Rennie Scaysbrook | September 23, 2017
Indian Motorcycle recently went to Bonneville to pay tribute to the New Zealander whose DNA runs through the veins of America’s first motorcycle company.
The Spirit of Munro glistens in the evening Bonneville sun. Indian’s was sure a fitting tribute to the man.
There’s not a place like it. It’s quiet, vast and incredibly, deceptively, flat. So much so you can see a car five minutes before it passes you, as it steadily grows from a dot on the horizon to the lumbering hunk of metal usually towing some form of home built contraption designed to do one thing—go as fast as possible.
Click here to read this in the Cycle News Digital Edition Magazine.
Photography by Alfonse Palaima, Jeff Allen and Scaysbrook
The sun’s UV rays get magnified by the white mirror that is the salt, and you must wear sunscreen in places you’d never given thought to before.
“The inside of your nose will get sunburned, because the sun’s UV rays bounce off the salt and go straight up your nostrils,” says Bonneville Speed Week official, Holly Martin. “Oh, and if you’re wearing shorts, you’ll want to put sunscreen on your balls. As a racer, I know…” she says. Not even flinching when she does. I wonder if she thought I wasn’t wearing underpants?
The Bonneville Salt Flat is one of those transcendent places you visit only a few times in your life. People who have no idea about land speed record racing, which, let’s face it, is most of us, have heard of the place. The world knows if you want to go fast, really, really, fast, this is the most iconic place in which to do it.
Indian Motorcycle has a greater, genuine connection to the serendipitous salt in the Utah desert than any other manufacturer. It was here in 1967 that Burt Munro, the hard graft New Zealander immortalized in the wonderful film The World’s Fastest Indian, bought his 1920 Indian Scout he’d worked on for 47 years and set a Class SA 1000 Land Speed Record that still stands at 184.079 mph.
There’s hardly a more desolate and lonely place in the U.S. than Bonneville.
“My personal belief is most people wouldn’t even know Indian Motorcycle existed if it wasn’t for Burt’s work and the movie Roger Donaldson made about his life,” says Indian Motorcycle Product Manager Gary Gray. “I take personal inspiration from Burt. He’s the guy that tells you to get your ass off the couch and do something with your life.”
Indian Motorcycle is in somewhat of a resurgence, getting their asses off the couch and back into the kind of competition that made them famous. Their dirt track team, the nostalgic Indian Wrecking Crew with riders Brian Smith, Brad Baker and Jared Mees, have wiped the floor with arch rivals Harley-Davidson in the AMA Pro Grand National Championship in 2017, but Indian Motorcycle’s Speed Week at Bonneville last month represented more a nod to the past than any outright attempt at velocity superiority.
Piloted by Burt Munro’s great nephew, Lee, Indian Motorcycle came to Bonneville 2017 with a machine dubbed the Spirit of Munro. They were not there to break any records per se, but to honor the achievements of Burt 50 years on with a 2017 Scout entered in the Modified Partial Streamliner 1350cc (MPS-G) category. It was indeed a grand affair, the pits resplendent with Indian’s trademark maroon red splashed across the vast complex as a festival atmosphere engulfed the Bonneville salt.
Munro sets off on what would ultimately be his fastest run, with a pass of 191.28 mph on Saturday morning.
Doing it for Burt
“One thing I’ve always said is, ‘success has nothing to do with the number of zeroes in your bank account.’ Success in my eyes is more to do with living the life you want. Living it to its fullest and inspiring people along the way,” says rider Lee Munro, a man of Burt’s stock and one who was more than happy to take up the challenge of honoring the great man under the Utah sun. “We are doing this for Burt, and it means a lot to me. But it’s more a case of creating memories and showing the respect I have for Burt, really, as opposed to any records we might take,” he says.
The Bonneville week marked the second time the Indian Motorcycle salt team and Lee had gone for top speed, having taken a Land Speed Record of 186.681 mph in the MPS-G class at the El Mirage dry river bed in Southern California a month earlier in what for Lee was an essential pass to attain his Bonneville salt license.
“We had only planned to go 184, but seeing as we smashed that mark on Lee’s rookie run, we had to go faster,” says Gary Gray. “We will set our new mark at 200 mph for Bonneville, which, if the conditions are ideal, we should have no problem in getting.”
This thing does over 220 mph. You’d have to be stark raving mad to drive it.
The words “ideal” and “conditions” are two you very rarely hear in the same sentence when talking land speed record racing and in particular, the pursuit of speed at Bonneville. For the past three years, the salt flat as returned to the state it was for thousands of years—under water and totally unusable.
