The REAL SECRET of the world’s FASTEST TWO STROKE!

The world's quickest two-strokes looking for history side by side blazing speed top end of the racetrack can they hit the sevens they do they got it history made Cycle drag universe two-stroke fanatics welcome to the great state of Texas we are digging deep we have found a hidden gem for you this is Ovilla Texas this is the workshop of Bill Baxter oh yeah he's got the world's quickest naturally aspirated two-stroke this thing is amazing so many of you have watched it in action on cycle drag youtube well his engine is unlike any other two-stroke engine out there let's head into his workshop and find out what this is all about welcome to South Georgia Motorsports Park let's take you back to what was the fast lap of the weekend this is Alex Yu oh what a garage and and you have cycle drag on Mr. Bill it is wonderful wonderful to see you thank you for supporting cycle drag we certainly appreciate that everybody loves watching your amazing motorcycle go down the racetrack and as I can see no rest for the weary look at this it's completely torn down disassembled right now where's the motor the motor is at Doug Flannery's shop in Michigan oh yes we got a lot to talk about all right we're going to get into your one-off engine on your drag bike but you being the two-stroke enthusiast the two-stroke aficionado you got to show me your street bike here too this is an unbelievable water buffalo gt 750 what year again did you say 72 72 let's get a load of this two-stroke fans I told you we're going to make you drool look at how clean this thing is well Bill I can tell you're not a Kawasaki loyalist right a two-stroke loyalist tell me about this machine well this is 72 that we found in a barn in Nebraska completely renovated it and believe it or not this is the first year and for most of the first year they got this giant double leading shoes front brake on it and collectible value of the bike is probably 30 40 percent higher if it has this giant brake as opposed to disc brakes it's just immaculately clean tell me a little bit about the restoration how much work did you have to put into it well it took me about six months had to strip it to the frame and start over again when we found it it had water in the forks it had water in the motor that had water in the transmission I don't know where they had parked this thing we pulled it apart and Bill Boone did the crank and the cylinders and Ken Blurry did the paint on it which turned out beautiful and we ended up really getting carried away and buying NOS parts are still available for it and we ended up spending around twelve thousand dollars at NOS parts for it it's not hard to do doesn't take long does it the seat was 500 the front fender was 400 you know everything was like five six seven hundred dollars and it added up really really fast absolutely love the bike well I promised everybody out there we're going to talk about your engine it's so amazing you're you're really in a league of your own a class of your own just update everybody the all-time nitrous record for a drag bike is 777 by Brian Pretzel that is with nitrous you're 783 all motor are you on a mission to take that nitrous record out all motor oh absolutely so I gotta ask you why why all motor well one of the limitations with an h2 is that little spindly transmission and nitrous eats them like M&Ms so I don't I don't want that hassle I'd rather fight it a natural aspirator 785 that record could fall Bill Baxter wants the overall 777 record set by a nitrous bike getting there 785 what is it 800 how you doing on the mile an hour 164 is not our best but it's not bad for this weather we're going in the right direction here's even a larger question for you expounding on that with the amount of money and time that you're putting in for this project and we love it we love watching it you could go have a turbocharged Hayabusa pro street bike you could have a pro open bike maybe even get into top fuel you choose to put all your money and resources into this two-stroke why you know that's a question I've asked myself a number of times because it's you know I tell people most most racers my age have graduated to real motorcycles and I'm still playing with a glorified lawnmower and and it's just I know I like the bike I like the way it sounds I like going quick on a very small motor and I think most of all I like the challenge yeah I love it too and clearly CycleDrag YouTube and CycleDrag.com Facebook loves it because the views are always off the charts now let's get into the technical side of your engine and parts that we have not all the parts are here but if you could please explain how it's different Bill we know in drag bike racing at any level the crankshaft is so important what are we looking at here well this is a mostly an h2 transmission that's unmodified except for the connecting rods which are out of a Rotex 600 twin and they're just a lot bigger and beefier I mean that's 20 millimeter wrist pin everything is beefier about