With the fourth edition of the Bolivia Speed Trials (BST)—part of the FIM Land Speed World Records (LSWR) discipline—set to begin tomorrow (October 22) and run until Tuesday (October 27) on the Salar de Uyuni in the southwest of the South American nation, organizer Mike Akatiff is preparing for a very busy six days on the world’s largest salt flat.
This is a press release from the FIM...
In the hands of Rocky Robinson, the twin Suzuki Hayabusa-engined machine set the current FIM-accredited absolute motorcycle Land Speed World Record of 376.363 mph in 2010, and 16 years later, the team has reunited in a bid to push the record past the 400 mph mark.
A former racer and visionary avionics expert, Akatiff has spent his life surrounded by motorcycles and played a key role in the 1970 AMA Grand National Championship that was immortalized by Bruce Brown in his Oscar-nominated film On Any Sunday.
“I broke my ankle badly in a race in 1969, which put me out of commission, but I was contracted by the BSA factory to build motors for Jim Rice,” said Akatiff. “He was their number one rider back in the 1970 series. If you’ve ever seen On Any Sunday, we traveled the whole season with him and Bruce Brown. Jim won more national races than anybody ever had in the 1970 season—I was building the bikes, and he was doing the chassis work.
“We covered 83,000 miles in the 1970 season between January and September in a van that we bought new, and I just got tired of doing it.”
Akatiff’s pioneering engineering work resulted in the first Hy-Vo chain drives used in motorcycles, and after he shifted his focus to the world of aviation, he designed and built an altitude encoder—allowing air traffic controllers to accurately gauge the height of aircraft—before developing an emergency locator transmitter.
His involvement in Land Speed started as a result of his friend Sam Wheeler’s attempts on the absolute record of 322.150 mph that was set by Dave Campos in 1990.
“We started in earnest in January of 2003 and showed up in 2004 at Bonneville with a rider called Jimmy Odom, who was one of the very best. When we got there, there were only two days left. You have to go through a series of speed tests to get licensed, and they allowed him immediately to go to the one-seventy-five speed because they knew him as a racer. We were able to do that, and then we were licensed up to the 225 speed, and we did that so we were given the okay to go up to 300, but the event ended so we couldn’t do it.”
Odom set a non-FIM-accredited American Motorcyclist Association (AMA) record of 328 mph the same year, but it was not until Robinson joined the team in 2006 that Campos’ record finally fell at that year’s BUB Motorcycle Speed Trials at Bonneville with the new benchmark set at 342.797.
“We put Rocky in it, and he went 342 right off the bat. His run coming back wasn’t quite as good, but we got the record by 20 miles an hour over the old record. I go, ‘That’s it, we’re done, we’re hanging it up; it will probably be years before anyone can break it,’ as I could never see the point in running against our own record.”
However, Denis Manning—another Land Speed legend—was also chasing the record with his BUB Seven Streamliner, and after parting company with Robinson and hiring Chris Carr, two days later the record was raised to 350.884 mph.
“Our bike had no doors on the back, which we knew was detrimental, so we went back and designed doors that opened automatically when the chutes come out and put on a bigger turbo and did a whole lot of other work and went back out in 2007, but the track was really wet, and we probably should have never run.
“Well, Rocky made a run and got about 300 miles an hour when he got into the slippery stuff, started to fishtail and he crashed. Fortunately, the chutes came out, and I think he rolled 16 times—it must have made him dizzy—and slid for probably half a mile. He got out and was uninjured, but the bike was an absolute mess.”
Back on the salt in 2008, Robinson extended the record to 360.913 mph, but Carr snatched it back the following year after achieving 367.382 before Robinson established the current record in 2010 at Bonneville at an FIM and FIA-sanctioned event called The Shootout.
“We had our challenges and we ran out of time. The event was over, the insurance had run out, and we didn’t have the record, but the guy who had contracted to use the track the next day—a guy called Bobby Cleveland—to set a lawnmower record let us run with his insurance, and we ended up setting the record the day after our event had finished.
“We had no fifth and sixth gear—it would not shift—so I don’t know how we got the record. We actually went 400 miles an hour right at the very end, but it’s only the timed record that counts. We have sensors on the bike that tell us the speed, and we showed a little over 400, but it doesn’t mean anything; it wasn’t recorded. That’s why we’re going back.
“Rocky’s our guy. I probably would have said, ‘Let’s not go back,’ but Rocky wants to be the first to go over 400 miles an hour, and we’re there to support him 100 percent. I have a passion to do this. You couldn’t do it if you didn’t love motorcycles, and I’m very fortunate at my age to be able to go out and still do this stuff. I’m blessed in that regard.”
The Top 1 Ack Attack Streamliner project has been documented from its early days by filmmaker Brian Lecky, and episode one of his series 400 mph: The Last Run can be viewed by clicking HERE.
For more information, visit https://www.boliviaspeedtrials.com/
