Building a motorcycle-powered land speed record streamliner race car from scratch is an ordeal. Just ask Superfast Matt, who has been working on his for a couple of years now. When it comes to race cars, it’s almost always better, faster, and cheaper to buy someone’s finished project than to kick off your own. Which is why the Screamliner, recently posted for sale on Racing Junk and conveniently located just 35 miles from my house, is so appealing. According to the listing this machine has already passed tech, so it must be ready to rock and roll, right?
This long tube car is powered by a Yamaha YZF-R1 engine, and while the listing doesn’t say which R1 engine is used, you can probably bet it’s an early fuel-injected example making around 180 horsepower. The listing is surprisingly short on information and the photos are incredibly poor, so there’s not much to glean from this other than the car looks complete, it’s allegedly ready to go, and it’ll probably come cheap. Here is every word the seller has written about the car.
r1 powered 1000cc class car has passed tech
make your best deal it has to go
What does I/FS mean on the rear stabilizers? That’s the car’s classification, which determines what record the car would be aiming for. The I is the car’s displacement, which must be between 46 and 61.99 cubic inches, which in cubic centimeters is 1,015, so the R1’s 998ccs falls inside the upper limit. F means this is a “fuel” car, running on anything other than gasoline, including nitromethane, E85, nitrous oxide, or anything that isn’t standard pump gas. And the S is for streamliner. If the SCTA’s website is up to date, the current I/FS record is an astonishing 266.166 miles per hour, set way back in 2012.
In stock form a 2006 Yamaha R1 was capable of 177 miles per hour. Motorcycles are not particularly aerodynamic, and the bike’s gearing was set in a way to promote acceleration numbers over top speed. With a bit of tweaking to optimize the engine for a higher octane fuel and a shot of nitrous, there’s no reason a properly aerodynamic 200-ish horsepower machine couldn’t achieve some pretty impressive speeds. Will it go 266 and take the record? There’s really only one way to find out.
There’s no price listed, how low should I ball?