American Beemer
AMERICAN BEEMER
CW EXCLUSIVE
Made in Germany, re-made in Costa Mesa
DAVID EDWARDS
RON WOOD IS NOT YOUR AVERage senior citizen. Rather than honing his shuffleboard skills or solving sudokus or standing in line for Early Bird suppers, he built this motorcycle, which might just take BMW to places it’s never been before.
If all goes according to script, the 70-year-old plans to enter his latest flat-tracker, powered by BMW’s new F800 inline-Twin, in the 2008 AMA Grand National Championship.
Wood knows a thing or two about inline-Twins and flat-trackers. In 1978 he somehow persuaded a Norton Commando motor to make 80 horsepower and stay together just long enough to take the Ascot Half Mile, the last national the British marque ever won.
With England’s demise as a motorcycle maker-and never really happy campaigning the dreaded HarleyDavidsons-Wood was on the verge of retiring from racing when the 500cc Rotax motor came along in 1983. He took that air-cooled Single, wrapped it in a chromoly frame of his own design and created one of the winningest dirttrack bikes ever. At last count, WoodRotaxes have won eight AMA Junior titles and every 600 Expert national championship since 1984, plus a string of unbroken Peoria TT victories from 1986 to 2001. Off the track, his connection with Rotax led to Wood becoming a leading aftermarket vendor for Can-Am ATVs and BMW F650s, both of which use versions of the Austrian company’s liquid-cooled Thumper. These days, Wood’s operation (www.rotax.net) in Costa Mesa, California, caters mainly to the quad crowd, but at heart the man is still a racer.
That’s why, a couple of years ago, surfing the web, Wood was intrigued by spyshots of the upcoming F800 BMW-or, more specifically, its Rotax-built Twin with cylinders canted forward, much like his old Norton. When the bike debuted in America at the 2006 Cycle World Show in Long Beach, Wood was there with his tape measure and notebook. Next came calls to BMW, which agreed to send over a couple of motors, and to Rotax, which provided blueprints of the engine.
Wood sat down at his drafting table in January of ’07 and immediately had a problem. With no racing pretensions, the F800 was a large, heavy lump to design around. What to do? “I just treated the engine like a solid chuck of aluminum,” says Wood, who proceeded to attach everything to it-steering head, swingarm pivot, seat; even the shock mounts directly to the engine. For dimensions, he used what he knew already worked the layout of his Singles. “It’s a little
bike with a big engine,” Wood says. Ready to race, it weighs less than 320 pounds.
More hurdles with the engine-management system, a complicated array of 11 fuel-injection sensors, an electric pump and enough wiring, says Wood “to run from here to New York City.”
By luck, a pair of 41mm semi-downdraft Keihin carbs mated perfectly with the BMW’s intake ports. Then by mixing and matching ignition parts from his Can-Am DS650 catalog, and some trial-and-error tuning, Wood had the motor making noise. Running higher-compression pistons but stock cams for now, it pumps out about 90 horsepower. He’s shooting for 100.
From first pencil stroke to a successful shakedown test took six months, the work accomplished on weekends and afterhours.
“I fabricated it myself, made the molds for the fiberglass gas tank, painted it, even bent the handlebars. Nobody touched it but me,” says Wood who has a sponsorship proposal on the table at BMW. Given a green light, Wood will be on the national circuit next year.
Oh, another feature that sets his flat-track F800 apart from its competition? It keeps the streetbike’s electric starter.
“I’m getting a little too old to be bump-starting these things,” says Wood.
For more on the Wood-Rotax F800, go to www.cycleworld.com
