Dirt Rider

2006 Billings Hillclimb Championship Part 1 - Dirt Rider Magazine

February 24, 2009

The 88th Annual Miller Lite Great American Hillclimb Championship.The wildest hillclimb and some of the most radical and sometimes far-fetched machinery a gearhead will ever see appears in Billings, Montana, every July. The hillclimb is the oldest and richest hillclimb in America. And coolest of all, the BMC owns the hill and 900 acres of Yellowstone riverfront riding land.This year roughly 400 riders gave the hill named "Bentonite Nightmare" a shot. Very few of those saw the top under their own power.Billings is almost two extreme sports in one. You have the hillclimbers, and the crazy nut-balls with the hooks at the top of the hill who catch the hillclimbers. All in all it's a wild show.In this installment, we'll show you some of the more interesting equipment and in following installments we'll show it getting bent up.PART 1 OF 4

Several riders built bikes out of snowmobile engines. This one uses the stock auto-trans.

Nolan Martin's 800cc snowmobile-powered KX250 was the most successful of the hybrids.

The Harley crowd is getting smaller, but the bikes still work. The fork tubes are turned around backwards to allow the bike to make wheelbase.

Rules say tire-class bikes are limited to 66" wheelbase and must have one brake. This bike runs a rear brake to allow the forks to be reversed!

Three cylinder Triumph 955 is in a Tiger dual sport frame. It uses a Honda CR500 swingarm that was widened 4"!

This is a CR500 chassis with a Honda CBR600 fi engine. In the unlimited class it also runs nitrous for a claimed 120 horsepower.

This is a GSX-R1000 with a stock frame. They just lengthened the swingarm and put motocross suspension and plastic on it.

This is a KX250 with a ZX10 engine in it.

This is a RC51 Honda superbike V twin in a wildly modified CR500 chassis. Build by Davey Johnston.

This is a Suzuki TL1000R in another Johnston chassis. He turned the CR500 chassis into a Ducati-style birdcage perimeter chassis.

Jon Smith's 230 horsepower Hyabusa is in a one-off custom chassis. It won the 2006 Widowmaker Hillclimb.

This is another Honda CBR600-powered special.

Honda chassis with essentially a 1980's Kawasaki pro-stock drag race motor that starts as a Kawasaki police bike 1000 and ends up over 1400cc.

Another snowmobile-based bike.

This is a YZ450 punched out to 535cc and running nitrous.

The owner of this bike claims over 75 horsepower.

This is another Kawasaki with a big-bore Kawasaki superbike engine in it.

This was a new bike with an owner-modified KX125 frame with a Ducati 951 engine in it.

The owner built this frame in his garage to made motocross suspension to a Honda RC51 engine. He claims he has less than $2000 in the bike.

We hardly ever see an RC51, and this guy found an engine on e-bay for $500.

Ed Taylor built this KTM 570 for the Unlimited class.

If you're really sure you're only gonna do hillclimbs, you weld the swingarm's extensions on.

In addition to the big-bore and stroker crank, the KTM relies heavily on nitrous oxide.

The snowmobile-engine specials that relied on the stock automatic transmission didn't do well in Montana.