If there’s one man who knows how to eke every last bit of performance out of a flat tracker, it’s Richard Pollock. The man known as Mule has been building (and racing) them since long before Bike EXIF was even conceived, and has built some of the most lust-worthy trackers to ever grace these pages. So it’s little wonder that his latest creation?a full-throttle Hooligan flat track racer?is such a tour de force.
If you’re not familiar with the American Grand National Hooligan Championship, it’s a flat track series aimed at amateurs running highly hopped-up street bikes. The rules are straightforward; you can run any street-legal production bike over 649 cc, with an open book on motor, swingarm, and wheel mods. But you can’t cut and weld the steering neck to alter the geometry, and you can’t change the shock mounts on the frame’s side unless they’re bolt-ons.
There’s a 370 lbs minimum weight limit too, and each bike needs a wheelbase of at least 56 inches. From there, it’s up to each racer to find creative ways to make their bike go faster and turn left harder. Luckily for Mule, he’s been at this long enough to know all of the workarounds.
?Having raced the Hooligan class every year since 2018 on a Sportster-based bike, I decided to build the ultimate class-legal bike for this year,? he tells us. ?Given the constraints, my goal was to smash the minimum weight rule and reach the point of having to add w...