the fink
In lieu of…
Bikers Corner
The World’s Fastest Indian
by Gavin Foster
In a world where people over 50 tend to be written off as being too old to do anything worthwhile, New Zealander
Burt Munro last month sent out a potent message from the grave to remind us that this ain’t necessarily so.
The American Motorcyclist Association
sent out a press release in August
stating that the New Zealander’s still
unbroken 1967 AMA Land Speed
Record of 183,656 miles per
hour for Class SA motorcycles,
had been incorrectly calculated
and was now revised to stand
at 184,087 mph – that’s 296,
259 km/h.
Legend has it that he used an old
wheel spoke as a micrometer, using the
distance between the threads as his
measurement scale.
20 years left him in 1947 he packed up his
job and moved into his garage, where he
spent the rest of his days until his death
in 1978 modifying his motorcycle. When
the neighbours complained that
the grass was growing too long
he doused it in petrol, set it alight
and went back to work on the
bike.
Burt went to the Bonneville Salt
Flats in Utah nine times in eleven
years, and was once clocked at
over 200 mph (320 km/h).
This they did after Munro’s
son, John, checked the AMA’s
figures on a new-fangled modern
calculator and notified them of
the error.
Then he fell off on the required
return run and couldn’t complete
it inside the time limit to make his
record official.
The remarkable thing about
Munro’s record is that he set it at
the age of 67, riding a homebrewed Indian V-twin motorcycle
that he’d bought for £120 brand
new in 1920.
“We were going like a bomb,”
he’s quoted as saying, “then she
got the wobbles just over halfway through the run.
The bike’s top speed back then
was 89 km/h, but Burt spent the
rest of his life fettling it, designing
and manufacturing just about
every part himself.
He made his own connecting
rods from an old Ford truck
axle because the standard ones
kept breaking under the strain
of coping with his demands. He
used a steam hammer to make his own
flywheels, and cast his own aluminium
cylinder heads to convert the engine
from a side-valve to a four-valve
overhead valve design.
He converted the bike to take a triplechain final drive, and built his own
streamlining without the benefit of a
wind tunnel – he modelled the fairing
on the shape of a goldfish because he
reckoned that would be about right.
The camshafts he filed himself by hand.
He increased engine capacity from
600 to 950cc, using discarded old city
gasworks pipes to resleeve the barrels,
and melted down old car pistons in a
pot to make new ones that fitted.
Munro endured enough injuries during
his long racing career to have deterred
most much younger people for life. He
broke countless bones and suffered
numerous concussions. He was, of
course, a real eccentric – after his wife of
| words in action
116
To slow her down I sat up.
The wind tore my goggles off
and the blast forced my eyeballs
back into my head – couldn’t see
a thing….we were so far off the
black line that we missed a steel
marker stake by inches. I put her
down – a few scratches all round
but nothing much else.”
Burt Munro became a household name
long after his death, when a movie of his
exploits was made in 2005.
Called “The World’s Fastest Indian”, it did
well with Anthony Hopkins playing Burt in
what was surely the most unusual role of
his career.
Despite massaging the facts a little, the
story stuck reasonably close to the truth,
and it’s well worth watching. It’s available
on DVD.
october 2014