Moon Rocket

MOON ROCKET

From Salinas, with style

COLE FOSTER REALLY CAN'T help himself. It's a DNA thing. When your father is the late, great Pat Foster, pioneering Funny Car driver, ace fabricator and master drag-car restorer when you grow up as a track rat and shop gofer—it's going to shape your view of the internal-combustion world.

Cole Foster does not build candy-ass customs. lii fact, he doesn t build many motorcycles at all. lie's better known for the Fillies-style lead-sleds that emerge from his Salinas Boyz workshop in central California u%t%r.saIina.~bmx. co,,i ), but every few years Foster pops out a most memorable two-wheeler.

"Moon Rocket, for example. The chassis was hand-fabbed by Foster. a prototype for a kithike (`ustoii~ Chronic had commissiotied. When the giant \`T-T~vin parts house changed hands, the new owners (or probably their liability lawyers) rethought the whole kithike concept, and the chassis was dragged to the back of the warehouse. Foster dug it out three years later before it got sold as surplus or crushed.

A RevTech 100-inch Evo style V-Twin slotted nicely into the engine bay. A shortened Parks springer fork got the front end off the ground. Out back is a 150mm Avon, about as wide as Foster likes to go. Known for his near-flawless metalwork (those genes again), he then took alu minum to hand and pounded out the rear fender, seat base, gas and oil tanks, and that fairing. pure quarter-mile nostalgia.

Foster remembered seeing pictures of Boris Murray's wheel-standing, tire-smoking, double-engine Triumph fueler from the 1960s, one of the first dragbikes to run a lull tairing. lie contacted Murray and dis covered the bodywork started out on a little Paril Ia roadracer. Those being in short supply, Foster used a fiberglass replica of an old honda fairing as a buck. Because he wanted to use the provided windscreen, the nose is faithful to the original. but I pretty much eyeballed the rest." he says.

A smear of bondo and coat of paint can hide many flaws, so Foster left Moon Rocket's body work bare and polished. "I like to show off flex my muscle a little," he says. Hey, it's a family tradition...

-David Edwards

AMERICAN FLYERS