"Seven" is my latest painting for Brock's Performance of his record setting "7" second Street Legal Drag bike. A Drag Racing Milestone accomplished, coming up on 20 years now! As always, I hid some details in there for you to discover. I love the opportunity to paint Motorcycle History! Thanks Brock! - Eric Herrmann

About the process:

American made product printed in house at the artist's studio using a vapor phase transfer process, where the ink turns to gas under heat and pressure. The gas then impregnates the image onto the surface of the aluminum. Enjoy lasting beauty with this extremely durable, lightweight, and scratch resistant surface. Comes complete with hardware and ready to hang.

About the artist:

Educated at Triton College of Fine Art in suburban Chicago and Arizona State University, Eric holds a BFA in Graphic Design with studies in painting and printing technology as well. With his formal training completed, at which he excelled, he moved in to the business world of art. Successful ventures over the years included a graphics firm, several screen printing businesses, and a product design firm. Tiring of the business grind and longing to return to his artwork, Eric and wife Suzanne sold the business so he could concentrate full time on his paintings. He quickly realized that to become a world-class artist, you need to paint what you know.

Having ridden bikes for over forty years, painting them and the biker lifestyle is a natural for Eric. A lifetime of experiences at any race around, from the drag strip to an oval track, has given Eric the understanding of what it takes to go racing as well. His knowledge of the subjects is what makes an Eric Herrmann painting stand-alone. He has won acclaim for not only his depiction of vehicles, but his use of composition and color as well. Collectors and corporations in over forty countries worldwide seek after Eric’s art. His art has been shown at The Petersen Museum in Los Angeles, The American Motorcycle Association Museum in Ohio, The San Diego Automotive Museum, and numerous galleries throughout the world. Eric exhibits his work at all the major motorcycle events as well as numerous racing venues annually. His artwork is used for advertisements, novels, menus, clothing lines, collectible coin sets, and fine art prints. Eric’s commissioned paintings include work for Jack Daniel’s, The Barrett-Jackson Auto Auction, Discount Tire Co., The Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and numerous other motorcycle and automotive related corporations. His art frequently appears in magazines such as Easyriders, Hot Bike, American Rider, The Robb Report, and Phoenix Magazine.

Eric’s original paintings take from three to five months to complete. They are all done by hand with only a brush on canvas and acrylic paint. Large in scale, averaging four foot by five foot, Eric’s originals have sold for over $70,000.00. All original paintings have been sold, and a waiting list usually exists. Eric and wife Suzanne reside in Cave Creek Arizona with sons Ian and Dustin, C-4, the Doberman, six motorcycles, several cars, trucks, quads, trailers...

Good morning! I have a treat for you this morning. It's something I've been thinking about doing for a very long time. Some of you are very familiar with this bike and some of you weren't born yet when this bike really did some pretty cool stuff. A little brief history. For those of you who don't know, this is my 1997 Suzuki Bandit and it was officially the first street-legal motorcycle to break into the seven-second zone in the quarter-mile. I've got stories galore that I'll get to, but what I wanted to do today is just give you an overview of the bike and today is May 22nd here, so be gentle. 20 years ago today was this is the anniversary the 20th anniversary of getting into the 7's so I'm gonna take you guys for a ride. We're gonna take the bike into work, we're gonna talk stories, like so let me go ahead and sort of tell you a little bit about the bike. Most people are really surprised when they hear that a Suzuki Bandit was the first bike into the sevens. You had gs-1150s, you had GSX-R's There were so many other bikes that were competing, turbo ZX-11's, there were a lot of bikes that could make a lot of power back then, so we chose a Bandit ... and i talked about this in one other video... because we had some advantages. Basically the class rules were that you had a 68-inch wheelbase, street tire, and no wheelie bars - the bike had to be self-starting and self-reliant. In order to test that, we would actually go on a 25-mile road course. If you made it the 25 miles you turned your bike off, and then you turned it back on and it fired up under power. That qualified you to drag race the bike. If you couldn't do that. We actually had a lead and chase bike. If you passed the lead bike, you were out ...if the chase bike passed you, you were out. Some guys got flat tires, some bikes overheated... just all kinds of stuff but anyway... so after that 25 miles, then we would start to qualify and we would run the class in a regular drag race format. I chose the Bandit because it had some advantages over the GSX-R, namely