“The worst I’ve seen, the water was three feet deep but the mountains around the lake show the water line from the prehistoric times, 17,000 years ago. This was a giant, giant lake, or small ocean,” says Southern California Timing Association Vice President, Bill Lattin. “The lake is full of brine. So, the brine, in the heat of the day, it’ll wick the water up to the top of the salt and start growing. That’s what all the little popcorn stuff is (popcorn salt is the lumpy, gooey salt that sticks to the soles of your shoes). It also makes it wet and slippery. But for the most part, in the winter time, the salt dissolves. Then it goes back down into the aquifer and everything wicks back up in the dry season.”
The hot rod culture is alive on the salt.
For 2017, the conditions at the Bonneville Salt Flat were at least raceable, rather than ideal. Temperatures ranged in the mid-80s to the mid-90s for the week in which Speed Demon Racing and their four-cylinder streamliner car with George Poteet at the wheel went a staggering 423.521 mph in the early hours of Sunday, August 13.
Watching someone go 400+mph on land is a mesmerizing experience. On approach, it doesn’t look like the machine is going that fast, but once the car crosses in front of your vision and drives into the distance with a 50ft rooster tail of salt in its wake, you know you’re watching something incredibly, terrifyingly, fast. The spectacle makes your skin itch and the hairs on your neck stand at attention.
Danny Thompson’s Challenger 2 went 435 mph. That. Is. Fast!
Sending it down the salt
Indian Motorcycle earmarked the dates of Saturday, August 12 to Wednesday, August 16, as their ones to try and hit that magical 200 mph mark, but the salt had other plans. The team would only see three usable days in which they completed just four runs, Lee topping out with a speed of 191.28 mph on his second run down the five-mile Short Course on Saturday.
With such a speed attained on that first day of trying, Munro and the team lengthened the gearing on the Scout and headed to the nine-mile Long Course in the hope of cracking 200 mph on Sunday, yet came up drastically short when high winds and poor salt conditions that caused the rear wheel to spin in top gear and limited the Spirit of Munro to 186.415 mph in Indian Motorcycle’s only run for the day.
The team headed back to the nine-mile Long Course on Monday, but the rough surface meant the run was aborted on safety grounds and with similar conditions forecast for the remainder of the week, the group decided to call it a day and pack the transporter two days early.
It takes all sorts to make up the Bonneville masses.
It was disappointing, but as Lee Munro so elegantly puts it: “We had to go out there and try something, because to say, ‘it’s not worth it, it’s shit,’ just means you’re not going to know something that you could have. So, I’m 100 percent behind the idea that we went out and did what we did. We may not have had the results we were after, but piloting a modified Indian Scout on the same salt as my great Uncle Burt will forever be one of my most-cherished experiences.”
Gary Gray was philosophical about the week. With beer in hand and a glint in eye, he remarked, “We didn’t have ideal conditions this week. We went a bit slower but still I think we paid a good tribute to Burt and what he did. My personal feeling is we need to give back to the sport. The sport gives me my job. It gives all of us an income. We need to give back to the sport of motorcycling through races and events like this and do something to get people excited and back out to our tracks on motorcycles.”
Lee straddles the replica of Burt Munro’s 1920 Scout that was used in the film The World’s Fastest Indian.
One for the books
Indian and their PR crew from The Brand Amp capped off the weekend with a special screening of The World’s Fastest Indian for the Bonneville spectators under floodlights on the very salt Burt Munro used to set his legend. Presented by Burt’s son John, Lee and the film’s Australian director, Roger Donaldson, the feel-good feature gave everyone the warm and fuzzies that comes from honoring history, as well as a few too many beers.
“I’ve seen the movie countless times. But to watch it with Speed Week attendees, the Munro family and the film’s director on the very Bonneville grounds that the film was based upon, was a surreal experience,” said Reid Wilson, Indian Motorcycle’s Marketing Director. “It was a special way to honor Burt and the perfect way to complement the efforts of Lee Munro and our Spirit of Munro racing team on the Salt Flats.”
Burt’s son John Munro was the man who convinced Indian Motorcycle to undertake the 50th Anniversary tribute to his father.
One point of conversation over the weekend was the fact Indian Motorcycle went to such lengths to honor Burt yet still not go for an official record themselves. It seemed odd to a few, myself included, that such a financial investment be made with no possibility of a record at the end, but this could change in the near future.
