The Carolinas’ Full Throttle Magazine
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Meth Beth Earth’s Quickest & Fastest M-8 Story and photo by: Alan Dockery n the more than
30 years I’ve been writing about Harley drag bikes, I’ve always dug the fact that the strip determines the best machines. The baddest machines in all kinds of racing don’t always come from the biggest shops. Shoot, I remember when I was a kid and Richard Petty’s shop was behind the house down the road from my Papa. I could ride dirt bikes there and see the race cars we heard on the radio coverage while sitting under a shade tree with the grownups. Enough nostalgia, this is 2020 and Michael Beland, owner of A1 Cycles near Maiden, NC, is fixing to race the quickest and fastest Harley-Davidson Milwaukee-Eight Bagger Drag Bike on the planet. And he ain’t doing it in any old fashioned ways. The bike he calls “Meth Beth” was on the lift and getting a durability upgrade when I dropped off April issues of The Carolinas’ Full Throttle Magazine. I love drag bikes; the chest-rattling Nitro Fuel Bikes are cool. But I’ve always dug gas bikes, especially with no wheelie bars. The growth of Harley bagger racing has brought more of these type bikes to the strip. At the All Harley Drag Racing Association events “Meth Beth” will run in the Extreme Bagger Class. A1 Cycles is sponsoring the class in 2020. In the Hogs Gone Wild series Mike will compete in Pro Street. Both of these are the top
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MICHAEL BELAND
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classes and draw the baddest big motor street-type Harley drag bikes to the strip. “Meth Beth” came into A1 Cycles as a 2017 FLH Street Glide,” Mike said, “We built the M-8 Motor to 150 cubic inches. 4.77 stroke by 4.50 inch bore. Plus 2 mm on intake and exhaust valves. We used a 62 mm HPI intake manifold and throttle body. A TRASK Turbo plenum. Frank Drago custom ground turbo cam, only 520 lift. Hydraulic lifters and adjustable push rods. Some of the same stuff you have in your street bike makes up the motor.” Oh yeah, not only did Mike build the motor to 150 cubic inches, he boosted Beth with a turbo. That’s a 52 mm Bullseye Turbo unit from Michigan you see on the right side. TRASK Performance Turbos in Arizona, Nick Trask, provided the plenum. The part that supplies the boost to the throttle body. Mike built all the real clean tight piping for the turbo system. I noticed there ain’t an intercooler on “Meth Beth”. And that folks is where the name comes from. Mike runs a special newto-me VP race gas, C85. It’s similar to the E85 in some gas pumps, 85% Ethanol and 15% Gasoline. “High alcohol fuels run cooler since the stoichiometric ratio is 9.1 to 1 while gasoline is 14.7 to 1,” Mike said. “It requires more fuel to make the same amount of energy. But what is carried with the ethanol is much cooler temperatures. Cooler intake charge so you can run more timing with a turbo at boost. So I can run without an intercooler.” “The next step for “Meth Beth” will be full methanol fuel. But methanol requires a full system clean out from tank to pump to injectors after a race,” Mike said. It seems that
