The closest thing to strapping your arse to a rocket has to be a top fuel drag bike and Lawless Magazine has taken time out to get the riders perspective with Bad Bones Racing team chief and rider Kwik Mick. As with many of the brackets competitors Mick has been riding from a very young age and bought his first Harley Davidson, a 1982 FLH, at 16 years of age and still owns the bike today (hey you can do the calculations). Mick then bought himself a Dyna Wide Glide when they were released in 1993. Harley Davidson stopped making the Dyna Wide Glide in 1984/5 and re-released the Anniversary model in 1993. The Wide Glide was to go down in the record books as the quickest 80 cubic inch in the world with a record breaking 11.2 sec quarter mile @ 120mph. The Dyna is a ballsy 113BHP @ the back wheel and is best known for delaminating the tyre whilst on Fraser Motorcycles Dyno. At the time the bike was travelling at 270 kph @ 6,000rpm and far from the 7,900rpm redline. ‘’It still had plenty to go but just can’t get tyres for it, it’s a fun street bike!’’ says Mick. Racing has always been in Micks blood and he’s always drag raced and street raced and Mick and the other members of his club were always competing to see who had the fastest bike. This soon attracted the attention of the police and with the police intervening once too often they decided to do their racing at the newly established Eastern Creek Raceway. Mick and his mate Lester were the first two to compete in the Street Bike bracket at the Creek and it wasn’t long after, Mick stepped up to Modified class and it was in this class he set the record on his Dyna. Mick then scoured a job with the Brett Stevens Jack Daniels Racing and crewed on the championship winning Troy Maclean fuel bike and it was then he was bitten. ‘’Once you go Nitro you can’t go back’’ he says and he went out and bought himself a Nitro bike and with Jack Daniels unfortunate demise Troy found a home with what was to become Bad Bone Racing. Troy was an asset to the team, former Australian Champion, Troy not only was great on the tools, was a great teacher and Mick couldn’t ask for a better instructor.
Things were just on the up and up for Bad Bones with Fraser Motorcycles picking up 90% of the sponsor ship of the team which has given Mick and the boys the peace of mind and the ability to concentrate on their racing. The Bad Bones Nitro bike at the time of this feature was ranked the number 1 Harley Davidson in the country and number 2 in its class. The bike runs an 186ci Overkill engine with 12:1 compression, 4.75 pistons with 5 1/4 stroke and Rommine 800 lift cam and does 0-100 kph in 1.1sec, 200 kph in 3.5 sec and can reach a speed exceeding 350 kph in 6.6 sec. On the hit of the bikes throttle the pressure on the rider is around 4G which equates to around 4 times the body weight of the rider. Mick loves the sensation of these bikes, spoils you for everything else, a few of his mates have some fast cars (8 sec fast) and one of them decided to take Mick for a run, he told Mick how it was all set up and it was honkin’. Mick took up the offer and took a ride in the passenger seat, his mate launched the car, the wheels were in the air and the car was screwed up and sideways and Mick being Mick turned to his mate and as a mate would ask “when do things start goin?” Mick has to be excused for his cocky demeanour. He says ‘’but there’s nothing like the feel of Nitro! Lying on top of the thing, you put on your bullet proof vest (the only sport in the world where you have to wear a bullet proof vest) crack the throttle and the tacho goes from 2,700rpm (idle) 4,800rpm and 1000BHP.”