it that's why I had a stock h2 in here somewhere everything in the h2 is really small and the connecting rods are weakly they're very spindly and they crack right here below the wrist pin balls somewhere somewhere here I have chunks of crankshafts that are broken in the past so we needed this the the billet top end is based on a row on the Rotex the Rotex 600 twin and these are Rotex piston Rotex rods Rotex sleeves are in it everything in it is based on a Rotex 600 twin so this innovation this doesn't happen overnight this took you a long time and a lot of broken parts we need 75 and here comes our number one qualifier Alex horsepower used near lane he will take on the lightning bolt h2 steve chandler right lane Alex used eight flat and they heat about two tenths off the record he's chasing but guess what guys it's gonna cool down eventually it's sweltering hot right now but as we get later into the evening how many years you've been in this game oh I started racing h2s in the mid 80s but this I can't take any credit for this motor this is all the brainchild of Ralph Shipman in Germany he he designed it he built it he sent it to me and we put this motor together and went to Valdosta in 2019 with about five runs on a brand new motor and it went a 783 so just the fact that and this is the original crankshaft and everything's original we've never heard it very impressive I see we have other components out here bill really if you can let people know how your motorcycle differs from the other ones that we see well this is Ralph's latest brainchild and it's actually a dry slider so you bolt the plate put this on the motor then you actually bolt the outer basket to it after it's put together and so your entire slider is hanging out in the wind it's absolutely dry and this great big seal right here keeps all the oil inside the transmission Hughes looking for history remember his naturally aspirated record sits at 782 the overall two-stroke record with nitrous is at 777 Hughes wants both so bill just about everything is billet but you're telling me this is a gsxr1000 clutch hub that's right we Ralph took this and he made it a small steel collar on it for the seal to ride on but the rest of this is all billet all out of Ralph Shipman's workshop in Germany now how in the world would somebody think to try a gsxr1000 part in an old h2 well the reason we did that is it's the same plate it's the same clutch plates as an h2 somewhere along the line collaborated and they used the plates out of an h2 on their 02 to 06 gsxrs and zx7 close race at a thousand foot the zx14 gets it rxl 650 snowmobiles is this cool or what two-stroke fans well if your mind is blown yet you have not seen anything we're just getting started because check this out what makes bill's bike really unique compared to all of his competitors is he has billet cylinders he also in his shop has what he likes to call the dyno mule this is incredible bill you got a dyno set up here where you can test the engine and you're telling me right now if you look we've only got one cylinder in use and you can you can crank it up and test that one cylinder absolutely wow i got to take a closer look at this thing this is some serious technology i knew this was worth the trip on the back roads in texas because look at what you have going on here i didn't even know this was possible bill describe to me what i'm looking at right now well this was a brainchild of chris ritchie and he looked at the crankshaft he was a good crankshaft builder in england and he said there's a way that we can make a single cylinder dyno mule and balance it so it won't come apart then he made me a crankshaft and sent it to me back around 2012 i think and we started dynoing motors on it and it doesn't shake very bad grabs to the moon and we only have to cut one head make one pipe only use one third of the fuel it's just it saves so much time money effort and it's only makes 60 horsepower so we don't have to worry about transmissions or chains or tires and gosh we've been dynoing this with the max ecu this morning we made dyno pull number 352 oh my gosh wow so it's not bulletproof but it's pretty close so a lot of people don't realize this is where the magic happens when you get to the drag strip you've already put in the hours and hours of arduous labor at your shop absolutely when we first got this billet motor this very one our very first dyno pull we made 44 horsepower this morning we made 66.5 so we've picked up 22 horsepower per cylinder since we first got it and that's all on the dyno we don't do any development at the track what do you attribute the gain to if it's something you can talk about um i don't know how pro stock you are i don't know how much we can give away here to your competitors out there but well there really aren't any secrets in it other than uh i guess they're one of the limitations of the h2 is the bottom end is very small it's very limited transfers don't flow enough so that was the work we had to figure out is how to get the motor to