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Preparing for the salt: Stenberg crafts a motorcycle to break a speed record
LAKEPORT, Calif. – Fast motorcycles have been Tim Stenberg’s lifelong love, even if on a couple of occasions they almost shortened his life.
“I’ve had a couple of brushes,” acknowledges Stenberg, who carves out a living in an environment of sleek Harley-Davidsons and scattered parts of other motorcycles in varied stages of assembly at his Street Machines Cycleworks at 2345 S. Main St. in Lakeport.
“I had a crash back in ‘86 that tore up my face and pulled my right eye out of the socket. The tear duct in my eye was torn; it waters a lot,” he continues.
“Fortunately, I haven’t broken any bones, but I separated a shoulder. I was riding my dirt bike at the time at a place called ‘The Pit’ in Phoenix. I came up out of the Pit about 6 feet in the air. When I came down I saw that a road grader had dug a big trench shaped like a catcher’s mitt. I didn’t see it until I was up in the air and then it was too late.
“I was by myself, so I had to pick up my bike with one arm and get it started. Then I had to get it through four miles of river bottom to get to my van and drive myself to the hospital.”
But in the true spirit of the “motorcycle man” Stenberg’s love is eternal.
“It’s just in the blood,” he says.
Stenberg’s “saint” is Burt Munro, a New Zealand bike racer who set several speed records on the Bonneville (Utah) Salt Flats in the 1950s and 1960s on bikes of his own creation.
Munro was more or less deified among motorcycle devotees in a 2005 film, “The World’s Fastest Indian,” with Anthony Hopkins in the title role.
Come August, Stenberg plans to make his own assault on the Utah salt in quest of a speed record in the 1,000 cc (cubic centimeters in the measuring of engine displacement) class.
One piece at a time over the last several months he has been building the bike he’ll ride in his quest to eclipse the Southern California Timing Association’s current record in the classification for the bike he’ll be riding, known officially as the A-PG class.
The SCTA’s record for that class is 159.08 miles per hour. Stenberg figures he’ll need to hit speeds in the 170 mph range to eclipse it.
Under SCTA rules, a record-challenger’s speed is determined by what he averages on two three-mile runs. The process takes about an hour to complete, he says.
Stenberg moved to Lakeport about 14 years ago from his native Arizona, where he still holds a speed record at Phoenix’s Firebird International Raceway drag strip. He set the record, 114 mph, in the 500 cc class, in 1996.
He opened his own shop at Lampson Field airport and moved to his present shop in April 2012.
“I raced before I learned to drive,” he says. “I was pretty good on dirt bikes and I’ve (competed in) motocross, drag racing, road racing, everything from A to Z. But I’ve always wanted to go to Bonneville.”
So why hasn’t he done it before? And why now?
“Opportunity,” Stenberg responds. “I’m 55 years old and not getting any younger. If I’m going to do it, I’ve got to do it now.
Motorcycles have been his life for 40 of those years. When he was married in a lakeside ceremony in Lakeport he rode a motorcycle up the aisle with his mother seated behind him.
“It was the first time she had ever been on one,” Stenberg remembers with a grin. “My parents, especially my mom, were anti-motorcycle. She was scared to death of them. I remember the first time when I was in sixth grade and my friend had this little minibike. When I rode it home there was a look of horror on my mom’s face.”
Using various and sundry parts, Stenberg has always built his own bikes.
“All hand-built,” he says proudly. “There’s nothing I ride that I haven’t had my hands on. In my circle I’ve always been known for oddball motorcycles. I don’t go in for what everybody else is doing. I’ve always had smaller bikes than anybody else and less expensive than anybody else.”
With all the painstaking hours Stenberg invests in building his own machines it’s little wonder that he thinks of them almost as living organisms.
“You get attached to them,” he says as he shows a reporter a blue-colored motorcycle he has kept in storage he calls “Mighty Mouse.”
“It’s the bike I set the (Phoenix Firebird) record on,” he says. “It took me eight months to build it. The week after the record I entered it into a global wheels car show at Phoenix Coliseum and won a first-place trophy. That bike was really good to me. I probably have about five grand into it, but if somebody wanted to build one like it it would cost them $25,000.”
Stenberg’s objective is to have less than $3,500 into the bike he’ll ride to challenge the record on the Bonneville salt flats, where, he says “you see everything from garage and backyard-built bikes and others up to $100,000 and $200,000.”
He’s “very confident” about his shot at a record.
“I have seen the salt,” he says. “I know what it takes. I have a lot of experience and I have a lot of friends who have been at the salt. They tell me about the conditions, the dos and the don’ts. There are a lot of differences between racing on salt and racing on asphalt. For one thing, there’s a limited amount of traction.”
To challenge a record at Bonneville, a man has to know his salt.
Email John Lindblom at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .