There is nothing on the road — with the exception of a few sports or racing cars — that can catch an artfully hopped-up outlaw 74 as long as there’s room to jam it, or screw it on, and take advantage of the huge engine. Because of its size and basic engineering differences, however, a normally equipped Harley 74 can barely outrun a 305-cubic-centimeter Honda, much less a dual-carburetor Triumph or a BSA. It is not unusual for people who ride these limey bikes to seek opportunities to humiliate a cop on a Harley. But motorcycle cops are wise — they know. Even the California Highway Patrol, in their souped-up Dodges, view a big British bike or an outlaw chopper as an affront to their king-of-the-road image. I was once stopped for speeding by a Highway Patrol car that raced up to within a few feet of my rear fender before I realized I was being followed. The driver hit his siren at the last moment, and naturally I pulled over, somewhat shaken. When I asked him why he’d run up so close behind me, he said, I thought you might try to swing off at that exit and get away.
I said it had never occurred to me — which was true at the time, although it would now. Well, it’s a good thing you didn’t try it, he replied. The last motorcycle punk who tried to run from me got killed. I kept on his tail until he made a mistake, then I ran right over him.
For $1,300 to $1,400 anybody with a yen for death-racing with police cars can buy a motorcycle that will do 120 miles per hour right off the showroom floor. But to get that kind of performance out of a 74 requires considerable effort and skill. The first step is a drastic alteration of the weight-to-power ratio. The Angels strip their hogs down to the bare essentials, even to the extent of removing the front-wheel brake. The stripping alone makes a big difference, but most outlaw bikes are also power-jumped with hot cams, larger valves and increased bore and stroke. The only extras they carry are the ones required by law: a taillight, rear-view mirror and a hand hold for the passenger. A fanatic can satisfy the mirror requirement by using a tiny dentist’s mirror, which is technically legal.
Other modifications include a half-size, custom-designed gas tank, no front fender and a shortened or bobbed rear fender that ends at the top of the wheel; very high handlebars and a little seat so low that it looks like leather pad on top of the engine; extended front forks to lengthen the wheelbase and raise the front end; a foot, or suicide, clutch and a variety of such personal touches as long high-raked mufflers, tiny dual headlights, a bicycle-thin front wheel, tall dagger-designed chrome rails (called sissy bars ) for a passenger hand hold — and every conceivable kind of chrome and flame-paint trim.
A chopper is often a work of art, costing as much as $3,000 to build, not counting labor. From the polished chrome spokes to the perfectly balanced super-light flywheel and the twelve coats of special paint on the gas tank, it is a beautiful, graceful machine and so nearly perfect mechanically that it is hard to conceive of it screaming along some midnight highway in the hands of a drunken hoodlum only moments away from a high-speed crash into a tree or a steel guardrail. This is one of many paradoxes in the Hell’s Angels lore. Whatever they lack in personal grooming, they make up for in spades with their bikes. . . yet any one of them might take a bike he has worked on for six months and destroy it in seconds with a maniacal top-speed run at a curve that’s a guaranteed bust-out at anything over fifty.
This is called going over the high side, a nasty experience which one Angel supposedly described like this: We’ve all been over the high side, baby. You know what that is? It’s when your bike starts sliding when you steam into a curve at seventy or eighty. . . She slides toward the high side of the curve, baby, until she hits a curb or a rail or a soft shoulder or whatever’s there, and then she flips. . . That’s what you call making a classic get-off, baby.