Alan Cathcart | September 1, 2016
Photography by Phil Hawkins and Triumph Motorcycles
Exactly 60 years ago on September 6, 1956, American rider Johnny Allen set a new two-wheeled World Land Speed Record at 214.17 mph/345.188 kmh on the Bonneville Salt Flats. He was riding the so-called Texas Ceegar streamliner built in Dallas by Stormy Mangham, out of a discarded F-4 Phantom fighter aircraft fuel tank, and powered by an unsupercharged 650cc Triumph Thunderbird twin-cylinder motor tuned by fellow Texan, Jack Wilson.
Two years later, the Triumph Bonneville street bike was launched by the British manufacturer in recognition of that achievement, and this has, of course, since become the most iconic model produced by any European manufacturer, ever since production began back in 1959.
You can read the original magazine story by clicking HERE.
Now, six decades later, British road racer and TV personality Guy Martin is attempting to regain the World’s Fastest accolade for Triumph on the Bonneville Salt Flats in another streamliner built with American ingenuity, this time in Portland, Oregon, by mechanical engineer Matt Markstaller and his colleagues at Hot Rod Conspiracy. It’s powered by two turbocharged Rocket III engines coupled together, which have been de-stroked by New Jersey-based drag race tuner Bob Carpenter to a total combined capacity of 2970cc, and tuned by him to produce 1000 bhp. The official attempt to break Rocky Robinson’s current outright record of 376.363 mph set in September 2010 aboard the AckAttack streamliner will begin at Bonneville on August 28-September 1, with a second spell on the Salt scheduled for September 15-20. There, Martin will be competing with Robinson as well as with fast lady Valerie Thomson, riding the former record-holding motorcycle, Denis Manning’s BUB Seven, for the accolade of not only setting a new absolute motorcycle LSR/Land Speed Record, but in doing so to also become the first person to ride a motorcycle at more than 400 mph.
A fourth contender should have been the late Sam Wheeler, but the 72-year old Bonneville legend was sadly killed after crashing his EZ-Hook streamliner on the Salt on July 25—a tragedy which underlines the dangers entailed in the pursuit of speed.
Breaking Records
As a Triumph rider whose name is already to be found in the FIM’s list of current World Land Speed Record holders thanks to Matt Capri’s South Bay Triumphs, both turbocharged and naturally aspirated (click HERE), I was honored with an exclusive guided tour of the Triumph Rocket Streamliner by its creator, Matt Markstaller. After spending the previous four days out on the Salt Flats alongside the bike while pursuing records myself with the 1700cc South Bay Triumph Thunderbird, the chance to examine the Streamliner closely came by visiting the Triumph LSR team’s workshop. This was located 10 miles from the Bonneville Salt Flats at the former Wendover, Utah, USAF airbase that was used as a training HQ for the B-29 bombers which in 1945 dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs. The Enola Gay Hangar in which the team was based had been the home of the actual airplane, which made that fateful run to Hiroshima seven decades earlier.
Markstaller spared no details in describing how he and his crew at Hot Rod Conspiracy had created the fabulously sleek Triumph Streamliner. By day, Matt manages the test and R&D department at Portland’s Freightliner Trucks factory, Daimler-Benz’s North American truck subsidiary, but by night he orchestrates the work of the most creative automotive-design specialists in the USA’s Pacific Northwest. Hot Rod Conspiracy’s activities range from building award-winning high-performance custom vehicles, whether motorcycles, cars, trucks or boats, often going speed-record racing with the result, to developing aerodynamic solutions to improve vehicle speed, handling and fuel efficiency. Matt Markstaller’s engineering expertise honed over the past 25 years has resulted in a huge array of diverse creations that even includes furniture and homes, as well as vehicles. Let’s leave it to Matt to explain the genesis of the 1000 bhp twin-engined, six-cylinder motorcycle with which Guy Martin is currently attempting to set a new outright LSR on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
The Birth Of The Streamliner
“The Triumph Streamliner is really my first bike design, and build,” Markstaller said. “I’ve done many hot rods, Interstate Racing sprintcars, Bonneville cars, Bonneville trucks, and I’ve spent lots of time on the Salt Flats chasing records. The Triumph came about when George Latus and I asked ourselves, what would a Land Speed Record assault vehicle look like today that incorporates all of the ingenuity and racing prowess of the Triumph-powered Land Speed Record vehicles of the 1960s, plus the best of today’s technology in engineering, aerodynamics, safety, and power-plant performance?
