Posted on Wed, Sep. 22, 2004


Tale of the 205-mph biker takes your breath away

JOE SOUCHERAY

Last Saturday a State Patrol pilot, Al Loney, was watching motorcyclists on Highway 61 near Wabasha. Saturday was the day of the Flood Run, a twice-annual informal motorcycle ride on both sides of the river. The event has grown so large over the years that the coppers turn out in force and even put a bird in the air.

Historians of the Flood Run have told me that it started in 1965 when a group of motorcyclists from the Twin Cities went to Winona to help with the sandbagging efforts during the memorable spring floods that year.

It is truly an amazing event for one reason. It has no committees or corporate officers or meetings. I don't how they arrive at the dates or who arrives at them but the word gets out and off they go, once in the spring and once again in the fall. The fire departments and VFWs in the little towns up and down the Wisconsin and Minnesota sides of the Mississippi fill the taps and roll out the bratwurst carts.

In fact, I was in Lake City Saturday morning and the parade of bikes through town was endless. Up above that morning was Loney. He figured that the two bikes he was most interested in were racing each other and he decided to time one of them with a stopwatch. He did. He timed a motorcycle at 4.39 seconds for a quarter mile, or 205 miles per hour.

Good God. A state record speeding ticket. The Vikings players who arrived at training camp last month with new Ferraris and Lamborghinis might hit 200 mph. A Porsche Carrera? Probably.

The culprit turned out be Samuel Armstrong Tilley, 20, of Stillwater, who is either completely goofy or is a professional, there often being little distinction if you have seen a professional drag his knee around an S-curve. I guess young Sam isn't talking. He got a ticket for driving 140 miles over the posted limit of 65. I left a call for Tilley's father, Dean, a Washington County sheriff's deputy.

In the motorcycling world, everybody wants to know what this kid was riding.

According to the patrol, Tilley was riding a Honda 1000, but there are a couple of bikes that fit under that loose description. Chances are he was riding one of the jungle-gym bikes. Some people call them "crotch rockets,'' or street bikes, but to me they look like jungle gyms, a couple of bars at odd angles with an engine in the middle.

My idea of a motorcycle is anything that invokes the imagery of, say, delivering a message to the front in World War II. I guess it is the mystique I am after and not the speed. I know you shouldn't celebrate a lawbreaker, but my hat is off to the Tilley fellow for merely still being alive. I went off a bike once at about 8 miles an hour and laid there like a fish that had been tossed onto the beach, gasping for air. If you went off one at 205 I think you are arranging services.

I called the fellows at Honda Town on Lake Street in Minneapolis. Honda Town is a true, old-style motorcycle shop, meaning there is oil on the floor in the back room. The Tilley story was definitely the talk around the coffeemaker. Doug Millay, one of the mechanics, said that there isn't a bike out of a Honda box that would go 205 miles per hour.

"I'll tell you what,'' Millay said. "I would wonder about the accuracy of the radar or the guy's watch.''

There is that.

"I mean, yes, if he had a turbo on it or it was supercharged, it is possible,'' Millay said, "but road racers on straightaways might get to, oh, I don't know, 215 maybe.''

I wish to inform the State Patrol that they don't have to send a plane up for guys my age. I am properly terrified at the posted limit.