the chassis. I'm just gonna go through the bike and what's been done to it. A Bandit starts off as, I think the rear wheel on our dyno. They're not a very strong engine, but they were based on the air /oil-cooled GSX-R 1100. A good platform, so a lot of the parts would interchange and we would just use the ones from the GSX-R that we needed. Chassis wise... first thing I did. I went to Terry Macintosh and I said, listen I want to rake the steering neck, but when we rake it, we don't want to put it way out forward because that would move our center of gravity back - we want to actually, pull it in, maybe throw a little rake in it for stability, because this bike is fast. This bike's been 185 miles per hour in a quarter-mile... but we also want to pull the forks back, because with a set wheelbase of 68 inches the further this comes back, the longer the swing arm can be and still get that 68 inches. So, if you want to zoom in, you can see here we had it so close that it actually rubbed a hole in the exhaust at one point trying to figure everything out. We had to be really precise with these bikes because once you got to a certain point... you couldn't go any faster - so you had to figure out what needed to go on. From an engine standpoint, the cylinder head is brutally simple. Stock valve seats. I'd run a 30 millimeter intakes and we'd actually put 26 millimeter exhausts on the stock seats, which hung over the seats a little bit, but the the problem with aftermarket seats is they always wanted to fall out. And then the cylinder heads... I learned from racing Pro Mod way back in the day that I can spend five grand on the trickest cylinder head ever and then make one nitrous tune-up mistake and melt it and destroy it. It yanks the wallet out of my pocket, so I just quit doing that. I ported my own cylinder heads with a hand drill and a cartridge roll - right? Just to basically match stuff up, because the other thing I realized after nitrous racing for so many years is it just doesn't matter, right? what we wanted to do was build an engine that was extremely strong , we were gonna make mistakes - so we knew we were going to tear stuff up- so we tried to keep it economical. I can port one of those heads in about 45 minutes, it just didn't take much, then we put in some Bob Carpenter valve springs - do a valve job just for the bigger valves and then just dump as much nitrous oxide to it as we could figure out how to put in... until we blew it up, we fixed it, we made it stronger, so that we could put more in... you see a pattern? Alright so this engine... actually it's got a seven millimeter Falicon on billet stroker crank - which didn't fit. The stuff you had to do... I wish I could take this thing apart... but we had to machine the connecting rod that the Carrillo h-beam connecting rod caps we had to machine them thinner. Machine the bolt heads off. Grind out it all inside of here, and because that crank just was never meant to fit or anything close to it. We've got 86 millimeter MTC pistons, tool steel wrist pins, the bikes displacement went from 1157cc's to 1570cc's and I kept making it bigger. The bore got bigger, not only did it give you a little more torque to help the bike leave, but it gave you a bigger hole to shove more nitrous into... because nitrous racing is all about how much you can put in. We'll move back. We've got 41-millimeter Keihin flat slide carbs. You know because I really did I ride this bike on the street. I put 400 miles on it at Bike Week 2000. I've got pictures of the bike, riding it in the sand- I you know on and Daytona Beach. So we've got simple carburetors. Nitrous Express. One of my very first sponsors, I really like those guys. They made a hell of a nitrous kit and basically, what we did, we took the Pro Mod motorcycle kit. Pro Comp - Pro Mod I guess depending on what you want to call it. But I mean these kits were designed for big old car tire bikes with wheelie bars and you could just put as much power to them as you wanted to. In my first stage of nitrous, I've got it set at about a hundred and fifty horsepower. The engine makes about 200, but like said, it's really strong. So you take a 200 horsepower engine stuff 150 more to it... and so and how does that get applied? A lot of guys put stuff on timers and gear shift counters and all this stuff... well the problem with that was is if you've got your nitrous in a timer... your timer has no idea if you screwed up the launch and you’re on a wheelie, so the last thing in the world you want in the middle of fighting a wheelie is to have your nitrous come on all by itself! Right? That's crazy (!) So we have a wide open throttle switch, my nitrous is in the starter button - so basically all I had to do was launch the bike, tote the front wheel and as soon as I felt that wheel start to go down -- stab the nitrous button. And of course, if you just throw 150 horsepower directly to it just (wheelies violently) right? Sliding down the track. We used a progressive nitrous controller, which I'll show you... which allowed us to slowly bring the nitrous in and the secret was to time it to where ... wheelies are your enemy on a no wheelie