As soon as Gard terminated the call, he realized that he had all the skills necessary to build a dragster, but there was a small problem. “I didn’t have much of any track experience with a drag bike. I quickly recognized that I was going to have to seek advice from some professional racers,” Gard said. His next phone call was to none other than racing legend Sandy Kosman. “One of the parts I had been hoarding for the drag bike was a Kosman dragster front end (see the Up-Close for more info on the front end). Sandy’s a great guy, and put up with all the questions I had about the setting up a custom dragster chassis. He really educated me about this style of racing,” Gard said. One of the best tips Sandy gave Gard was to make sure the engine was positioned as far forward as possible to help the bike get more traction as the tire squats when launching off the line. With Sandy’s help, the finished frame had a wheelbase of 68” and the steering neck had been raked to 28-degrees. Sandy also set up Gard with the ultra-lightweight carbon fiber BST 18×2.5” front and 17×6.625” rear wheels, each fitted with ISR semi-floating rotors with dual 4-piston ISR calipers in the front and a 2-piston version in the rear.

Kosman works closely with G2 Motorsports and therefore it was the logical engine choice for Gard to use in his dragster chassis. Bennett’s Performance assembled and tuned the 4.375” bore and 4.1875” stroke Twin Cam-style motor to produce 161.75 horsepower and 150.03 lbs/ft of torque. It achieves those numbers with relative ease from a relatively mild engine sporting only 10:1 compression pistons, unmodified head ports, and a Novi-modified S&S Super G carburetor. Behind the motor is a stout looking BAKER Drivetrain Torque Box 5-speed transmission attached to a BDL lock-up clutch and Performance Machine open-belt primary.

“I had a very dear friend named Russ Tom who I met in the ‘80s. He was really involved with the motorcycle industry and an early pioneer of modern custom bikes that were cutting-edge for the late ’80s to early ‘90s. He owned Downtown H-D in Seattle, Washington. When I lived in Washington I became involved with many of his custom builds — I credit him with attracting me to the art form and getting me into business,” Gard said. “A day before the build-off started, I found out that Russ had been killed in a helicopter crash. So I gave the drag bike its second dedication (see the sidebar for the first) and moniker, 4 R/T, as in for Russ Tom, just behind the seat.”

Gard placed second on the Biker Build-Off, but then his shoulder did pop out of its socket in the middle of one of the runs that would have counted towards a win on the show. But, he did build an incredibly fast American V-twin; the bike turned an official 9.60-second run in the quarter mile. He could probably do much better with some practice on the track and some time on the bike, but a sub 10-second run is damn fast considering this is his first custom drag bike — and it doesn’t look half bad either.