Building Lightning Quick Dragbikes Is Profession for Chris Jones
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Building Lightning Quick Dragbikes is Profession for Chris Jones By Terry Witt Senior Staff Writer Chris Jones builds high performance motorcycles that might as well have wings. His bikes can fly down a quarter-mile drag race at close to 200 miles per hour. In his shop in south Chiefland, Jones has built drag racing motorcycles that captured three national titles, won 40 other national races and set national speed records. He is a professional in the motorcycle dragbike business at the national level. His motorcycles have been featured in national magazine advertisements. “Everyone knows on the national level I can build a fast bike,” Jones said. One of his motorcycles reached a speed of 203 miles per hour in 7.4 seconds in the quarter mile. He won his first national championship in 2009 Chiefland professional motorcycle racer Chris when a ZX14 Turbo ridden by John Fernandez Jones stands next to his latest creation, a ZX14 took the AMA Dragbike National Championship Kawasaki dragracing motorcycle that can in the Super-Street Class. accelerate to 200 miles per hour in a quarter of a Jones won the 2012 Manufacturers Cub mile. Photo by Terry Witt. Championship in the Real-Street Class on a Kawasaki ZX14 bike ridden by Rickey Gadson. The same year Gadson set a speed record on Jones’ bike, posting a time of 7.70 seconds in the quarter mile at 191 miles per hour. Jones claimed the 2014 Manufacturers Cub Championship in the Real-Street Class on a ZX14 Kawasaki bike once again ridden by Gadson. Jones builds super bikes. “The bikes that I build are based upon modern production sportbikes. The bikes are highly modified by means of power adders such as turbochargers or nitrous oxide,” he said. “Depending on what class we are running in, these bikes can produce over 500 horsepower.” He estimates his current Kawasaki ZX14 drag racing motorcycle is worth $45,000. Jones, a Chiefland city commissioner and owner of Jones Performance Cycles, a nationally recognized motorcycle drag racing company, grew up loving any vehicle with wheels. In the early days, it was bicycles and go-karts. “I stayed bruised and banged up. I can remember crashing a bicycle around the age of eight, landing face first on a gravel road,” Jones said. “I was so scabbed up my brother didn’t want to even sit at the dinner table with me. That wreck was just one of many to say the least.” His childhood heroes were Evil Knievel, Don “The Snake” Prudhomme and “Big Daddy” Don Garlits, three men that built their careers on speed. Jones would stay home from school occasionally to watch his Uncle Rayford “Bunk” Hunter and his buddies work on their old cars. As he entered his teens, his total focus was working after school and summers to buy a motorcycle. He worked for Dennis Andrews and Charlie Adkins in his teens. Three wheelers were all the rage in the 1980s. Jones’ father, Bill Jones, and brother Craig Jones, helped him purchase a new racing style three-wheeler. “That was the beginning of organized racing for me,” he said. His brother would come home from college on weekends and take him to local tracks. Jones’ parents were unaware of his adventures for quite a while. It all came to light one weekend when he took a nasty spill east of Chiefland at the site of a former motocross track. He remembers the fun of running around the woods on dirtbikes and ATVs with Clifton Hudson, Shelton Bowers, Edward Thompson and a few others. He has many childhood memories of riding together with his buddies. By the age of 15, he had saved enough money to buy a street bike. He didn’t have an operator’s license at the time or his parents’ permission to make the purchase, but that didn’t stop him. He said his father never cared for motorcycles and was not too pleased that motorcycles were his main focus. After graduating from Chiefland High School, he attended Santa Fe Community College to study automotive technology. He became heavily involved in performance engine building at the time. He was always helping his friends build fast car motors, but at the time he wasn’t interested in the thrill of racing fast motorcycles. In the early 1990s his mother, Doris Jones, helped him secure a loan from the former Levy County State Bank to purchase a new Suzuki sportbike. He was happy with the bike until he raced his friend Shelton Bowers and lost the race badly. Within a matter of days he tore his motorcycle engine apart to make it faster. At