Hejira, time to race it!

Some people know the bike in question as I have pics etc on the YPM forum but for those who dont here is a breif run down on what I know about it.

The Bike was orginally owned by John and Janet Ansell and was raced with Bemsee, the bike frame is belived to be 1983 and was orginally fitted with a Honda CR motorcross engine.

The bike has been fitted with a few upgrade parts during its life, it now has a Rotax 257 250cc engine fitted and has a Harrison 6 pot caliper and AP racing master cylinder, the rest of the bike seems original to me.

The bike won the Single Cylinder championship in 1993 with Bemsee.

The bike was given to Dave Gardnder a good friend of mine who I used to work with, we both have a love of bikes and I was racing MX at the time, he was sprinting the his various bikes (Norton,F2 Kawasaki, Honda RS125) with the club and said why didnt I have a go.

We collected the bike from a friend of his John and I got it cleaned up and I sprinted it in 2007/2008, I did various bits of work on the bike new steering damper, repaired the fuel tank leaks, new digital dash etc, it was a fairly competative bike at the club and ran low 13sec quarter miles.

In 2007 I was having some good fun on the bike and pushing for the tenths of a second here and there on the drag strip, we raced at various air fields across essex and suffolk and had a good time! I was still racing MX and doing a few enduro’s.

In 2008 I went to meet John and Janet Ansell and picked up a new fairing they had for the bike and saw lots of photos etc of the bike and had a good time chatting to them about Johns racing career, they were really please the bike was being used and still winning trophys!

As I picked up a few pots in 2007 I thought i would do the full championship in 2008 and give MX a rest as I had been doing it for 8 years in a row. I was top 1-2 all throughout the season and the bike ran well and didnt let me down, I fitted the fairing (it didnt have one in 07) and got a few tenths quicker because of this.

During 2008 we enetered the Classic bike sprint at North Weald airfield and I did a few runs on the Hejira and did some parade laps on Daves Rob North Kawasaki and Daves lovely Sealy Norton, I was crapping myself riding the Norton as its worth about £15k! and the blody gear change and rear brake are on the wrong side! Still I kept it shiny side up and had a good burn with a 6 cylinder Honda.

I was leading the championship with enough points to win just if i turned up to the season finals at Santa Pod, its a bit of a drive up there but we took my Hejira and Daves Kawasaki and RS125, Dave again just had to run his bikes and wrap up the 500cc class and the 125 class, he also got the overall club championship.

I ran my fastest time at Santa pod of a 13.1 and won my class and the 250cc championship so was well pleased!

Some pics of the sprinting season:

Hejira and RS125 and Dads GPZ500

Exiting Clearways

I did another track day on the FZR with some mates, thanks to Jamie for the wanker sign!!

Another pic I have found of me Dave and Murray Tourque motor sports head man getting our trophys!

Winners!

My pit crew at Brands, all they did was take the piss and eat burger and say how much faster their crappy Lotus Exiges were! We all know real men ride bikes! Cars are easy!

Pit Crew!

So anyway back to th story, after winning the 2008 sprinting championship I and doing the few track days on the Hejira and FZR I thought about Circuit racing and got my mate Tom into it!

We went along to Bemsee open evening and chatted to lots of fellow racers about it and decided on the Yamaha Past Master who we are still with in our second season of racing and loving it!

In the winter of 08 I stripped down the Hejira and gave it a full re-build, powder coated the frame, filled the fuel tank, lots of new fasterners etc and painted the fairings up with the help of my brother in law from Phipps Motors, it looks stunning btw! After this it has been gathering dust till a few weeks ago! …………………….

Some pics of it that the YPM boys wanted to see:

Shiney!!

The rather good brakes!

I found this bike at the Bemsee 100 year meeting at Brands last year, all Carbon! Hejira were way ahead of their time with the Carbon Frame and one of the first to produce one.

So this is how its been looking up till now, about a month ago I chap called Steve Burge from Thudersport GB (you may have seen the racing on Motors TV) got in touch through the YPM forum about my bike and getting it out on track again this is what he said:

I’m involved in the supermono championship and have been playing with (rebuilding?) singles since the mid 1980s. I noticed your efforts to get your Hejira Rotax onto a road racing grid.

The Supermono championship is no longer a National status series, which means we can rewrite the rules how we wish. It also means it’s open to all licence levels (it always was, but the National tag put a lot of people off). We’re running with ThundersportGB which is proving funand every round is televised.

There’s a new supermono site link:
http://supermono.clients.fyldesoftware. … ontent.php

Along with others I’m keen to get the 2-stroke singles back into the class again and we’ve been discussing recently how to do this. What we really need is someone who actually has a 250 (or bigger) 2-stroke single cylinder road racer all fueled up and ready to go, who might be interested in running with us for a while to showcase the potential of bringing these bikes back under the rules. At the moment the rules are “4 stroke single – no weight or capacity restrictions”. It’d be nice to take the “4 stroke” bit off the front and have the simplest rule book in racing “Single”.

Dave Stewart at ThundersportGB has confirmed that we can offer you a free entry for one of this years rounds, if your interested? You wouldn’t be able to score points at the moment, but that’s not what we’re really about. What we are about it’s getting singles out there and having a good time on and off track. Would you be interested in this?

Regards
Steve Burge