Mick has riden bikes for over 30 years and says all he has learnt had to be thrown out of the window, because everything was backwards compared to a standard motorcycle. ‘’It don’t steer, it don’t stop, it just goes fuckin’ fast in a straight line and it’s the opposite, if you want it to go right you lean left, if you want it left you lean to the right and push with your feet. It’s everything you know about riding a motorcycle backwards and it’s hard to train your body after 30 years of riding to do that and you only have 6 seconds to do it in’’. One could only imagine what goes through the mind when things go wrong and Mick recalls some memorable moments. ‘’ I ran off the end of the Perth Motorplex, I was travelling at 195mph when I hit the sand and travelled 16 meters on the Wednesday in testing, we pulled out the bike, stripped the bike down and rebuilt it and raced that weekend and got runner up. At the Nitro Champs in Sydney (WSID) Chris Matheson came off at 370 kph. In the track there is an actual dip and I hit that dip whilst Chris was getting towed back and he said he could see clear daylight under my bike. When I hit the dip I was traveling at 200mph and braking which meant when I hit the dip I ended up in an endow with my back wheel in the air higher than the height of the end wall. The dip is 60ft past the finish line. The bike is 3m long and weighs 500kg so it’s not like it’s a sports bike. What happened with Chris was he has reached out to grab the front brake as his front wheel hit the dip and pumped his hand and the force from the 370 km wind pushed his hand back, if you have ever stuck your hand out at 100 kph? Times that by four and try to hang on, impossible! So that’s why he ended up off the side of his bike.’’ Being runner up at his first meet and running first six are also fond memories but hitting that 200mph mark is a highlight. ‘’There’s nothing like running 200mph, it’s a strange feeling. You talk to all the drag racing guys, at 200mph everything goes quiet and you can’t hear anything, everything goes silent and you go to a zone where everything is smoothed out and there is nothing and then the stop sign comes up! It all goes to shit, but you know when you hit 200mph you can feel it in the bike and it all goes weird for that split second you are doing 200mph. Other boys have gone faster, 216-218mph. When you are going that fast it’s only three wheel rotations. It’s fuckin’ madness!’’
Mick started Bad Bone Racing when he first started racing at Eastern Creek and with the help of local legend Sporty Bob (Bob Performance Modifications) graduated to modified bracket, which meant Mick had to do away with the mandatory boots and jacket to the modified bracket full leathers. Bob told Mick of an old time flat track rider of the 1930’s that used to run in a skeleton suit. Because Mick was 140kg at that time everyone was telling him he was too fat to be racing motorcycles and drag racing was all about light weight, of course Mick had to prove them wrong. ‘’I figured fuck it and got the suit done and I thought I couldn’t lose the weight.’’ Mick had a novel idea with the skeleton design on the leathers and had all the bones he had broken, broken on the skeleton with a line through them. Back in 1988 Nitro Champs at Eastern Creek Dragster magazines Lee Davies was taking photos for an upcoming article and asked ‘’what’s with the friggin lines’’ and Mick said ‘’I have broken every one of these bones’’, in which Lee replied ‘’fuck you have a lot of bad bones in your suit’’ and that’s were Bad Bones came from.
The Bad Bone Nitro 182 at the time as mentioned was the No1 Harley and second overall in its class in Australia. At a previous meet the bike was running a new fuel system and clutch and was actually over powered for the track at the semi-finals which lost them the race. The bike smoked the tyre at over 150mph when the second fuel curve came on the bike lit the 15 inch tyre up. With Nitro, once you unload the engine by smoking the tyre it will kill a cylinder and with just that one cylinder the bike still ran 9.20sec @ 138mph, but they still got beat and their meet was over. If they would have won that meet they would have been leading the points table by a fair way, if only because of Chris Matheson’s unfortunate accident when he came off the bike. Bad Bones still have a good chance of top qualifying, MPH and ET points at the Winter Nationals which would put them in the overall No1 spot in the country.
Unlike many riders Mick has the unenviable job of driving the team trailer to all the events in Australia and then competes. ‘’As much as I have tried to get my crew members to get a licence they would rather fly, half the fun’s driving. I’ve been a truck driver all my working life and love it!’’
Our go fast model is 24 year old Tara Tequila. A fan of anything fast that looks sexy. By day she is a makeup artist and hair stylist with dreams of modelling full time. Tara is starting to make her dreams come true having done bikini shoots and fashion shows and has this to say about her shoot with our mag. ‘’Hopefully you will see me around more often in Lawless Magazine and that bike was so hot I would love to go for a ride, I love them fast and hard!’’