flow so doug flannery did the first uh the first go through and he took it from uh 44 to 58 uh then we added fuel injection and max ecu and there's a lot of things you can do with it now that you couldn't do that before and it increased horsepower and broadened the power band and now we've actually converted it to alcohol truly amazing as for the cylinder right now the form that it's in it's just a block you're going to machine it down to shape why do you have it as just a block right now this was our prototype we actually didn't know if it'd work or not so scott sullivan at front range machine in denver he built this billet block the internals are all exactly the same we didn't even know if it would work so we just said leave leave it outside as a giant block and we'll put the fins in it later this is so cool and you're telling me we can hear this thing run oh yeah it's it sounds sounds pretty cool oh i can't wait so i told you two stroke fans you found the right video bill is going to fire this up for us i'm so excited bill before we get to that i got a question for you though some of the competitors in your category have got into a very interesting debate a respectful one and they've said at what point is it no longer an h2 you have billet cylinders do you still consider this bike an h2 i do because it still has the limitations of an h2 you may have put a bigger cylinder on it it's still roughly the same size in displacement but you still have the choke down transfers and a little spindly transmission so you have a lot of challenges to work around even with more horsepower have you ever considered billet cases is that something we could see in the future we have ralph shipman my genius buddy in germany has already drawn them up uh he's bought the metal for it and he has a new five axis cnc on the way and he thinks that by this time next year we'll have a full billet 1200 cc triple wow that's very exciting and it seems like you know uh two-stroke racing it's not the largest class in terms of participation but the guys that are into it are so loyal they're into it for life it sucks you in and it seems like we gain a few bikes every year you and i are talking about setting up a big race we see a big one in martin michigan you can see on psycho drag youtube man cup finals is pretty strong those bikes are still out there there's they are still purple haze racing used to have a database and he had around 200 drag bikes in the u.s in his database so there's a ton of them out there in people's garages i wish they'd pull them out yes we're going to try to do that we have been beating the horn saying blow the dust off those bikes and get them back out there's gonna be more information coming on that on cycle drag youtube but hey we promised you we'd uh fire this thing up what do you think let's go for it let's go for it with the dyno and how we were testing some things and he gave me a maxi cd for it how about that we have about 88 channels that are monitored and you said since the last time we saw you the finals you picked up some horsepower about six horsepower a cylinder how do you find six horsepower a cylinder well then we've been working with a fuel injection guy and he sorted out a few issues we had that was the biggest part nate mccoy helped us out opened up some flow inside the motor he's consulting on the alcohol complete alcohol setup of course nate is extremely enthusiastic he's extremely helpful and he's one of them modified geniuses that oftentimes have to take notes and read it three or four times to figure out what he said so cool i bet you've smelled a two-stroke fume or two in your day huh yeah yeah we all have smells good i like it intoxicating i think it's safe to say you got your fair share of expansion chambers my goodness wow a lot of trial and error over here yep a lot of them are doug flannery's pipes all the straight ones are doug's uh there's a couple one by john mcgee one by wayne right these are fast by gas pipes these are doug's pipes and uh this is what i always show people this is my show and tell pipe this is one of doug's can you hold it very cool oh my goodness are you kidding me what does that weigh 22 gauge titanium weighs one pound one pound i feel like i almost crushed it in my hand i grabbed it too tight i was used to oh my gosh you said this is for your street bike yeah it's a case read engine now you've never had an h2 street bike i've never owned a street street bike henry wedge built one of these with the case reeds built into it and the benefit of this is there's no intake port in the back of the cylinder so you can port it very differently and it supports the piston better but uh henry wedge made these for me and we're gonna find a bike to put them in very cool so this is the machine in hot pursuit of that 777 bill we didn't talk much about the chassis give me a little tour of the lightweight components that we have in use here well mike morath started working with us back in 13 and he made the side panels the dams the chain guard the