the time, he was dragging his bike around on trucks to race on back roads because the motors weren’t as highly modified as they would be when he turned pro. After a few years of back road racing, Jones started participating in organized motorcycle drag racing events at Gainesville Raceway. He raced a few bikes himself, but it was only after he put a skinny kid named Todd Schnitz on his bike that he realized the motorcycle’s true potential. In 2005 Schnitz, a registered nurse from Orlando, set the record in the AMS dragbike Super-Street Class with a time of 8.23 seconds in the quarter mile. He reached a speed of 178 miles per hour. Schnitz was riding a Turbocharged Suzuki Hayabusa Jones built. Jones and Schnitz were the runners-up for national championship honors that year due to a fuel leak that made the bike two-tenths of a second slower than the top bike in the field. That was the last time Nationals were held in Gainesville. The event was moved to Valdosta. “That one still eats me,” Jones said. “I have won a lot of national races out of state, but I would have loved to have won in the backyard (Gainesville).” Jones gave up racing the bikes himself about the time Schnitz came into the picture. He knew he could build fast bikes and he had a great rider in Schnitz. He was getting older and had become a family man. He and his wife Amy have two children, son Devin 14 and daughter Christine 7. Racing fast bikes comes with risks. In 2008, Jones and Schnitz rigorously tested a new bike Jones had built, a Kawasaki ZX14 Ninja. Jones built the bike for the Super-Street Class. The bike caught the attention of Kawasaki factory-backed rider Rickey Gadson who asked if his nephew, Richard Gadson, could race the bike that year. Jones agreed. Jones raced two of his bikes that year, one ridden by Schnitz and the other by Richard Gadson who finished third in points for the year. Jones chose friend John Fernandez to ride his bike in 2009. Schnitz had taken a full-time job and couldn’t race. Jones and Fernandez won seven of nine races that year. By midseason they had earned enough points to claim the 2009 AMA Dragbike Championship in Super-Street Class. Jones said the bike was constantly torn up by AMA technical staff investigating rumors that he was using illegal parts. He said the rumors were false and nothing came of the allegations. He said running with illegal parts would be too costly and he considered his personal integrity of more importance than cheating. In 2010 Jones continued his winning only to learn that the AMA Dragbike Series was going bankrupt. “That was a rather depressing moment for me,” he said. Dragbike racing was revived in 2011 when several major players from the motorcycle community formed another National Series that became known as the Manufacturers Cup. Jones hadn’t planned to race bikes that year. He was serving as a vendor selling and promoting Shinko tires, which had sponsored his bikes since 2008 and had featured his bikes in several national magazine advertisements. Jones has done tire testing for Shinko. Jones had his bike on display at the 2012 Manufacturers Cup when Rickey Gadson blew a motor. Gadson needed a bike to ride. He used Jones’ bike to win the 2012 Manufacturers Cup Championship in Street Class, posting a time of 7.70 in the quarter mile. He ran at 191 miles per hour. In 2014, Jones faced real drama in his life. In the final race of the year in Valdosta, he lost close friend and family member, Willie Byrd, an avid motorcycle rider. He had been employed at Suwannee Lumber for 30 years. Byrd and other local bikers would ride up to watch the final event of the year. Jones returned to Chiefland to be with Byrd’s family for the wake, knowing the race was the next day. At the same time, Rickey Gadson called to say the motor was blown on the bike. Jones arrived back in Valdosta at midnight and he and Gadson worked until 5 a.m. rebuilding the motor. Gadson went on to win the 2014 Manufacturers Cup Championship in the Real- Street Class. Jones hasn’t become rich in the national dragbike Rickey Gadson, who races for Chris Jones, gets a quick start on Jones’ racing series. He said he is ZX14. Photo courtesy of Chris Jones. growing tired. At the level he builds these top flight bikes the work is “very arduous” and time consuming. His long term goal is to eventually move uptown in Chiefland and do more mainstream services such as general maintenance and repair and retail sales. “At one point in life I had something to prove to the big boys in the racing community.