6. IAN KING
A visit to Santa Pod aged 12 was enough to ensure Ian King would spend his entire life (so far) firing himself up drag strips the world over – and to great effect
I an King’s place is writ large in the annals of drag racing. As a rider he has racked up 10 FIM European Championships and a further three as team principal to give him an unsurpassed total of 13 titles. Add in two ACU British Championships, an Irish title, numerous official FIM European and UK and European track records, not to mention a current FIM World Land Speed Record and it is plain that Ian is a King by both name and nature in drag racing.
He is the only British rider to have run a five-second standing start quarter mile, and numbers among only eight members in the world of the MTC Engineering Top Fuel 5 Second Club.
Ian’s ascendancy to the uppermost echelons of the high-tech and esoteric world of drag racing began on machinery recognisable to PS readers and in a number of familiar series. There was no familial influence on Ian when it came to motorcycles but a couple of events conspired to pique his interest. Born in 1961, he would have been around 10 years old when he went on a Cub Scout trip to Santa Pod. The sight, sound and smell of the drag bikes would stay with him. Around the same time, a girl along the road had a boyfriend who would rock up on a bright yellow Ducati. Young Ian was captivated.
At the age of 12, Ian decided he would build his own bike. Together with a mate he headed for the local tip. “We came away with a Raleigh Chopper bicycle frame, a 70cc Garelli scooter, and a fuel tank from a Suzuki A50 moped. Using a stick welder purchased from the pages of Exchange & Mart, we cobbled the Garelli engine into the Chopper frame,” he says. This was the kind of thing we did as kids in the 1970s.
A year or so later, Ian got a part-time job at Andy Lee Motorcycles in Royston and by the time he was 15 had scraped the money together to buy a used Honda CB750 F1.
“Obviously I was too young to ride it on the road... legally” he says.
When he turned 16, Ian went road legal with a Suzuki AP50, graduating to a Yamaha RD250 at 17 then an RD400. He made his Santa Pod riding debut on the 400, heading to his local track to do Run What Ya Brung. “It was just racing your mates, nothing serious, wheelies everywhere,” says Ian, who owned a variety of road bikes in those early years – Suzuki GS750, Honda CB900, Kawasaki GPZ1100 and Suzuki GSX1100.
In the early-1980s, Ian happened into building specials. “I became aware of Harris Performance and in 1981 I went over there, talked to Lester and Steve Harris and decided to build a Magnum 2 with a Kawasaki Z1000J engine. I hadn’t long completed that when someone wanted