bodywork the fairings everything every piece on it is carbon fiber from uh from mike and uh of course the folks the forks are cody how about them from scott mckinney at a race in indy one year when our forks broke carbon fiber bst wheels on there yep carbon fiber wheels wow which i was very skeptical about but they've been on there now for five years and no issues they seem to work really well how much does this motorcycle weigh when it's all put together 270 270 that is unreal now that's really where the advantage comes in with the two-stroke power to weight power to weight yep it did weigh 310 we put it on a diet and that's where mike morath came in and the wheels and all that it all added up to almost 40 pounds in savings unbelievable now i can see by that picture up there we know that alex ewes has piloted this but so have you so i gotta ask you just 200 some pounds what is this thing like to ride well it's interesting for me because i don't fit on it it's kind of like a monkey screwing a football but but uh uh matter of fact in that picture right there i thought i was tucked in behind the fairing and uh you see i'm exposed up to my chest but even with my big fair rear end on it it went a 520 in the eighth mile wow i bet that gets your attention quick huh it was fun i hadn't ridden it in quite a while since we picked up quite a few horsepower so i was shocked that how it left the line had a 113 60 foot with me on it that was fun ewes and seangrist looking for the first two strokes side by side seven here on cycle drag top into the racetrack this looks good 786 ewes 789 seangrist they did it on cycle drag cycle drag which plays in bill baxter's shop do you play it in your shop if so let us know down below in the well bill this has been great we wish you all the best we want to see you break that record i think you will with how much hard work you're putting into this machine another question i want to sneak in there for you what what is the total value of a package like this if you had to put a number on it you may not even be able to but oh my goodness probably hard to say right i didn't really sit down and put a pencil to it it's got to be probably 40 000 50 000 all right so let me let me take it a step further i know that one of the reasons why we don't see a lot of h2 drag bikes is it's very valuable and collectible to bring them back to street form now because we see them at mecham h2s are just through the roof i think i saw one go for 25 000 yeah my buddy john sold an original one for 20 25 000 about a year ago so based on that the fact that you're playing in a sport in a category here where where parts are just uber collectible and expensive what challenges has that presented for you well you know the parts availability is a bit of a challenge for anything modern i can get all the h2 cylinders and cranks and so forth i want but they're not good for racing they're just not strong enough so you have to make them yourself well you've done that well don't take any credit for stuff that ralph shipman does or doug flannery yeah big shout out to ralph shout out ralph and doug we see doug up at martin can't wait to see him ralph hope to meet you someday we'll keep this passion of two strokes alive we know we want to thank dave conforti worldwide bearings he's done a lot for you absolutely every bearing on the bike is from dave every even the crankshaft bearings are from dave anybody else you'd like to give a shout out to well uh nate mccoy has been a ton of help on this new project with the fuel injection and of course steve nichols i think steve's about to block my phone number i don't know how that man sleeps he's he might be the only one that goes to more motorcycle drag races than we do every time i see steve it's it's very nice and comforting but we're like hey i saw you in georgia now we're in florida now we're in pennsylvania now we're in virginia and we just keep crisscrossing the country but it's worth it dave lakori was also a great deal of help initially setting it up and i still buy as many parts as i can from because he was so helpful excellent and he did block my number actually after a while i think he's unblocked it now so we're good we've all been there well guys down in the comments if you have any questions come with them maybe bill can answer them if he has time and please congratulate bill and encourage bill because we want to see this machine dip low into the 770s and maybe even a big race coming this year stay tuned for that bill it's been awesome good luck to you thanks for having us known this guy a long time great guy world record holder more coming thanks for stopping by jack oh man i got a kiss i didn't know i was gonna get a kiss hey two strokes are worth a kiss well there you go two stroke fans if you like that video here's another one for you subscribe right in the middle be a friend tell a friend and make sure you're locked in because when this thing hits the track we will bring you all the action to all our subscribers thanks a lot guys