Larry Lawrence | October 15, 2019
Archives: Chasing 250
Don Vesco will surely be remembered as one of the greatest Land Speed Record racers in history. Not only did Vesco become the first rider to break the seemingly impossible 250-mph mark in 1970, he turned around five years later and was the first to pass the mythic 300-mph barrier. No other rider came close to Vesco in terms of upping the ante on the motorcycle side of LSR attempts.
Archives: Chasing 250
In Land Speed Record competition, the increments of 50 miles per hour are seen as major milestones. There was the 150-mph barrier set way back in 1930 by Joseph S. Wright riding a supercharged Zenith-JAP motorcycle on a long stretch of concrete highway in Cork, Ireland. That was set during a period when motorcycle land speed attempts were at an all-time peak and the record was being broken sometimes two or three time a year. With the outbreak of World War II motorcycle land speed attempts went dormant. Then in the 1950s, as the world largely at peace and the economy was humming, activity picked up again.
It was 26 years after Wright set that 150-mph mark in 1930, when the 200-mph barrier was finally conquered on the Bonneville Salt Flats by a German named Wilhelm Herz on the NSU Delphin III streamliner.
Getting to 200-mph was indeed an impressive accomplishment and it took a streamliner to do it. So much of what could be done in terms of aerodynamics had been done. To get to that next milestone, 250 mph, not only would a designer need to further refine the aerodynamics of their machine to a point beyond the exceptional work done by NSU in the ‘50s, the horsepower numbers needed to get that additional 50 miles would be considerably higher. Keeping in mind the NSU that broke 200 mph, was a just a 500cc two-cylinder, four-stroke. The secret to the machine’s power was a unique rotating supercharger.
Over the next ten years after Herz’ 1956 NSU record of 210.64 mph, the record inched up. Just a month after the NSU record, Johnny Allen at the controls of the “Texas Ceegar,” a Triumph-powered, 650cc twin, methanol-fueled motorcycle with a streamlined body shell, moved the record up by almost four-miles-per-hour, when he hit 214.4 at Bonneville.
Allen’s record then held for six years. Then in 1962, Joe Dudek, chief mechanic Aero-Space Division at North American Aviation, brought his streamliner to the Utah salt. Inspired by NAA’s X-15 rocket plane and powered by a bored out T120 Bonneville nitro methane-burning engine, rider Bill Johnson (not to be confused with the Bill Johnson who was the West Coast Distributor for Triumph) piloted Dudek’s machine to set a new world motorcycle speed record of 224.57 mph.
Dudek was one of the leading aerospace engineers in the country. He had an amazing amount of technical expertise and top-notch facilities to fabricate his streamliner. Suffice to say that under Dudek’s direction, the upper-limits of the most powerful four-stroke motorcycle engines of the 1960s were being reached.
But then Bob Leppan, a Detroit Triumph dealer who, with mechanic Jim Bruflodt, had been building legendary twin-engine Triumph drag racing bikes, decided to take his twin-engine design and put it to test at Bonneville. With help from an innovative former Ford engineer Alex Tremulis, the team designed a streamliner called the Gyronaut X-1. With the power of two engines Leppan was able to get close to 250 when he reached 245.667 mph.
To get past 250 mph even more power was needed and by 1970 Vesco had the powerplant that could finally produce the kind of horsepower to reach the elusive 250-mph mark, Yamaha’s TR-2-based 350cc two-stroke road racing engine – two of them in fact.
Unlike the engineering tour de force from a leading aerospace company and former Ford Motor Company engineer in the previous records, Vesco’s effort at building his LSR machine was mainly shade tree, hot-rod know how. “Big Red” as Vesco’s machine was dubbed by his wife, was five and a half meters long and built from an auxiliary fuel tank for a Korean War era Grumman F9F Panther fighter jet. The Yamaha engines ran regular pump gas!
In 1969 Vesco got 227 mph out of Big Red. Then the next year, with the experienced he gained on the previous year’s attempt, Vesco finally eclipsed the 250-mph mark, when on September 17, 1970 at the Bonneville Salt Flats. Vesco clocked a two-way average at 251.66 mph aboard his twin-engine Yamaha. Vesco overcame a crash during one of his preliminary runs at close to 250 mph caused by a blown tire. The shredding tire cut the cable release for Big Red’s parachute and the machine slid on its side, chute deployed, 300-yards past the timing lights, still fast enough to establish a record. Big Red came back repaired two weeks later and set the new LSR record.
Less than a month after that, the Harley-Davidson factory broke the record with Vesco’s longtime friend Cal Rayborn at the controls.
“Since Cal (Rayborn) and I were good friends, I knew Harley was going to set the record,” remembered Vesco. “I made sure I got my contingency money from Yamaha and all my other sponsors real quick.”
In 1975, Vesco came back and became the first rider to break the 300-mph barrier in the Silver Bird Yamaha (powered by twin Yamaha TZ750 motors), when he went 302.92 mph.
To be the guy who broke 250 mph first and then turn around and also be the first to break 300 mph? It was an incredible accomplishment.
Vesco wasn’t done. For an encore he put a four-stroke powered machine back atop the Land Speed Record when in 1978 he broke his own record, turning 318.598 mph in a twin Kawasaki KXZ1000 turbo rig. That record held for 12 years.
In a 1975 interview, Vesco said he chased speed because “basically, it’s my hobby. Some people play golf, some go fishing and some ride bikes in the desert. I get my enjoyment from the challenge on the salt.”
Today Vesco’s “Big Red” #11 streamliner is part of the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum collection.