Passes & Canyons Blog

Vetter challenge participants at Vintage Motorcycle Days in 2012.

I may be working a full-time job lately but that doesn’t mean I’ve given up my freelancing. I’m pleased to be able to tell you that Rider magazine has published my latest article on its website and the piece will presumably be in the next issue. Now you get to read the story behind the story.

The piece is about motorcycle fairing designer Craig Vetter and what he’s up to these days. It started out when I went to Ohio in 2012 for the AMA’s Vintage Motorcycle Days (VMD).

Craig was the grand marshal for that event that year, and one piece of the event was the Craig Vetter Fuel Economy Challenge. I took a lot of pictures and spoke with several participants in that event. I also attended three presentations Craig gave, two about the challenge and one about his many years in motorcycling and design of motorcycle gear. I then wrote about all this for several publications.

After I got home I sent a query to Rider magazine editor Mark Tuttle, Jr., asking if he would be interested in a piece on Vetter and this whole business. Mark replied that sure, he’d be interested to read my submission. That is to say, no guarantees he would accept and publish it, but if I would write the piece he’d be happy to look at and consider it.

Then nothing happened. I got busy with my new job and months passed with me doing nothing to pursue this. About the time I was despairing of ever getting off my butt and doing it I got a fortuitous email. Craig Vetter had seen one of the articles I published elsewhere and sent me a note saying he liked it and thanks.

I knew I needed to jump right on things at that point. I emailed Craig back and thanked him for his note and told him I had gotten the go-ahead from Mark to do a piece. Could we speak? Craig said sure and so we did.

My thoughts initially had been to do something about the previous year’s event (this was the middle of 2013 by now) but at this point we were drawing near to the 2013 event, so it made more sense to make it a forward-looking piece rather than dwelling on something that was past. And Craig was totally focused on what was upcoming. In the interim he had gotten seriously amped up on the idea of electric streamlined motorcycles. As you’ll see if you read the article, Craig had gotten hooked up with Terry Hershner, who was planning–and by the time we spoke, had completed–a cross-country run on his Zero electric motorcycle. Craig’s streamlining had enabled Terry to get double the mileage out of his batteries and helped make the whole thing possible.

At this point Craig was looking forward to the 2013 VMD and expecting Terry to run away with the championship on his electric bike. I wrote the piece and sent it to Mark at Rider with the main pitch being the electric bike angle. Mark replied that he had no recollection of us discussing this piece (it had been nine months) but he liked what I sent him and he wanted to run it. I thought it would be a good piece to use coming up to VMD, setting the stage and then demanding a follow-up, but Mark said he wanted to let the 2013 challenge take place and add a follow-up note at the bottom of the piece.

So that’s what we planned. And then it fell apart. Terry was on his way to VMD and the bike broke down. The extra weight from all the extra battery packs and charging units he had added were finally too much for the stock wheel bearings. Terry would not be competing in the VMD. OK, Mark said let’s wait for the later Vetter event in October.

October came, however, and there was no fuel economy challenge at the annual Vegas to Barstow event because Craig had had surgery and was not feeling sufficiently recovered to take on that load. Push it back even further.

At this point Mark was telling me it didn’t have to be tied to one of the Vetter events, he’d just run it in an issue in summer 2014 when he had space in the magazine. But then I got a note from him not long ago saying he would have space for it sooner. And now, by golly, it’s up there. And I’m eagerly awaiting the arrival of the next issue in my mail. Gosh, only 16 months from when I first pitched the idea to Mark to when it ends up in print.

Biker Quote for Today

I’ve done it myself in the past, ground the bike so far all the oil was gone, got up and walked to work without a scratch.

Streamlined motorcycles at last year's Vintage Motorcycle Days. That raggedy-looking green bike is Vic Valdes, who made his streamlining out of discarded political posters.

I spoke with Craig Vetter last week, working on an article that I hope I’m not too late getting to Rider magazine. Vetter, as you probably know, is the designer of the Windjammer fairing and a lot of other things, and these days he’s really focused on fuel efficiency.

Vetter has worked out the design for what he calls The Last Vetter Fairing, which is body work that creates a streamlined motorcycle with upright seating and room to carry four bags of groceries.