bar bike... right? Pretty straightforward, but we would time it and we've ramped the nitrous out so once that front wheel would drop down, we'd stab the nitrous, it pick it up again - go forward hit the air shifter more nitrous is coming in... go forward and I mean on a good run this bike would it would tote the front wheel damn near to the eighth-mile. On a really nice smooth run. So anyway, moving back, the clutch. We use the GSX-R clutch. It's got an MTC billet basket, a single-stage lockup. Our very first clutch cushion that I ever designed is right in here... and then we had a nitrous back-cut transmission from Mark at R&D Motorsports. The problem with nitrous was is once you started putting those really big loads in there, that everything would just get distorted. The cases would get distorted, we were breaking crankshafts - and to stop breaking cranks we put a big block in. Because as you're going down the track, and the nitrous is pushing down on the crank, it was flexing the crank and causing it to break. So when we put that big block in there, it made it a lot more rigid. You could press down harder, you didn't break your crank and then break your cases. Mark at R&D, Ii we went an entire season without being able to shift in to high gear. And we basically figured out that with a back cut transmission it was sucking the gears over so hard that the shift the pin on the shift fork, was getting bound up. So we started to relieve the shift drum, let that move around, let it be a little looser next thing you know we've got a bike the shifts consistently all the way down the track. Our very first drag shock, working with Ohlins, is down there. That was critical - one of the things that happens, when you put a big long swingarm on a bike like this, when you go to launch it if you search the internet you'll see... if you launch, the spring will compress. Well once the spring compresses, it will actually bounce back, and the whole the rear wheel will come off the ground. There's pictures of guys leaving the line, their front wheel is in the air, their back wheel is in the air because they couldn't control that the spring bounce. Because yeah, when you've got all this leverage, you've got to have a heavy spring. Well if you've got a heavy spring it's gonna want to spring back... so I went to Ohlins and we put the shock on a shock dyno. I said listen, guys, I need a lot more rebound damping - which means I want to really slow down how that bike comes back. We couldn't do it with just valving, even with an off-the-shelf Ohlins shock ...which is a really good shock. We had to change the piston and revalve it, and by the time we did that, we got it slowed down so much that when we put it on the shock dyno, the guys from Ohlins actually left the room because they were afraid we were gonna blow the shock up! Because instead of building 250 pounds of compression damping force, we built 2,000 pounds of compression dampening force! So what that allowed us to do was - win that bike squatted -and if you've seen our suspension videos before we could crank up that rebound and that thing would come up nice and slow. We could keep it planted going forward, on a perfect pass this bike would squat and... you can see this little notch here, that showed me if I was squatting too much, right? I've torn these things all up so if it squats too much the tires hitting in here, that's friction you don't want that, so on a perfect pass this would barely touch. We had a shaved oil plug and that oil pug plug would go down, touch the track, and peel a little layer a rubber off and it would stick to the bottom of the of the engine. On a perfect pass. This bike back then, and it's a full-blown street bike, you can tell we didn't take a bunch of things off. I've still got to all the instruments, the speedo, the fuel gauge... I really did ride the bike on the street. To have all this stuff working correctly was was the secret. This bike would run 130... I think I did a 136 60 foot. Hand clutch with a single-stage lock-up. Put a Multistage in this thing and it would be in the 120s. But with a hand clutch 130s - 60 foot 134. I think my best ever was 132 which was pretty good back then. McIntosh made the arm and then, you’re going to hear a lot about Mickey Thompson. Those guys came in and actually developed and I was part of the tire testing crew... they developed a tire for drag racing because this bike. We were using the old Yokohama's and spending $1,000 for a worn out Yokohama because it was the only thing that would get us down the track. And even with those tires, at my home track when I would practice... the thousand foot club. The guys sitting at the thousand-foot club, they loved taking videos of me going across the finish line because the bike white smoked the tire at a thousand-foot. All the way across the quarter-mile mark. Like the old dragsters did back in the day - right? We just didn't have enough of traction. Mickey Thompson was kind enough to do the development and come up with a tire that could take the power that we were creating. So, real quick what I'll do...let me pull off the seat here and show you some of the stuff