The engine tuner
John Floyd has been a motorcycle speed junkie for as long as he can remember. “My addiction started as a five-year-old when I used to climb on motorcycles parked in the street to see how fast the speedo showed,” he says. “At the time, my dad had a Rover V8 and I was always asking him to go as fast as he could...”
At 15, John got his first motorcycle – a Suzuki ER50 – and at 16 was riding a Honda MBX50 on the streets, but very quickly got bored when he could only get 37.5mph on the clock.
“I started spending all my pocket money on parts to go faster – and when I could only get 39mph, I was soon craving more power, more adrenaline,” he remembers.
At 17, he bought a Yamaha RD125LC, tinkered with it enough to get 97mph on the clock and from there the speed addiction snowballed: “I passed my test at 17 and got myself an RD350LC – which I still have – and blew it up in that first week of ownership, just pushing it to the limit. I got a quote from a local garage to rebuild it but just couldn’t afford it, so I decided to rebuild the engine myself and blueprint the components. That made it considerably faster, and so my love for tuning had begun.”
John started racing in 1990 and developed his RD350LC drag bike with great success. By the end of the decade, he had an engine producing 100bhp and could run low nines on the quarter-mile.
In 2002, he started development on a larger-capacity LC engine and, after many hours burning the midnight oil, set a new a world record of 8.87s at 147mph in 2006.
With a bagful of drag racing championships, he’s since run a best time of 8.70s at 149mph over the quarter – which makes his bike the fastest RD in the world – and, under his own banner of ‘Floydy Racing’, now produces engines for other two-stroke fanatics to their own specifications (floydyracing.co.uk).
We spoke to John to discuss what work he’d done on the three bikes we’ve featured.
Vic’s RD375LC
“This engine is a beast! It’s got more of everything. I tuned it to fast road/race spec with blueprinted cylinders, head and crank, race-spec porting and timing, high compression, V-force MX reed blocks, using all high-specification components and Yamaha parts to make this a missile on the road.”
Jonathan’s RD350LC
“This engine arrived in my workshop looking like it had come from the bottom of the sea. Everything was melted away – nylon, rubbers, cables... There was lots of corrosion – all caused by the bike being set alight years before, then being left in the shed to rust away. This engine was blueprinted (matching weight pistons, tolerances checked, matching piston to head clearances, etc) and given a fast road tune using all-new Yamaha-spec components.”
Phil’s TZ/RD350
“His engine turned up with Chinese-made cylinders and lots of issues! We junked the cylinders, then got hold of some original air-cooled Yamaha items, but they were very poorly ported; in other words, bodged! Vic welded the overwidened exhaust port and I sorted the porting work, creating a fast road/race tune. The complete engine has been rebuilt using high-spec original Yamaha parts.