“If there’s enough interest in going for the class record, this is certainly something we could look at,” says Wilson. For Lee Munro, there’s no question as to what he’d like to see.
Let’s hope Indian Motorcycle and Lee Munro come back for a full crack at the MPS-G 1300cc class record.
“At the end of the day, there’s a lot more in that bike we could tune out of it,” he says. “We’ve given 50cc away, so there’s 25cc per cylinder still available in our class. That’s the power we would need to drive sixth gear through that first run to get over 200 mph. There’s a lot of stuff we could do to that bike to make it a record-breaking machine in its class—it’s just whether Indian want to go down that road or not.”
Let’s hope Indian Motorcycle does, for I suspect there’s one long departed Mr. Munro who would love to see an Indian take another Bonneville Speed Week record to match his, set 50 years ago on a 1920 Scout modified to within an inch of its life at the bottom of the world in a shed in Invercargill, New Zealand.
Lee Munro, a New Zealander made from the same grit and graft as his great uncle, Burt.
Munro by name, and nature
Lee Munro holds one of the most famous surnames in all of motorcycling, but you won’t hear him talking about it. The grandnephew of Burt Munro is an accomplished racer himself but not one to toot his own horn, preferring himself to let his results in street and beach racing in his native New Zealand do the talking.
“People used to say, ‘You need to use Burt and promote yourself and get yourself more sponsorship through your uncle.’ I’m like, ‘No, I won’t do that.’ I think results speak more than relations,” says the typically straight forward Kiwi.
A pool builder by trade, Munro has enjoyed the highs of the sport away from the spotlight, entering select races back home, as well as the Ilse of Man Manx Grand Prix, but this was his first time on the famous Bonneville salt.
“When I first saw Bonneville, I sort of looked around and I thought to myself, ‘Man, this is like a white, sandy beach with no beach.’ It’s like the sand’s all watery, but there ain’t no water. “Riding on the sand is more abrasive; the sand doesn’t contain as much mush underneath of it. The salt is more like wet, slushy snow on a road surface. So, if you can imagine riding like you’ve had a foot of snow and then it’s starting to melt off and cars are trampling over it, then you’re going from lane to lane across in the middle—that’s kind of riding on the salt. The beach is more like riding on sort of a slightly more constant surface…it doesn’t have those slippery bits.”
The Spirit of Munro project marked a milestone in Lee’s on again/off again career, one that means more to him than almost any other.
“My uncle John was the instigator in all of this,” Lee says. “He asked if I’d be interested in doing a tribute to his dad, Burt, and I said ‘Of course! If it’s got two wheels and an engine, I’m keen as!’. The Polaris guys have been absolutely fantastic, working after hours to get this bike done. I’m just so pleased I get to be the guy to ride it.”
The Bike Burt Didn’t Build
The bike Lee Munro used to set his top speed of just over 191 mph would have made his great uncle smile. The same name on the tank—albeit a modern version—the bike used by Lee was an extensively modified version of the Scout you or I could buy at the dealer.
“We started the build in December, at least formulating the idea for the build,” says Wayne Colden, Project Leader for the Spirit of Munro. “We started with a repurposed Scout frame. We pulled it out of a snowbank in January and started the project. We had some engine development work that was being done on the Scout and we chose that engine because it had some higher potential. All the bottom end is stock. The cylinders are different of course, so it can get the power requirements that we need.”
“We worked with Wayne Alexander and Lee Munro from New Zealand on some of the details as far as trying to carry it over, as well as Burt’s son John Munro, who was critical to this project and carry over some of the design features of Burt’s early bikes. We did that primarily with the tail section—the same style lines with some of his early bikes.
Parts of the Victory Project 156 engine were used in the making of the Spirit of Munro challenger.
“There are various parts of the Victory Project 156 in this bike, the cylinder heads are a similar design, but the base of the motor is stock.
“We chose an aerodynamic fairing to get to the speeds that we wanted. Of course, Burt, he was running in a full-on streamliner class and we wanted to run in partial streamline. We chose an Air-Tech fairing off the shelf and made it fit the Scout. We have vertical handlebars and some special triple clamps. Again, we had them sitting on the shelf, so that was an easy choice.
“We wanted to go hard tail from the very beginning, but we had a couple different designs where we would have the option to switch in shocks. We were having some trouble with the mountings for the shocks, so ended up with a hard tail, which was we wanted to do anyway.
“The wheels come from Roland Sands Design.” CN
