earlwb

The bikes had to be street legal, pretty much stock. You had to ride them in to the drag strip. There were people there inspecting the bikes to check them out as well. The Mach III's that I tried were all pretty squirrelly off the line. That power band being on or off made them really tricky to handle. When it came into the power band there was that huge spike in power and the rear wheel would either break loose or you'd wheely over on yourself, then the frame would flex a lot too when you stayed in the middle where rear wheel didn't break loose and the front wheel stayed down. The stock rear wheel didn't exactly have a large rear tire on it either. The one guy I used to race with, sort of cheated, he would trailer the bike to within a few miles and then pull it off the trailer and ride it in. But then he lived quite a ways away though, so I didn't complain. I would just ride my bike in from home, and I carried a bunch of new Champion spark plugs with me. The Champion plugs at the time tended to burn out after a few miles but they were good for a couple of hundred extra RPMs over the NGK plugs. But I would put in a new set of plugs for every run. After the day was over for me, I would put the NGK plugs back in and ride on back home. But at the time I did not compete against any custom drag versions of the Mach III. They were in a different class from my bike.