The Vintagent Selects: A collection of our favorite films by artists around the world.
The Barn Job: The Fastest Bike In America (2019)
Run Time: 2:21
Director: David Lancaster
Produced by: Gerry Jenkinson, David Lancaster and James Salter
Filmed by: Steve Read, Robbie Douglas and Gerry Jenkinson
Associate Producers: Philip Vincent-Day and Mike Nicks
Executive Producers: JP Davidson and Peter Bender
Key cast: Jim Leineweber
FILM MAKERS
David Lancaster: A former director on BBC’s Top Gear, and one-time motoring editor of The Times (London), David took his first journey on a Vincent aged seven – on the back of his father’s Black Prince to the Lion Rally in Belgium. A year later, the pair rode from west London to the FIM Rally in Austria.
David, with co-producer Gerry Jenkinson, began work on SpeedisExpensive four years ago. Since then, they have tracked down the remaining 16 men and women who built the bikes at the Stevenage factory, have overseen the restoration of the Vincent family’s 16 mm film archive and interviewed Jay Leno, John Surtees, record-setter Mary Dickerson and filmed the Jack Ehret Black Lightning, back on its record-setting road.
David owns and rides the same 1947 Series B Rapide his father owned during the 1950s. His brother owns their father’s Black Prince.
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SUMMARY
The Barn Job is a legend in US drag racing and the subject of the second preview of the forthcoming documentary, SpeedisExpensive: The Untold Story of the Vincent Motorcycle.
Based around a late 1940s Rapide engine, the Barn Job was developed by owner Clem Johnson to become a blistering missile which out-gunned the fastest Harley and Japanese-based dragsters 40 years after the engine left the Stevenage factory.
It was the first bike in Stateside drag racing to hit 140, 150 mph and beyond and after Clem retired from riding, Jim Leineweber took over. Jim and the bike retired in 1987: its best ever quarter mile run was 8.40 seconds, its highest top speed 187mph. The bike is now owned by historian John Stein (check out his excellent book Motorcycle Drag Racing: A History).
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Hmmm. Vincent mythology knows no bounds. And it was the first motorcycle to land on the moon….
Hyperbole aside, the Brit movie promo copy claims Barn Job’s best ET was 8.40s; John Stein’s superb MC Drag Racing book says Clem’s quickest ET was 9.70. I trust Stein’s research, unless his number is a typo. Who’s correct? And please spare us the “outgunned the fastest Harley and Japanese, blah blah”….in the 1980s? Really? Terry Vance went 203 in 1982, and the quickest Kawi Z1-based fuelers were into the low 7’s/high-6’s around the same period. Paul, dig into your Cycle News archive from the ’80s and check out the drag-racing results. By then, Barn Job, as beautifully engineered as it was, was past its prime.
It’s still fun twice a year at Eagle Field Runway Drags in Firebaugh California.