We Race You Win

Oct 14

For as long as I can remember, I have been around racing. I can faintly remember going to the races with my father when I was about 3 years old, where he won national championship events drag racing early 1980s Suzuki GS1100e’s. Then in the late 80’s my dad was tuning and building a Suzuki GSXR 750’s and a GSXR 1100’s for two aspiring road racers, that's when I fell in love with motorcycle road racing (Championship Cup Series) In the mid 2000s (oh so long ago), we at Johnson Engine Technology started road racing Buells. We started with a 1997 Lightning, then moved to a 2003 Buell XB. We raced because it was fun and allowed us to keep learning in a competitive environment how to go fast and make our customers motorcycles faster and more reliable. During this time we expanded our knowledge of:

EFI tuning optimization for high load part throttle acceleration,
Chassis and suspension tuning.
Camshaft profile development for maximum performance and valvetrain reliability.
Cylinder head design.
Cylinder sizing and finish.

In 2021 we hope to get back to the race track. We are working on a major update to that 1997 Buell Lighting chassis. Our goal is to:

Update the rear suspension by replacing the under mounted extension mono shock with a linkage based conventionally mounted mono shock.
Develop a front motor mount that will use the engine cases as the front mount instead of the cylinder heads.
Aluminum Fuel tank
Aluminum oil tank
Developing an Alpha-N crankshaft triggered EFI system using a Daytona Twin Tec EFI system.
Raised port XL Sportster cylinder heads and intake manifold

We are doing this because it's fun, hard, and when we learn you benefit. Everything that we learn on the race track gets passed along to the street. That’s why we love roadracing there is 100% correlation to the street.

Here are some pics from the last time we started a project with the 1997 Buell Lightning frame, we thought about turning it into a thumper, aka single cylinder. Who knows we may just get back to the project, once we get through 2021 Lord willing...

Here’s what coming up in future 2021 Racing Blog Posts