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Fowler Formula racing: Speedsters on a budget

Ken Bingenheimer's photo
Motorcycles Examiner
Stephen Gillen and his CB160
Stephen Gillen and his CB160

Motorcycle racing is notoriously expensive, what with the cost of endless tires, unobtanium parts, and the entourage needed to keep the team competitive.

Or maybe there's a different way to go about this. Isn't there some way that just about anyone can have the fun of racing?

That surely must have been the thinking of Tim Fowler and a couple buddies 20-something years ago when they orchestrated a revival of racing based on Honda CB160 motorcycles. It's a simple concept really: Pick up an old CB160 for free that hasn't run in 20 years, clean it up and fix it up and get it running, and go racing.

The hotbed for CB160 racing has been largely in Washington, Oregon, and northern California, but it has spread to a lesser extent across the country.

Stephen Gillen, of Avondale, AZ, has caught this bug and I talked with him over the weekend at the Bonneville Vintage GP and Concours at Miller Motorsports Park, outside Tooele, UT.

The idea, says Stephen, is to bring a street bike to the track without lights and with a different exhaust and different tires. Whatever you've got laying around can be welded to the frame to reinforce it; rebar works.

"This is some of the cheapest racing around, ever," he says. The key, of course, is getting the bike as inexpensively as possible, as in free or maybe for $50. Stephen rescued his bike from a field where it had sat untended for who knows how many years. It was rusted and the motor had water in it but most of the parts were still on it. Perfect. A "barn fresh" beauty.

The frame on Stephen's bike is recognizable as the original but much of the rest has been customized. He built the tank himself out of aluminum and has tweaked it as he has deemed necessary. And that's really one of the keys to CB160 racing. These machines are so simple you don't even need to be a mechanic to take them apart and fix them and put them back together.

"They're very simple, durable, and bullet-proof," says Stephen. "We ride them hard and put them away wet, over and over and over."

Of course, no one with a pristine show bike is going to do that, so it's a simple fact that "these bikes had a hard life before they came here."

And how do they run? Well, top speed is 85-95 mph, so they're not going to win any World Superbike titles but when you see them on the track there's some ferocious racing going on. This past weekend's event featured a couple CB160-only races with Le Mans starts, but there were also some open class competitions.

"Bigger bikes, like the 350s, will get us in the straight but we'll take them in the corners."

Meanwhile, I didn't run into him but Stephen tells me Tim Fowler is still out there racing his CB160 and was at the track that weekend. If the response to "I want to be a motorcycle racer when I grow up" is "you can't do both," then I guess Tim has made his choice. So has Stephen.

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Bonneville Vintage GP wraps up
Fowler Formula racing: Speedsters on a budget
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Ken Bingenheimer has been in love with motorcycles as long as he can remember and finds Colorado the perfect place to ride. He shares his enthusiasm on his website, Passes and Canyons, Motorcycle Touring in Colorado. Reach him at kenbingenheimer@yahoo.com.

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