#Modifications

If you missed Part 1 of Micky Garneau’s incredible Honda VTR1000F build, you can check it out here. In this, the second and final installment, Garneau dives even deeper into his Superhawk in his quest to leave no stone unturned.

When you think of a 1000cc Honda V-Twin sportbike from the start of the millennium, what comes to mind? Naturally, it’s the VTR1000F, right? Wait, what’s that? You’re thinking of the RC51? Well, Micky Garneau wasn’t. Granted he was looking for a street bike, but the time, effort, and money he’s put into his VTR1000F Firestorm, otherwise known as the Superhawk in the US, rivals that of many racebike builds we’ve seen. Here’s Part 1 of Micky’s bike build.

[Frequent MO readers will know that our friend, Thai Long Ly, is not a man of few words. Consequently, we should’ve known what we were getting into when he offered to write up his experience with Tuono modifications. Still, we never expected an 8,400-word opus. So, we decided to break the story into easier to digest pieces. Here is Part 3 for your reading enjoyment. If you missed it, catch up on the part one and part two. –Ed.]

[Frequent MO readers will know that our friend, Thai Long Ly, is not a man of few words. Consequently, we should’ve known what we were getting into when he offered to write up his experience with Tuono modifications. Still, we never expected an 8,400-word opus. So, we decided to break the story into easier to digest pieces. Here is Part 2 for your reading enjoyment. If you missed it, catch up on the first part here, and check back later for the third and final part. –Ed.]

[Frequent MO readers will know that our friend, Thai Long Ly, is not a man of few words. Consequently, we should’ve known what we were getting into when he offered to write up his experience with Tuono modifications. Still, we never expected an 8,400-word opus. So, we decided to break the story into easier to digest pieces. Here is Part 1 for your reading enjoyment. – Ed.]

We’ve been force-feeding you an awful lot of electric-motorcycle content lately, but here’s something that’s been tugging at my mind for years. We know E-motos are good at racing, commuting and supermoto fundays, but their range – hovering around the 100-mile mark – is what’s limiting them from being truly all-around products.

What is it about motorcycles that makes riders immediately want to modify their bikes? Sometimes, they don’t even make it out of the dealership before some of the OE parts have been replaced with “performance enhancing” upgrades. Back in the days when tires seemed to made out of stone, swapping out the stock rubber for something stickier truly was a way to earn street cred (assuming you scrubbed off the chicken strips) and improve the bike’s performance. Of course, this was during the Pleistocene epoch, when aluminum was considered an exotic material, and swapping out steel parts was another easy path to a sportier motorcycle.

We’ve ridden the Indian Chieftain a few times, and we’ve always been fond of its engine and power delivery. Still, the semi-secret, unofficial MO Motto is “More is more.” So, when the Indian PR folks asked us which model Chieftain Dark Horse we wanted to take home to cuddle up with, a stocker or one that had been blessed with the complete listing from the factory performance catalog, you can probably guess our answer. Then toss in the fact that, with the exception of the model-specific exhaust, all of these modifications could be made to any Thunder Stroke 111 engine, and we saw the opportunity to share our bounty with our readers.

When our old friend Brad Banister wasn’t roadracing or motocrossing or jetskiing competitively, or snowboarding, skiing or jumping Excelsior-Hendersons off loading docks or dating six women at once or flying hang gliders or parasails or remodelling the kitchen or scaring the hell out of me on vertiginous single tracks, he was probably sleeping. He’s a high-voltage human light switch. That all came crashing down quite literally, in 2009, when a heavy crash landing while paragliding (due to the dreaded “rotor”) left him with limited use of his legs. Not that he doesn’t still use them anyway. It’s like this:

To summarize: a back-to-stock Grom was only marginally slower than the race winner… Tells you how much good a pile of expensive aftermarket parts do.. Think twice before you modify your bike.. It’s unlikely you’re more qualified than 100 Japanese engineers..

If you’ve been following Motorcycle.com lately, you’ll have noticed a recent Top 10 about Honda Grom modifications. The list, of course, was a teaser to a bigger event a few members of the MO team participated in: a 24-hour endurance race. We’ll get to that story in the coming weeks, but we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Before we could ever race a Grom, we’d have to transform it from the little funster that it is in its stock condition into a dedicated kart-track destroyer.

Here at MO we like riding slow bikes fast. Both Chief Editor Duke and contributor Gabe Ets-Hokin have written columns about it (read Duke’s here and Gabe’s here), but it’s a sentiment all of us on staff share. To prove it, I’ve signed up the entire staff, sans Tom (he’s got a press intro to attend. Ppfff), to come race with me in a 24-hour race on mini bikes, organized by the United Mini Racing Association. Our chariot that will hopefully lead us to glory (embarrassment, more likely)? None other than the hugely popular Honda Grom.

Hot rodding’s history is filled with speed seekers that have gasoline running through their veins. But now there’s a new dawn in the age to go faster and Harlan Flagg, Brandon Nozaki-Miller and Jeff Clark are pioneering the way. The technology they’re working with might be different than that used by speed seekers before them, but the proving grounds remain the same. Competition improves the breed, and that’s the path Clark, Nozaki-Miller and Flagg have embarked on, pioneering the next chapter in hot-rodding – the electric motorcycle. Their challenge: the Pikes Peak International Hill Climb.

“Smokey, this is not ‘Nam. This is bowling. There are rules.”