On his first visit to the Bonneville Salt Flats in 2013, Tim Klostermann couldn?t believe the variety of motorcycles he saw, from vintage streamliners to garage-built Hayabusas. The Flats inspired him, and after a few days of roaming around the pits and seeing all types of bikes and the whole gamut of skill levels, Tim decided to build a race bike of his own, despite never having raced or built a bike before.
Tim saw a woman racing a restored Honda C110 and it led him to consider the bike?s successor, the Honda S65 that debuted in the mid-1960s. ?I didn?t feel the need to go 200 mph, and an S65 looked pretty simple,? he says. ?I felt it was perfect for my first build.?

Back home in Northern California, he sourced two donor bikes and put together a build plan. Tim knew how to weld, but when it came to fabricating other parts for his bike, he would have to learn how to use his newly purchased lathe and mill drill; YouTube tutorials proved invaluable. The S65 would race in the altered-frame class, which requires at least two modified features. Being a straight-line bike, the Honda wouldn?t need a full-size fuel tank, so Tim made a smaller tank out of a chunk of exhaust pipe and tacked it to the top-left corner of the frame.

For his second modification, he replaced the stock 63cc Honda engine with a 150cc Daytona Anima engine. ?It has four valves, where the standard Honda engine has two, and its clutch assembly runs independently from the crankshaft,? he explains. ?The ti...