“A decade ago I began working at Freightliner Trucks North America, and I designed and built a wind tunnel for them to test trucks in. For fun, we put in a shorter test section in front of the truck section to test various other stuff, like motorcycles. I’ve known George Latus for a long time, and I suggested he should bring some of his bikes in to be tested, so George brought in his new Triumph 675R race bikes. He’d been racing Ducatis in his road race team, and Jason DiSalvo won the Daytona 200 on a Latus Racing Ducati, but for 2012 George switched to Triumph, therefore he was starting from ground zero. So he brought in the bikes and while we were testing them in the wind tunnel, George asked me about Bonneville. He knew I’d been going there on and off since college, and he said he’d love to go there one day himself. I said I was up for anything he wanted to do, so then he called me back about six weeks later, and told me he’d talked to Greg Heichelbech, who was then President of Triumph North America, and he had said they’d love to help us go after the outright World Land Speed Record.”
“While we were starting to think about building the Streamliner, I suggested that we should look through the record book for something to aim at, so we could go to Bonneville and get some experience running motorcycles there. There aren’t a lot of 2000cc-plus bikes around, and the records for that class were pretty obtainable. So we went to the Salt Flats in 2012, and got the AMA Modified Production record as well as the FIM 3,000cc Unstreamlined record on a stock Rocket-3 we’d prepared, with Jason DiSalvo riding. Triumph North America came out to watch us, and they loved it. Triumph is very sensitive about its Bonneville heritage, and they’d been looking for an opportunity to somehow build on that. This Streamliner project is a way for them to repeat history 60 years later.”
The Bones
“The Triumph Streamliner has a carbon Kevlar monocoque, which is oven-baked in an autoclave, using pre-preg material. I was personally responsible for the overall packaging, the overall design, and the overall layout, but I had support from others with FEA [Finite Element Analysis] to optimize the plys and everything. The frontal area of the vehicle is basically determined by the engines, and these are big engines. So we basically packaged these in as small a diameter structure as we could, and then the driver fits in front of that.
“There are two issues you address in designing a vehicle to go fast in—speed, and safety. I’ve watched many videos of other streamliners crashing, and what happens is that they tip over, then slide along on their side for a little while, until a body panel flies off. As soon as that happens you get a sharp edge, and it digs in and tumbles, or else pencil rolls. To me, the monocoque was such a natural way to get the surface structure smoothed out to where if it hits, it’s not compromised. Carbon fiber is just so amazing in terms of stiffness to weight. Our basic monocoque tub weighs less than 400 pounds. Okay, light weight is not necessarily an advantage on the Salt, because you want weight for traction, but it’s an advantage for us because we can position the weight where we want it. The monocoque structure gives us a great advantage in strength, safety and aerodynamics. All of the panels that are detachable are perimeter bolted, so everything is as strong as everything else. Our FEA shows us that this vehicle can bounce along at 40g without destructing, and the driver can take 25g before he is compromised.
“We did three basic parts to the computational analysis for this project, so besides FEA for the structure, we did a lot of CFD for the aerodynamics, and then we also did a regular motorcycle-stability analysis. Perhaps surprisingly, it was difficult to find anyone who could do this, and the only company I could find to do so was in Italy, called DinaMoto. They do a lot of work on MotoGP bikes. Their program is called FastBike3D, and the analysis showed that we had to rebalance a lot of things. The results came back that this thing we’d designed was going to go into a weave mode at 250 mph, which was no good at all! So we had to shift some weight around and stiffen the chassis. They tell us that despite its long 14-foot wheelbase, our Triumph Streamliner is as stiff between the wheels as a MotoGP bike, which is excellent.”
The Art of Adjustment
“We can adjust the wheelbase depending on where we want to move the CG to. Aerodynamically, it’s important to have the CG ahead of the CP [center of pressure], but not too far. If you throw an arrow backwards, the CP is ahead of the CG, and it wants to turn around. If you YouTube some of those streamliner crashes, you can tell that this is exactly what they wanted to do. For the chassis rigidity, we have billet aluminum swingarms front and rear, each machined out of a single block of metal in a C-channel, then with a plate welded on to box it in, making a very strong but light component. Then we have three Öhlins shocks up front, and a couple out back. Those are regular TTX36’s tuned for us by Öhlins. We’re grateful for their help with that. The Triumph’s got twin-stick hub-center steering, again for the rigidity. I went to the Barber Museum and spent a lot of time there looking at the Bimota Tesi, and it’s totally the right way for us to do this. We use about 50° of caster angle, and we have a pushrod from each side going to a stick on either side there, so when the rider pushes forward on one lever it goes in an arc this way instead of that way, but then it’s the opposite way on the other side.
“Brembo didn’t want to release a Formula 1 carbon-carbon brake to us; instead, they wanted to supply us with a superbike metal brake. Well, that’s designed to stop a 400-pound bike at 200 mph, whereas our complete weight fully-fueled ready to race is close to 2000 pounds with driver, going at 400 mph, meaning we’d melt that thing instantly! So instead we have a single rear carbon-carbon brake from the drag racing industry which runs very hot, around 2000°F, but then it disperses that immediately. This is from a company in California, which also makes Space Shuttle brakes, so they’re used to absorbing a lot of energy!
