Rs.

The other two bikes were normally aspirated gas-powered engines built by Don Holmboe of Competition Motor Corporation. CMC is one of the leading engine builders in the world of karting, and their knowledge of data acquisition was key to this project. Bonneville is a challenging place, and weather conditions this year meant that we were racing at an adjusted altitude of 7,300 feet elevation. Since it's believed that engines lose three percent of their horsepower for every 1000 feet, our power was down over 20 percent at times. Still, we managed to get up to 115mph against a record of 118.082 set on a Honda RS125 road racer. Remember, we were chasing after street bike records on a dirt bike!

The team: (from left) Terry Hulbert, Race Tech's Phong Diep, Ken Faught, Paul Livingston, Rod Falkner and Bill Taylor.

We would have gotten the record in that class as had we not encountered a lot of problems with the weather. Normally, we would have been able to run each bike at least 20 times. However, we got less than half that number which limited our data collection on the salt. But this team will be back. There are several more races this year on the land speed record calendar this year, and Team Falkner/Livingston won't stop until they can etch their name in history a few more times.

We had several days of rain which limited our time on the track.	The line at Bonneville moves slowly and we only managed a few runs before the rain came.	We used Digitron data acquisition equipment to gather cylinder head and exhaust gas temperature along with engine rpm and distance traveled.
The moment of truth. Bonneville rewarded us wtih three land speed records.	Faught listens to a tape recorder he carried in his leathers. The sound was the turbo bike seizing at over 90mph.	We ran two nearly identical normally aspirated Hondas in order to get more testing data.
A huge K&N filter hangs off the side of the turbo, making for a unique riding position.	We used two heavy-duty batteries out of a toy motorcycle to spin the turbo.	Land Speed Vehicles come in all shapes and sizes.