I did a lot of reading and talked my way into teaching courses in Internal Combustion Engine Theory at MSOE. God, I was teaching thermodydnamics. Who would have guessed. I think I might have flunked thermo once. Anyway, I applied my new found knowledge to my bike. Acting as an advisor to senior engineering students we built a cylinder head flow bench and worked on HONDA and Kawasaki cylinder head flow efficiency as student projects. I was actually getting paid to play with my bike. With what I learned, I started tuning and engine building for other HONDA racers and built a small but loyal following. With the business knowledge I was acquiring running the x-ray lab I ran Ken Bergren Racing as a sole proprietor and joined with a couple of other racers to incorporate Lakefront Car and Cycle, both are stories in themselves.
The High Energy Radiography Lab at MSOE operated as a consulting subcontractor for large government contractors like General Dynamics Electric Boat and Westinghouse Bettis. To say that my customers were finicky would be grossly understating their sophistication and the scope of the accountability required. I ran it as a commercial business for seven years, with up to 10 employees, all of whom had to be trained, tested and certified to military standards. As part of that responsibility I became certified under MIL-STD271D as a Test Examiner, which meant that I was certified to train and certify people who take radiographs of things and to analyze the results, looking for minute flaws. These were submarine and nuclear reactor parts we’re taking about. I also worked on huge valves for the California water project, bringing the water from the mountains down to LA so the population density could grow to an unsustainable level. My contribution to the environment.
That year I also met the true love of my life. Adriane Ruth Brodkin. We've been together ever since.
By 1978 the defense business was poor and commercial nuclear was dead so I was forced to close the radiography business. I could’t teach enough hours to make ends meet so I took a job with Ron Hoettles at Speed Engineering Service and spent a year building engine prototypes. This included pattern making, core making, jig building, machining, finishing, assemble, first run and dynamometer testing. Projects included a 20hp industrial V-twin and a V-8 USAC Midgets engine derived from two 4-cylinder motorcycle engines. This was a wonderful year of learning at the side of one of the countries top engine designers. He was a seat of the pants kind of guy who could not calculate a bending moment to win a bet but if he eyeballed a rod thickness it would be right on if you did the calculations. If it was for an industrial pump engine it was just right for the job. If it was for a race engine it was just right. Both engine projects were commercially successful in production. I can take credit for giving Hoettles the idea for the Kawasaki V8 while we were driving back from Sonny Meyer’s Indy Car shop in Indianapolis. He picked my brain about engine dimensions and I got to listen to him think out loud.
You could not buy education at that level.
World's first Kawasaki V8
In the late fall of '79, I let Greg Meyer talk me into leaving SESCO and helping him get the serious engineering flaws out of a limited production roadster project that he had talked a group of lawyers into bank rolling. The roadster, called the Centaur, was to use a new Pontiac Grand Prix as a donor car and fiberglass and cast brass coach works. Absolutely no one new what they were doing. They offered more than Hoettles was paying me so I took it.
I relocated the engine to solve a pinion angle drive train problem, designed adequate motor mounts, doorposts, door latches, fuel tank protection, power window regulators and many other components.
I created button door locks and adapted the GM door latching system to the roadster's suiside doors.
I then contracted a commercial steel fabricator to produce burnouts and soft-tooled stampings to reduce production costs and redesigned casting patterns to reduce casting flaws in the massive grill shell. In addition, I produced a detailed bill of materials for the entire car, detailing donor parts, fabricated components and purchased supplier parts. A shame I never kept a copy.
American Classic eventually sold 52 cars, only losing $10,000 per car. They actually sold more cars than the legendary Tucker and actually lost less money per car, but it was a serious life lesson for those lawyers nonetheless. IIt was a great learning experience for me as well but I was on straight salary and the bottom line was not my responsibility. By the time they went belly up I was selling engine test cell instrumentation and dynamometers for Taylor Dynomometer, anyway. It was 1981, Rusty my youngest son was born and I had sold my drag bike. I quit building motorcycle engines and learned sales by traveling the eastern half of the US and Canada cold calling Caterpillar, Cummins and Detroit Diesel engine shops.
You haven't cold called until you have done it in Queens or Newark. The instrumentation got me thinking about electronics again and introduced me to what they called board computers at the time. Micro-computers with the 8080 or Z80 microprocessor. I bought a Commodore VIC 20 and learned Microsoft Basic. I sold my machinists tools and went into the computer business and couldn't afford any car toys for a long time.