“We have aircraft grips on the Streamliner, because they have a number of controls on them. So you have a twist throttle on the right, with a brake lever there too, then we have a clutch on the left, plus push buttons for shift up and shift down, while also on the left side we have a switch for moving the landing gear jockey wheels up or down. Those go up at about 20mph, and return on slowdown at the same speed.”
The Powerplants
“We have a MoTeC dash, and two MoTeC ECU modules, one for each engine, which were built here by MoTeC Systems East, rather than at their HQ in Australia. Bob Carpenter is our engine builder, and he’s in New Jersey, so the MoTeC East office in North Carolina helped us out a lot. We use two turbocharged three-cylinder Triumph Rocket III engines, but these have been modified from standard bore and stroke. They call the Land Speed Record class Unlimited, but really it’s limited to 3000cc by mutually agreed consensus. We considered the option to bore and stroke the stock 2,300cc Triumph engine to three liters, and we knew that we wanted 1000 bhp, neither of which was an issue. But then with a single motor the transmission loads get pretty crazy, the engine breathing gets problematic, and being too light in weight is an issue, as well as length; we needed the length for aerodynamics, and weight for traction. So we decided to use two engines of 1500cc each. Bob Carpenter has a lot of experience building sportbike engines, and he makes 500bhp with a GSX-R motor all the time, but they’re like glass. Reliability is a huge issue.
“To reach the three-liter capacity Bob’s retained the stock engine block and the stock cylinder head, which he has CNC-ported and gas-flowed, and stock valves. He then de-stroked the billet crankshaft made by Marine in Los Angeles with very long Crower titanium conrods carrying custom pistons made by Carrillo, using a stock 101.6mm bore and a shorter 60.96mm stroke to get 1485cc on each engine, times two. They each produce over 500 bhp, and we run to about 9000 rpm, a lot higher than stock [peak is 5,750 rpm on a stock Rocket III – AC]. This is a short-stroke motor, but Bob can run the stock long-stroke engine at 9000 rpm with modified valve springs and titanium retainers, like those he has on these motors of ours. After looking at it, it’s clear that the Triumph factory developed the Rocket III motor to give a lot more than the 146 bhp that it has on the street! New valve springs get another 3-4,000 rpm, then Bob does a little port work, he makes some new cams and better fueling, and he can make 280 bhp with that thing, still naturally aspirated without compromising reliability, and still using the standard throttle bodies and injectors. But we then add a turbo system designed by Carpenter Racing and fabricated by Precision Chassis, which gives each engine its own Garrett AiResearch GT2876R liquid-cooled turbocharger running around 21psi of boost.”
Transmitting The Power
“The transmission is geared for about 420 mph right now. With the high 250 ft-lb of torque that we have in these engines, the strategy is to get it into top fifth gear by about 200 mph, and then pull it on through. The final drive is from an off-shore powerboat; they have these 40-foot speedboats with multiple engines making 1500 bhp each, so our 1000 bhp is chickenfeed by their standards! We use stock Triumph Rocket III five-speed street gearboxes, which are strong enough to harness all this extra power without any extra upgrades. The gearshifts are electronically linked together, with the power coming out the drive shaft of the front engine with a single gear rotation which reverses the direction, so that it comes in above the gearbox of the second engine’s geardrive, then feeds into a transfer case similar to a drag car quick-change rear end differential. Then final drive and changes in gearing are done by means of a third and fourth gear arrangement from a Jericho road-race transmission.”
The Rubber Solution
“We had very limited options what size rear tire to use, because that amount of power requires a large contact patch to get grip on the salt. Denis Manning [owner of two-time LSR holder BUB Seven] contacted Goodyear a while ago about a tire for speed racing, but there wasn’t anything they had ready developed that was suitable. So he paid them to produce a suitable tire, but for some reason he didn’t buy all of them, which allowed us to get supplies—that’s very sporting of him. To make this, Goodyear used the mold for their drag racing Funny Car front tire called a Frontrunner, which is rated up to 300 mph, then developed a cord package rated to 400 to 450 mph, and filled the remaining space around it with rubber. So we have a very old design of cross-ply tire which is however very stiff, so it works. We have a 22-inch front tire and a 28-inch rear, about eight inches wide at the widest part, but a very round profile, and we run them at 150 psi. Like all of the structural metal parts the wheels are made from 7075-T56 aluminum. They’re an internal bead design within the externally bolted on bead lockers, so the beads are constrained both from the inside and the outside. A standard bead would come off at 400 mph. And we’re aiming to go faster than that!”
We shall see.
You can read the original magazine story by clicking HERE.