Rennie Scaysbrook | July 18, 2019
Take one ride on lawn mower, rip the motor out, and wedge a superbike block in there. Seems like a good idea to us.
Every now and again, it’s nice to do something utterly bonkers. For some, that might be a trip to the casino, or a holiday on a whim, or a night on the tiles.
However, for the Honda Motor Company’s UK subsidiary, their idea of “utterly bonkers” is a little different from most. Thanks to their partnership with Team Dynamics Motorsport—the same outfit that runs the factory Honda British Touring Car team for them—the world now has the second edition of the Mean Mower series, this one powered by a Honda CBR1000RR SP1 motor.
Yes, it sounds nuts. Because it is.
The Mean Mower story started a few years ago when the first version, powered by a Honda VTR1000 Firestorm V-twin, garnered world attention by taking the Guinness World Record of World’s Fastest Mower at 117 mph. This machine opened the proverbial can of mower worms, however, as the next two years would see the Viking Stihl Garden Equipment company from Scandinavia build their own mental mower (using a 408 horsepower LS engine out of a Corvette, no less) to move the new record to 132 mph in 2015.
VIDEO | Fastest Lawnmower with Guinness World Records
If there’s one thing Honda hates, it’s being shown up.
Enter Mean Mower 2.0. This is still a working ride-on Honda HF 2622 lawn mower (the cutting blades under the chassis still work), but it’s now got a claimed 190 horsepwer on tap thanks to a 2017 Honda CBR1000RR SP1 motor, pushing a package that weighs a claimed 309 pounds. It’ll accelerate to 100 mph faster than a Nissan GTR. Oh, and there’s no seat belt to save you. Jessica Hawkins then took this machine to a new Guinness World Record of the fastest accelerating lawn mower on the planet, measuring 100 mph in 6.285 seconds in Germany earlier this June.
“After Stihl took the record from us, I went back to Honda and said, “what about this?” Not on your bloody life, was the answer,” says Team Dynamics’ James Rodgers, in his delightfully British tone. “The world has changed since we did the last one. Honda’s HR and our insurance teams would have a hissy fit. But we kept pushing and kept pushing, and they finally agreed to it. The project nearly got pulled at various stages through the build process. In these days 150 miles an hour is quite normal, but in reality it’s exceptionally dangerous—especially in a lawn mower.”
A working mower though this is, the Mean Mower 2.0 is far from a case of just bolting a superbike motor to the chassis.
“Everything’s bespoke,” James says. “It’s a little bit different with a car because with a car you’ve got CAD, CFD, wind tunnel testing, prototyping. Then you go to production. That mower is all in one, so it’s a prototype vehicle. We experience failures with her. Genuinely success is 99 percent failure with us.”
Among the many, many one-off parts with the Mean Mower is the 3D-printed airbox, one that’s gone through approximately 13 different versions by the time we go for our little joy ride at Honda’s Proving Grounds near California City.
“We never stop playing, never stop tinkering,” James says. “The airbox has gone through so many iterations because it started to waste away with the injectors firing fuel straight into the trumpet.”
The bespoke chassis is constructed using TiG welded T45 steel—the same stuff they made the Spitfire’s out of in WWII—chosen as the chassis runs no suspension and the T45 flexes and contorts to the undulations in the road, thus providing some form of suspension. And this 190 horsepower lawn mowing show runs on 10-inch wheels wrapped with Hoosier slick tires, the kind normally found on a junior Formula open wheel car.
Going For A Joy Ride With The Honda Mean Mower
I love doing stupid stuff, and this job has afforded me more opportunities than most in indulging in this pastime.
But a 190 horsepower lawn mower firmly ranks alongside the maddest thing I have ever controlled, save for a 350 horsepower turbo Hayabusa back in 2008.
The Mean Mower is part mower, part bike, and part open-wheel racing car. Much of its development, speed testing, and, ultimately the world record run was done by a certain Miss Jessica Hawkins—current W-Series driver and Development Driver for Heritage F1 (she does the rad burnouts in F1 cars for the fans at shows around the world—not a bad gig). So, that being the case, it’s no wonder I can’t fit my wide ass into the ultra-snug racing bucket seat as I climb aboard for run number one.
After squeezing, pushing, folding and contorting myself as best I can into the seat, I am faced with the small steering wheel and paddle shifter for gearshifts (à la F1 style, baby). The clutch is a foot-operated unit, and it’s very on/off, meaning once the pedal is lifted, it’s go time.
Firing the CBR1000RR motor up gives a very familiar rumble as Honda’s fitted a Scorpion exhaust system to it—Mean Mower sounds like any other four-cylinder superbike—but the mower chassis it’s bolted to makes for a strange aesthetic.
Okay. No pussyfooting around. Time to crack on.
Clutch out, I trundle to the line that signals the start of the quarter mile ahead of me, and let her rip. I’m used to the acceleration of a superbike. I experience it for a living. But to be immersed in it barely 10 inches off the ground, that’s something else entirely.
The Mean Mower picks up speed with the kind of intensity I remember bikes did before I got all old and jaded. In the first run, I barley hit 98 mph, simply because I’m trying to recalibrate my brain to how fast I’m going.
I only get two more runs, and on the final expedition I hit 118 mph. It’s freaking terrifying. Stiff as a board, I’d rather go 200 mph on a bike than 120 mph in that thing. It accelerates so hard, with such an ear-splittingly rad soundtrack, for a second there I feel like one of Honda’s IndyCar racers—until I realize I’m far from the fastest of the journos here.
Regardless, the Mean Mower 2.0 is one of those wonderful pieces of maniacal engineering that makes me happy to be a part of this industry. It has no place in this cotton wool society we now live in.
As Hunter S. Thompson once said in the greatest road test ever written in the Song on The Sausage Creature, “We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever’s funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird…”
The Mean Mower is indeed weird, and that’s why we love it. CN