He told me that in a recent test ride, with two identical motorcycles, one streamlined, the one that was streamlined got double the gas mileage of the stock bike. But he also talked about the power you need to push a bike down the road at 70 mph, and that comes out somewhere in the 20-25 horsepower range.

And here’s the kicker. If you’ve got too much power you’re not going to see any major miles per gallon increase with streamlining, he said, because all that power eats up too much gas.

“What you would notice is you could go probably 200 miles an hour. But where is it legal to go 200 miles an hour?”

I get the point but it still kind of tickles my fancy to think of my Concours going that fast. “I hit 189 miles an hour but the dang thing only gave me 68 miles to the gallon! What a gas hog!”

So anyway, it was a really good conversation and I couldn’t begin to use all the interesting stuff in that one short article for Rider so all the extra will make for some good blog posts here. Stay tuned.

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Biker Quote for Today

I wanna ride this road!

An entrant in this year's Craig Vetter Fuel Economy Challenge.

Racing has a long history of pushing motorcycle development forward, as solutions to punishing conditions on the track migrate to street bikes to make them better and better.

What is less well known is how some areas of motorcycle development have been blocked by the rules promulgated by the powers that be in racing. Specifically, today’s motorcycles would probably be a lot more aerodynamic were it not for limitations imposed by racing.

Craig Vetter is renowned for his fairing designs as well as a lot of other work on motorcycles. As Grand Marshal at the American Motorcyclist Association’s Vintage Motorcycle Days a few weeks ago, he also hosted the Craig Vetter Fuel Economy Challenge. The Challenge solicits entries of bikes that can move at highway speed while getting the greater mileage based on fuel cost, all the while serving as a viable alternative to a car. As the key to meeting that last demand, the bikes are required to be able to carry four bags of groceries.

In the presentation he gave on the purposes of the challenge, Vetter also covered some history that had much to do with why motorcycles look the way they do today. Following World War II, he said, German, Italian, and Japanese designers worked to make motorcycles more aerodynamic, and therefore more economical. The designs they were coming up with looked a lot like the designed used today on the bikes that go to the Bonneville Salt Flats to set land speed records. That is to say, they have a rounded nose and come to a point in the rear, with smooth body paneling over the rest of the bike.

Said Vetter, “They were looking . . . not like what you could buy. Remember the old adage, ‘Win Sunday, Sell Monday’? That’s what motorcycle dealers said. Well, these motorcycles didn’t look like anything you could buy on Monday. And so the FIM, which was the world sanctioning body for racing at that time, was under pressure from the people with money–motorcycle manufacturers–to eliminate streamlining. Now, they could have said, ‘You motorcycle manufacturers, you should change your ways,’ but they didn’t. They bowed to the pressure of the motorcycle industry of the time, and this is what they did. This is why the motorcycles on the track out here today look like they do and do not look like real streamliners, which is very significant.

“We already know that this is real streamlining (showing slide of round-nosed, pointed tail, enclosed body bike). It only takes 3 horse power to take you 60 miles an hour. Here’s what the FIM did with their rules. In one sweep at the end of 1956 they said, ‘Oh, you’ve got to see the front wheel. Oh, you’ve got to cut it all off in front of the axle. You can’t have anything sticking in front of the front axle. Oh, you can’t have anything sticking behind the rear wheel either, behind the rear axle. This is now illegal. Plus, you’ve got to see the rider from the side, everything, you can’t cover him up. You’ve got to see the rider totally from the side. The back end can’t be high either. You’ve got to cut it off 5 inches high. You can’t have anything on the back. The fairing can’t slope any more than 30 degrees.’

“And that’s what we have on the track today. They intentionally gave us dumb streamlining. They could have said, ‘No, we want technology to advance. We’re gonna require tracks to be better, to handle faster speeds.’ They could have said, ‘Hey you guys have got to come up with better brakes. You guys gotta come up with better cooling.’ But they didn’t. They intentionally slowed motorcycles down and made them . . . made it hard to go fast.”

Now you know.

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Biker Quote for Today

What in the wide, wide world of sports is a-goin’ on here?