from back in the day. All right, so this is what it takes. We didn't have lithium batteries back, then we had a regular battery. We had to have a bunch of relays. We pulled off the stock ignition and used old Dyna 2000 which let us adjust the timing and adjust our ignition curve. The Schnitz Racing controller... this thing was so instrumental in getting us into the on... it actually retained all of its settings. This bike sat for 10 years but you've got. What do we got? Nitrous start percent - then the final percent 95 - we actually figured out that the bike made a little bit more power. Not sure if it was because of the pulsing of the solenoids or what, but anyway, you'll also notice ample use of butt connectors. And you know, everybody will tell you oh you know, you've got to have solid. You've got to have solder connections, or you know, they'll go bad. Not if you do a butt connection correctly, if you've got the Destako tool, with a little the little pointy crimper. 20 years ago I wired this bike and you'll see here in a minute that of all of the electronics and wiring works just fine. One other thing, and this is the best... this is for a $4 air compressor from Kmart! A 20 year old $4 air compressor from Kmart, and what that is for is to fill the air shifter. You need pressure to be able to use the air shifter and basically what this does - it takes the place of your foot I fill it up. Come over here, I usually use about 140 psi and then... so with an electric shift they're great right? You've got the gas wide open and you don't touch the clutch, and you lift up and your bike shifts. Well the problem with drag racing is when you're doing a half G's. Your legs weigh a couple hundred pounds apiece! And you're not really in a big hurry to get them on the pegs. Because I use my feet as feelers it's sort of almost like in the swimming pool, right? When you're a kid, if your feet touch you're okay, if your feet don't touch then you don't really know where you're at. Well we use our feet as feelers so that's why, with the air shifter, we hold the gas wide-open, and we let the clutch out. And then I just press my horn button and the bike shifts. And it does it with a lot of nitrous oxide in it... it's really sort of violent and fun! But anyway, enough talking. I'm gonna go ahead and gear up here and we'll chat. Now one of the things we'll chat about is Mickey Thompson came up with a first in the seven-second club. You can see here, me, Johnnie Locklear, Ryan Schnitz, Keith Dennis, Duck Lauer, Randy Waters and Tom Miceli. There were seven members of the Mickey Thompson seven-second club. I got my jacket... this was a long time ago ... I was quite a bit smaller. I got a custom jacket here that I very proudly. No very very very proudly wore to the next race because I was the only one that had the jacket. So I could go up to guys like Johnny Locklear and Keith Dennis and go - hey man what's up? Who's fast? (Ha-ha) Anyway we're gonna go have some fun I'll chat with you more on the ride. I'm gonna go ahead and suit up, and see you in a few. All right, here we are, we're gonna go ahead and fire it up. Here, I want to show you this. This bikes got 20 years of license plate stickers on it! I don't ride it much, but I like having the ability to just jump on it and go if I like. It's exactly how it was when we ran the first seven second pass. You saw the lithium battery. I went ahead and put some Sprint Filters on it, just so we'd keep the air clean. I have a baffle I'm though about sticking in, but I decided that that was a little boring. We're gonna go ahead and run it ... go ahead and run it open. Oh! And let's just turn on the nitrous, why not? I might feel a little froggy during the ride. Alright, here we go! I'll give it a little squirt. Ah, I love this bike. We had some rain earlier, so I'm gonna have to watch the roads. Really fast bikes and wet roads don't work out sometimes. Yes she's a little lopey - that's one thing, webcam made us some cams and I didn't run the real high lift. You don't need to with nitrous you, just need to put a bunch of nitrous in there. I know, I keep saying that but I mean a whole lot of nitrous in a very reliable engine. As soon as we went above about 380 lift is started chewing up rocker arms and doing bad stuff. So. It also has a pretty tall gearing to keep the front end on the ground Of course, as you can see we have the tracking vehicle in front of us. Which is going to be a big nuisance, so I'm gonna have to get around him. All right, let's just go play. (Devilish laugh) wow, this thing is brutal - I forgot how fast this damn thing was. And what you saw up there, of course, was my shift light. We have a bike with a sidewinder... dragging a knee into a right hand corner is a really bad idea! All right, now we've got a left-hand corner but we are slammed, so we can't really take it too seriously. You can see, we've still got a little water on the road here...trying to find a road here that's not so wet. All right, so talk about the air shifter. So basically, all I'm gonna do is press the horn button and the bikes gonna shift like magic. I remember the first time I pressed an air