Beautiful 2002 Yamaha Road Star Warrior built for magazine in conjunction with Yamaha, Patrick Racing, Orient Express, Barons and others. No expense spared. Currently has just under 1600 miles.

First, a little background on how this bike came to be.  I am the second owner of the bike, with the first owner being the builder.  The builder of the bike was Keith Kizer, former President/CEO of AMA Prostar racing.  At the time he was also a contributing writer to Motorcycle Street & Strip Magazine, which featured the buildup of the bike in a four-part article over four issues.  In 2002-2003 the "Hot Rod Crusier" class of bikes was just heating up, both on the street and at the track.  Keith and several manufacturers wanted to show just how far you could take one of these bikes performance-wise and still be able to ride it comfortably on the street.  The result of their efforts is the bike you see here.

This bike has a long list of options and accessories, just about anything you could want to do to a Warrior short of tacking on a giant rear tire and ruining the handling.  The engine mods were handled by both Patrick Racing and Orient Express, the two leaders in engine modifications for these bikes.  The net result is that they took a stock 77 HP Warrior and turned it into a 105 HP machine that has run a best 1/4 mile of 11.35 at almost 116 MPH!

Of course, it needed to look good too!  After all, this was primarily going to be a street bike, not a racer so it had to stand out from the crowd.  To get heads turning they started by bolting on just about every Yamaha billet accessory they could get their hands on, and some that they couldn't!  There are more than a few parts on this bike that are pre-production prototype parts for parts that you can just go buy off the shelf now, like the hand-made adjustable pushrod tubes or the custom made gauge cover.

After the bolt-ons were bolted-on, they moved to some of the trickier dress-up parts like the nude pulley setup, bomber bars and custom YZF-R1 front fender.  Also added were a full compliment of RC Components running gear (wheels, pulleys, rotors), and a lowering kit to bring down the rear a bit (the front was also lowered a bit too by switching from an 18" wheel to a 17").

Other mods included the Vance & Hines Pro Pipe exhaust (along with a Big Air Kit and Power Programmer to keep everything running smoothly), and of course the custom paint applied by AP Graphics (including the seat).

So then what happened?  Well, it travelled around the country a bit so everyone could drool over it, then it got put away.  When I got it it had 750 miles on it, and it now has around 1600 or so.  It's more or less a brand new bike, and it's chomping at the bit to get ridden (it does NOT like to be ridden slow!  Basically first gear is only there as a means to get to the other gears.  If you have it in your head that you're going to ride this to work every day in rush-hour traffic, forget it!  It'll buck you off into the weeds like you're at your first bullriding lesson!)

You'd be hard-pressed to find a bike with better documentation that has had this much work done to it.  In addition to the magazine articles (which I have copies of), there are receipts for pretty much every part that went into the bike.  There are also timeslips from the dragstrip testing and copies of the before and after dyno runs.  A lot of the parts were donated to the project by vendors for the buildup, and warranties have probably long since expired, but I do have contact information for just about everyone involved in the build, and if you mentioned the project to them I'm sure they would be interested in helping out with any questions or concerns.

On the spreadsheet that I have, the bike comes in at just under $30K for parts and labor, with a few items left off such as the aforementioned adjustable pushrod tubes, custom brackets for the R1 front fender, and a nice soft cover to keep the dust off.  Even if you spent a year on ebay and makig deals with people for parts and labor you would STILL be in excess of $20K to recreate this bike, plus you wouldn't have a manufacturer-supported magazine article to back up what you did!

Please click a link below to read through the articles that were printed in the magazine about the buildup of the bike:

Now that all the talking is out of the way, let's get to the (many) pictures!: