Forget packing light. Anything can happen on the Iron Butt Rally, so you have to be ready for it. Photos by Jerry Anderson, Rick Corwine and Bo Sills.
Jerry Anderson likes Suzukis?a lot. ?I?ve always had Suzukis,? he says. ?Never owned anything else.? So when his application for the 2017 Iron Butt Rally was accepted, it?s no surprise he decided to ride a Suzuki. What is surprising is the Suzuki he chose, a 1974 GT750, a water-cooled, two-stroke triple. Appropriately, he entered it in the Hopeless Class.
The calm before the storm. Most of these bikes will finish, but some will be finished before the end.
The Hopeless Class is reserved for bikes and riders who aren?t content with the inherent challenges of riding in an 11-day scavenger hunt that ranges from coast to coast through the worst that nature and the rally planners can throw at them. The first Hopeless Class entry was another Suzuki, an RE5 Rotary, in the first Iron Butt Rally, in 1984. Running an oddball motorcycle powered by an engine practically nobody had ever heard of seemed like a hopeless cause, and thus the class was born. Fast-forward to 2017, and Anderson?s reasons for choosing a bike some call the Water Buffalo. ?There aren?t a lot of them on the road any more,? he says, adding this particular one has been very good to him. ?I?ve done a lot of riding on it. It took me coast-to-coast-to-coast in 92 hours, and from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska.?
Here’s the Iron Butt Rally in a nutshell. Ri...