shifter button... I just giggled like a schoolgirl. No need to let off the gas, it works great for wide-open, high rpm shifts. Like I said, you can shift the entire quarter-mile without ever even putting your feet up, if you don't want to. Oh, we got a little traction that time. All right, you can't go for a ride on a seven-second bike without making a run... Let’s see what we can do... we got a little bit in there... pump up the shifter, looking for a hundred and forty and just for shits and giggles, let's arm the nitrous. Oh yeah... now we're all ready, great news is that we've got a car... and another car... here we go! A little suspension and tire pressure adjustment... and I just didn't have enough traction to be able to use the spray on that one. A bit of adjustment and we'd be right in business. Get this thing to hook on the street at 68 inches... it's crazy; All right, let's see if we can get her done... nope...gonna have to leave a little softer than that. hahaha. Well if you can't go fast, you might as well have fun. So, let's talk about the street bike shootout class. It was an AMA Prostar class. It originally started out as the cycle world street bike shootout. It was a once a year event, that the Godfather no wheelie bar street tire bikes- Kent Stotz originally got started, I believe it was within Nick Lenatsch? It was a once a year event. The problem with once a year was, if you won it. I won it in 1996. I mean if you had a problem, you had to wait an entire year to race again. So they ended up making it the streetbike shootout class official. The unlimited class was basically run what you brung as long as you were 68 inches and could pass the road course, you're good to go. turbo,nitrous turbo and nitrous nitromethane. Pick it... it doesn't matter whatever you want to run so long as you could pass the road course. I really enjoyed streetbike shootout because, I mean this is a full blow7 second race bike that I'm riding around on...instead of it sitting over in the corner of my garage, where once a month I go to a national event, throw thousands of dollars at it...break it and it sits over in the corner of the garage after the race, or in the trailer with the tires going flat until I can come up with enough money to fix it and go out again. The thing about the streetbike classes are, you can actually get some enjoyment out of these bikes when you're not at the racetrack, and I loved it. It was really perfect for me. The class got very popular. I want you to picture this... a 25 mile road course and all of the classes they had stock wheelbase , they had modified and they had unlimited. We would all compete in the these bikes, slammed on the ground, stretched, sidewinder pipes.... and the the biggest road course was in Indianapolis. We would go along the road racecourse, along their oval they’ve got a 3/8 or 1/2 mile asphalt oval. And we would just follow each other...well you know what happens when drag racers get next to each other? Or any competitive racer gets next to each other ... it doesn't matter whether - it's a 25 mile road race course or out on the street, or next to each other in the quarter mile... they're gonna screw around! So part of Indy's road race course you go along the back area, behind the grandstands and then you would come up basically where the start of the starting line at the drag strip, go down the drag strip all the way down to the end, and then continue on the road course. like I said... 60 guys all on a race track whether, they're on stretch bikes or not we would go down that drag strip, racing each other... we'd go 160 or 170 miles an hour and then there was a sharp right-hand corner as you got back on to the road race portion! And man, I'll never forget ...I was I was behind Dick Speed from Chicago... he went into that corner and there were so many sparks off of his exhaust... I thought he went down, but I was getting showered in sparks. I couldn't see there were so many sparks in front of me... it was, man it was a lot of fun. We had a great time back then. And you know, we're stretched this is a nice curvy road. Now don't get me wrong, it's a little more fun on a stock wheelbase bike. But hell, I come down through here and really enjoy myself. You always have to watch... I just felt the pipe scrape just a little bit. So really what had happened is the class had gained in popularity and a lot of people wanted to get into it. The OEMs got involved, Kawasaki got involved. Suzuki got involved, well they were sort of already involved because Suzuki's are a great platform for drag racing, but so you had some of the fastest riders of the day. You know Ryan Schnitz was just starting out, he was super-fast, his dad had put him on a little 500cc Kaw when he was about 12 I think? Put him on the drag strip, so he knew what he was doing. By the time that kid was 16 he was really fast already. He raced for us for a couple years. He did a great job. Johnny Locklear is one of those guys... that if you're in the mainstream, you are probably not going to know Jonny. He's from the Carolinas. If you're from the grudge scene and you want a bike that is unbelievably fast, and a