Origins of "Bucket Racing".

**speedpro** · 6th January 2007, 23:40

Originally Posted by Ixion

Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivan
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Anyone know the reason why bucket racing died down is it because of the bikes becoming to fast and too expensive to race or justsomething that happens

Quote:

My bike started as a Suzuki AC50. In the end it had Suzuki A100 race kit 18" wheels, the barrel was watercooled using thermosyphon to circulate the water, some fairly serious porting, an up and over expansion chamber which exited under the seat and had a titanium silencer, and a home built and designed CDI triggered by the original points. It went pretty good

Answered, I think.

At the time I built that bike bucket racing was pretty well at full strength. Plenty of guys were doing lots of trick stuff and we had good big fast tracks at the air force bases or the unused Wiri container terminal in Auckland which was about 10 acres of gently sloping virgin asphalt. Races were frequent and the tracks were big enough to be interesting and with the space available the design could be varied. Lap times could easily be over a minute with top speeds over 80mph for the 100s.

If you are implying that people who built trick buckets killed it off by ruining it for everybody else you aren't saying anything I haven't heard before. I used to run an "A" grade and a "B" grade to cater for the differances in ability & buckets and also sometimes a "novice" class. The Ohakea GP meetings had two 100cc classes for the same reason with about 50-70 in each class.

For info - A mate and I bought a race kitted Suzuki A100 for $50. I got the wheels, he got the motor. The titanium for the muffler was a helicopter tail rotor drive shaft and was free. The water cooling was done by friends for free and the radiator was built by another friend for free. All the porting was done by me using needle files - tiny ports in a cast iron barrel. The pipe was welded up by a friend for free. The CDI cost about $10 for parts and the board was made by a friend for a few beers. So it definitely wasn't a case of "cheque book racing" but just a lot of hard work and a lot of help from friends. The real expense was the French Dunlop TT100GP2 tyres.