Bad For Good Racing


Jim Owen at the Starting Line

What do you call a guy who runs into burning buildings to save lives, Drag races a fast ’55 Chevy at the local strip, and sets new Motorcycle Land Speed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats on his Street bike???
I call him Jimmy!
I have known Jim Owen for 20 years. We have done a little motorcycling, a little drag racing, spent some quality time wandering junkyards looking for rusty treasure, and downed a few beers in between. These days Jimmy earns his living as a Professional Firefighter in Iron Mountain, Michigan.

Jim forst ran competition classes at Bonneville at World of Speed ’00 with a new Kawasaki ZX-12R and ran 187.219 against a production class (PP/1350) record of 202.708

in 2001 Jimmy brought the same Kawasaki to the Salt, but he had added a Nitrous Oxide Injection system to his ride. The Nitrous system moved his bike from the PP 1350 class into the MPS/F1350 class (Modified Partial Streamliner / Fuel 1350cc). The existing record in this class stood at 196.512, a pretty snappy number for a street legal motorcycle. After making a couple of checkout runs without using the Nitrous Oxide System (191.250), Jimmy punched the nitrous button on his third pass, netting a record qualifying run of 202.146. Bonneville rules require a backup record run with the two run speeds being averaged to determine the record speed. Jimmy’s backup run was even hotter at 203.167 for a new record average of 202.656 MPH. He was immediately inducted into the prestigious 200 MPH Club.

In 2006 Jim returned to World of Speed with a new Notrous tuneup and raised the MPS/F 1350cc Motorcycle Land Speed Record. The previous class record set by Jim Owen in 2003 was 213.491 MPH. Jim raised that record with a two way average Flying Mile speed of 219.555 MPH. His second run of the required two way average was 220.042 MPH which earned Jim the prestigious Fastest Motorcycle of the Meet 2006 Award.


In the “Good Old Days” a motorcycle was advertised by its proud manufacturer as able to go “A Mile a Minute”.
Jims 220 MPH Flying Mile took exactly 16.360 seconds, according to the precision timing slip.

Jim Owen’s motorcycle is a street legal and regularly ridden 2000 Kawasaki ZX-12R, specially modified by Jim Owen to create additional power by injecting a monstrous dose of nitrous oxide. It is also notable that Jim attributes his success at Bonneville to his old school style of doing all modifications and tuning himself. He has perfected his Nitrous Oxide injection system thru painstaking hours of flow testing Nitrous and gasoline jets to find precisely matched sets, and carefully evaluating, polishing and blueprinting each component in the system. In a day and age where it seems so easy to take a motorcycle to an “Expert” and hire the work done, Jim finds his keys to success at this level of performance to be “elbow grease, dirty hands and personal attention to detail”.

All this was accomplished without any sponsorship. Jimmy’s racing operation goes by the name of “Bad for Good Racing” taken from a line out of a Meatloaf tune. This is as grassroots as racing gets. To learn more about World of Speed, visit www.saltflats.com .

One more thing, if you should be unfortunate enough to wake to a fire in the night, you can rest assured that a Firetruck load of Jimmy’s are on the way to bail you out. Is this a great country or what??


Jim Plans to return and run against his own record at World of Speed 2010