I pulled in, parked off to the side, and shut the engine off. Dead silence. I wondered what the hell was up as it was strangely quiet for a body shop during work hours. There’s always something extremely noisy going on in any body shop and usually a combo of loud air-powered tools backed by a bit of hammering. I got out, hit the horn button hard through the driver’s window and waited. Nothing happened. Thirty seconds later I heard a starter motor whirring away hard trying to bring something to life. Finally it fired and the sound was deafening as the door was roped open (nobody I knew had electric garage door openers back then) and then hell broke loose as whatever it was now wide open and trying to clear its throat.
It was definitely not the Randy’s 289-powered MGA or his ’55 Chevy straight-axle street gasser with a wicked-high-winding 283 or his ’69 Nickey Z/28. The sound of somebody side-stepping a clutch at full throttle can only mean something cool was about to happen and by all the gods in Valhalla, it sure damn did. Randy came flying out of that garage on a modern-for-the-time gold metal flake, fiberglass-bodied trike with the front wheel a couple of feet off the ground and straight into the cross street before finally crashing the front wheel down hard when he shut off the throttle abruptly. He whipped it around and immediately lifted the front wheel again until dumping it right near where I was parked. Smiling like a nut, he shouted over the open exhaust, “So whaddya think?”
I was dumbfounded by the whole show and didn’t know what to say. Then I heard, “Here, you try it” and stumbled my way onto the plastic seat that looked like it was stolen from a Laundromat and put my hands on the cheesy thin apes to give the throttle a goose. Randy yelled in my ear that a guy had crashed a hopped-up dune buggy and after insurance just left it there while somebody else paid a bill with an unassembled, unknown brand VW-powered kit trike. Kind of looked like a gold metal flake space-age death trap, but at Randy’s screaming urging I gave it a go.
Foot to the floor, let out the clutch and it just shot off with little or no steering intervention. Unfortunately I couldn’t get it up when I was supposed to and after a few more tries, I decided on something different. You know, the old roll along in first, clutch in and gas pegged, then drop the clutch and it basically just climbed on its ring gear, but it did get the front wheel right up so high I couldn’t see a thing ahead of me and held it for a bit before slamming the pavement like it was frozen rest room waste from a jet liner.
It didn’t drive quite the same after. Randy and his crew were outside laughing so hard they were almost crying. “Did you see the look on his face?” and “He musta pissed himself!” was all I remember hearing as I tried to park it. I told them I was sorry, but I bent the simple super-long tubes that substituted for a real fork on my landing which only brought more gales of laughter instead of the expected chastising followed by a repair cost. “Don’t worry about it,” Randy said. “So whaddya think?”
Hey, after you’ve damaged somebody else’s toy, what do you think I said? “It’s great! Lots of power! Wicked cool! I love it!” Unfortunately I wished I had driven it around more to see what it was actually like to drive instead of the tenth- or two-tenths of a mile I probably rode it. I never got it out of first. Big Daddy Roth during his trike era I was not.
You still see all sorts of old kit and homemade VW trikes at rallies and I often wonder what they’re like to ride with all that weight hanging out back there. Today with the proliferation of factory and conversion trikes, the old VW transaxle trike seems to have gone the way of Radio Shack. Still here and there, but not for long. But not for everybody and our feature trike takes a step back in time with an entirely new twist. Yes sir, that’s a familiar looking engine hanging of the back of this 1999 Lowboy trike and it’s definitely not a Volkswagen.
I’d run into a few of these in various showy guises while Googling trike images, but I never bothered to check them out other than a quick look. This little baby has a 113-inch S&S engine mated to a VW automatic transaxle. The shop that was displaying it in Daytona where Jack Cofano got these shots is The Trike Shop of Daytona Beach. Their very successful business of converting all brands of bikes into trikes using their own bespoke setups keeps them busy as all get-out, but there’s always time for a blast from the past. In this case, they put the S&S engine via adapter to the VW automatic transaxle and not only had three-speeds forward, but reverse too. Foot paddling a trike backwards is never going to end pretty.
There is a hint of motorcycle normality with the Harley-style front end and fuel tanks, but that’s where conventionality ceases. Yes, the tank still feeds the engine sitting as far back as it can go and still be attached to the trike and just aft of the fuel tap on the left side is a weird looking lever poking out of the side of the body. It’s kinda like mounting an automatic floor shift on a door panel, but it makes sense here. Hey, when you only have to shift it a couple of times a day at most, it doesn’t have to be at your finger tips and it makes sense here. I have no idea how long it is, but it does seem to stretch out over a lot of ground and apparently provides two-up seating although things look a smite tight for the passenger.
The simple, all-enveloping bodywork is its own entity and strictly a matter of personal taste. Big body panels cover where a motorcycle’s engine usually is and all I can say is that they’re just there. Remember, this thing is from the ‘90s and other than old Servi-Cars, there was not much trike action anywhere. I guess you just have to appreciate the design as an updated period piece that happens to have a big, 113-inch air-cooled 45-degree V-twin in a weird place ─ hanging off the back.
So what do I know about this trike? Not much. I just have to assume it’s from the day before the proliferation of today’s trike rear ends that have replaced VW engines and transaxles as the go-to drive train if you were building a custom trike other than a Harley. I guess there might be some advantages like not having a hot engine between your legs in traffic and super-easy engine accessibility, but that’s about it. But then there’s the all-important “What the hell is that?” factor that so many people want. And that alone is the perfect price for admission for a lot of people looking for attention. And that’s just peachy as far as I’m concerned.