Trackday Diaries: How Fast Can We Go For $1800?

Almost 25 years ago, I walked into a small-town gun shop looking for a surplus Chinese SKS rifle. At the time, the gun market was flooded with SKSes and the steel-cased 7.62×39 ammunition that they used. $99 for a gun, $0.02 a round for the ammo; it was pretty much the official rifle of Ohio rednecks for a solid year. If I had a nickel for every afternoon I spent with a bunch of worker’s-comp-addicted ex-bikers shooting at abandoned cars, ovens, and “empty” propane tanks, I’d have my very own Viper ACR already.

Most of the shops I’d visited in pursuit of my own SKS had tried to foist off recent-production stuff made for the U.S. market as authentic ’60s ChiCom army stuff. I was sick of it. You can imagine my relief when the fellow behind the counter at this particular shop had the right gun at the right price and was willing to go over every component of said rifle to make sure it was correct. He even helped me get the Cosmoline off the thing. I was impressed by that dude. So impressed that I ended up shooting competitively with him and traveling all over the Midwest to ride mountain bikes with him. He was the best man at my first wedding, and we stayed close even when he left the shooting world to start a mortgage brokerage firm.

Over the past couple of decades we’ve pursued all sorts of stupid ideas together, from riding bicycles off loading docks to running a Neon in NASA’s Performance Touring class. Our latest idea, hatched during a dinner in which we celebrated his divorce was this: How fast can we go for virtually no money at all?

Our initial plan was to buy a 1992 Yamaha FZR1000 “EXUP” from a Columbus police officer. I’ve always wanted a classic Yamaha liter bike and, to be honest, I could use some goodwill with my city’s finest. The problem was that it didn’t start on either one of our trips to pick it up. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice … I won’t get fooled again.

In the week afterwards, we looked at everything from a Honda CBR1100XX “Super Blackbird” in Texas to a thoroughly ratted-out salvage title GSX-R750. But then we came across a 2001 Yamaha FZ-1 … with some “stories”, as they say in the biz.

The FZ-1 was a mostly successful attempt to combine the 145-horsepower engine of the all-conquering 1999 Yamaha R1 sportbike with ergonomics that would attract the over-25 crowd. Stock, it runs a 10.5-second quarter mile at approximately 130 mph. That’s McLaren pace. Of course, it doesn’t turn or stop like a supercar, but that’s beside the point.

The FZ-1 that I found was an early 2001 production frame with a newer engine hanging in the steel cradle. When my friend and I went to pick up the bike, the kid who had it didn’t seem to know much about its history other than what he’d been told by the previous owner: 54,000 miles on the frame, 24,000 on the engine. He’d been unable to sell it at $2,200; all of his potential buyers had been scared away by the replacement-engine story.

For $1,800, however, my friend and I couldn’t have cared less. What we did care about was the fact that it started and ran from cold like a new bike, that it had brand-new Dunlops and a shiny chain, and that there was no evidence of abuse anywhere on it. Wear, yes. But not abuse.

I rode it about 20 miles in monsoon conditions yesterday. Sweet and stout. The 998cc Yamaha engine is hugely powerful all the way to 11,500 rpm. The transmission was a little notchy and the brakes desperately needed service, but at least it didn’t wobble on the freeway. Later that evening, I caught a ride downtown and brought it from my office back home. A brief twist of the throttle on a patch of dry road saw it soar from 70 mph to 115 in just a few eyeblinks.

The problem with having something like this in your fleet is that it doesn’t just make my Porsches feel slow; it makes my VFR800 feel like it’s dragging some sort of trailer behind it. The FZ-1 is now in my friend’s garage getting a complete nose-to-tail going-over and full service. We might even try to find out the story of that mystery engine. I’d like to think of it as Excalibur, stuck in the stone, waiting for the right person to pull it out. Based on the parking stickers adorning the forks, this big black Yamaha has done solid commuting service for a variety of people over the years. But now we’re going to use it to have fun. If you see the twin-light fairing behind you, my advice is to move over.