rider that really knows how to ride Johnny - Johnny was amazing. Keith Dennis. Keith is legendary. He's won just about everything in our sport at one time or another. Definitely one of the best. I've got a story. So my first 7 second run was in the first round of eliminations against John Vermeulen, I can't remember what I qualified? But anyway, I ran the first 7. When I picked up the time slip, I looked at it and it didn't register? I'm like, what's wrong with this slip though? You know I don't understand these numbers. And John looked at his slip and he goes "you did it! You got in the 7's!!" He flipped out and I looked at again and was like ...holy cow well, of course, I just broke the back of the other guys who all wanted to be the first also. So, we came out to the second round and I had Keith Dennis, Keith was always strong. Well his bike was running funny and I could hear it. My crew chief Marc Huelsman goes man I think that things broken, he said. Just, you know, just make a smooth pass don't screw it up don't red light and you should have this. And then that light dropped and Keith did exactly what he always did... that dude tore out on me... I mean it wasn't even... I didn't even know where he was going he was out so far on me. I mean to put it into perspective when I was in second year, he was way up there and generally in a drag race like this you're not catching somebody who's that far out. I have two stages of nitrous I told you about 150 shot, well I also have what I call a panic button. And what would happen, if I was behind I just tweaked my high beam and shoot another 50 horsepower. The problem was that Rockingham's surface couldn't take that... and every time hit my second stage It spun the tire and I slowed down. So Keith's out on me... and it was the hardest thing I've ever had to do... I wanted to hit that button so hard... but I knew I would lose that race and I just held in there. I crawled into the paint and reeled him in... reeled him in... reeled him in and I won the race. I ran another 7. I think I went a 7.98 on that pass. And he ran something real quick. It was like an 8.04. I mean it was super close. I managed to win again and I ended up going into the sevens three times that day. No one else got into the 7s that day. And I ended up losing in the final to Duck Lauer. Duck- Ducks a street racer from Chicago. He kept his head on straight and of course I was smart enough to not change one thing on the first seven second motorcycle, but what had happened was as we were going the tire had started to wear and then, if you look, as soon as I sprayed... as soon as I hit the button on that run it spun for just a split second and Duck jumped out on me and man he ... He always had a lot of horsepower, there was no doubt about that. And I just couldn't I couldn't real him in. So, would have been would have been fun to win the race and run the first seven, but it wasn't in the cards that day. It doesn't matter. We get to go down in history, and it's a lot of fun. And you know, this bike has set numerous quarter-mile records, mile per hour records, ET records. I used to set a lot of records and then somebody would come and break them, and then I'd have to set them again, then somebody else break them. I'd set them again... but the best thing about being the first in the sevens, is that you know... someone else may always be faster but no one else is going to be first again. I just, somehow every time I ride my bike into work, I find a lot of traffic. So one of the things that happened, as a result of the first seven, was I got a lot of notoriety and at the time I was working out of my garage trying to get my business going, and all of a sudden the phone started ringing because when you go sevens before everybody else... you obviously know what you're doing. I had a call after call - hey what do you make for my bike? I was pretty confident at the time... nothing, but what do you want? I can do anything and that's really with the product side of Brock's got rolling because we had a whole lot of people that wanted in on what we knew. The Hayabusa had just came out and it basically made the engine that we are riding on right now... obsolete. No traffic!... pump up the shifter and have a little bit more fun because we're on the last leg before we get to the office. Cops like to sit there... Holy Cow! I forgot how fast this thing was, even though it's a nitrous motor, back in the day I ran 8.60's at 155 or so without nitrous. So it it's definitely no slug as we're driving it around like this. In fact it's a hell of a lot of fun. It's a little noisy... I might end up getting in trouble with the Popo, here in Mexico Mexican police... they don't like this. Effortlessly spin the tire... This thing is so much fun. I really love this motorcycle. It's my favorite bike. Guys I hope you've enjoyed coming in for the ride, we're here...here Brock's. This doesn't feel like a workday to me, so I think I'm gonna go ahead and play the boss card and go ride around a little bit more. So, I'm Brock from Brock's Performance... until next time, we'll see you then. How about a little rolling burnout for the boys :)