One night we were “sellin’ wuf tickets”, doin' burnouts and showing off at the quarter car wash when the cops took issue with our games and the small but boisterous crowd.of onlookers. The car wash in Maywood was known as a hangout for Black automotive enthusiasts. Bottom line, I was kicked out of Maywood for being white. Oh, did I mention that Morris was black? Well, he’s African-American now and an administrator in state government in Madison WI. Most of my Chicago friends at the time were "brothers". Except BJ, my good friend from college who returned from his Army draft tour that summer.. BJ bought a 750 HONDA within a couple of weeks of riding mine. He didn't race at all. He was still in the staying live mode motorcyclewise.
Even with a stock motor I could surprise most muscle cars of the era, especially in a two or three block street race.
I discovered that a bike could smoke a car for the first eight-mile but then aerodynamics favors the car. So Morris and I made some money on the West Side, taking advantage of our knowledge that quarter mile times published in magazines have very little to do with street performance. The muscle car guys just weren’t ready for a crotch rocket.
The Chicago West Side ‘71
After finally getting a BSEE degree from Milwaukee School of Engineering, I went to work for the Veterans Administration at Hines, Illinois, a huge medical research facility and hospital on Chicago’s west side. I was doing primarily computer programming and radiation dosimetry mixed with some basic circuit design. My wife had just split with the boys after a couple of months in our swell Maywood triplex rental unit and I had nothing to do but work, which surprised the hell of the bureaucracy. They bought a PDP 8 from DEC equipped with what we would today call beta1 software for depth dose calculations. I jumped on that computer and spent the winter learning FORTRAN, FOCAL, DEC Assemblerr and playing with a wonderful new toy. My own personal computer. Calculating dosages for the 25 Mev Betatron, doing gamma spectrum analysis of radioisotopes on a state of the art mutichannel anylizer, thermoluminesent dosimetery and exit dose analysis.
Having no health care exposure beyond a bio-medical engineering elective, I was given a certified x-ray technician to help me with patient interaction and clinical procedures. Samuel Morris Neely RT.
Morris was just back from being a medic in Viet Nam. He rode hughies to work was what he did for his first tour then took a second tour in a hospital somewhere in that shit hole. He was a Chicago street racer that ran a chevy 427 powered 1965 Buick Skylark convertible. He bought a used 750 HONDA K0 motorcycle as his new secret weapon on the street and let me ride it. I was hooked big time. In the summer of ’71, I bought a brand new HONDA K1 750 and survived keeping up with Morris as I learned to ride in Chicago traffic. We became fast friends.
A Seventies Motorhead
When Sex Was Safe and Racing Was Dangerous™
That led to my making special radiation field shaping devices known as wedges that worked in conjunction with my computer programs to improve the quality of radiation therapy in cancer treatment. It also allowed me to make aluminum setback foot pegs, adjustable fork dampeners, a wheel truing jig and other handling goodies. The engine had more than enough power for me then.
So here is how bracket racing works. It stems from the fact that at any local track there are some awesome machines that are much faster than you. And there are some guys with cars that are slower than you. If you were to race against some guy with four times the cubic dollar investment as you and always loose it would get boring very quickly. Bracket racing provides handicapped starts to equalize the car differences.What you do is kick an elapsed time that you think you can run consistently. The other guy picks n elapsed time that he thinks he can run consistently. The difference between the to E.Ts determines the the headstart given to the slower car. The "Christmas Tree" starting lights display the difference. So if I have dialed in an ET of 11.50 sec. and you dialed in an 11.80 ET you would get a 0.30sec. head start. Here's the kicker: If you run quicker than your dial-in ET you "break out" and lose automatically. Now, the thing to remember is that he who gets there first wins. You start your own clock when you move forward at the start.so you have to read the lights and "cut a good light". Zero reaction time is what you want and most afficianados run close to zero reaction time. That is, how long after the light goes green do you start your clock by moving forward. Cutting a good light requires anticipation. Naturally, if you leave early you "red light" and lose.
Consistancy is the key. My best time ever was 11.51 at 118.4mph. I usually dialed in around 11:80 and, as I mentioned before, managed nine consecutive places within .03 seconds of eachother. I broke out and ran an 11.78 in the final round and lost to a car called the Sod Buster. He took home the $1000 top prize and I was runner up at $500. The entry fee was $15.00 and you had to dial in 12.50 or quicker. They had no trouble getting 256 cars every Saturday night. There were guys with cars running low nines and cars at 12.50. Just image, you get a two second head start from a pro stock car that comes by you in the traps at 185 mph. Yeah, you are going 120mph and he comes by like a freight train. His wind would make the bike shake. What a rush!
