My Testimony
(How in the world i became a Christian..)

I was one of those kids that took their Christmas toys apart to see what made them tick.. i mean all of them.. I'd worked on bicycles my whole life, there was a running rule that if someone broke their bike and left it in the garage long enough it was fair game so i had parts to work with! In high school a well off friend was gifted a bike from his brother and I tricked it out for him, he had the money to do it.. to keep up with him on my JCPenny's special i lightened everything and i'd dumpster dive behind the local scwhinn shop for my trick parts.. his was lighter and fancier but i made up for it with hard work and shear determination. At 15 or 16 I got my first motorcycle, a Yamaha RD125 twin. I loved that bike, you could throw it around like a bicycle on the streets but 60mph flat out was all she’d do so I started tinkering and trying to learn how to make it go faster. By my teens my father and i fought all the time so by 17 i left home. By 18 i had my girfriend living with me. We literally started with nothing, no job, no place to live, but no job made me qualify for a government assistance motorcycle mechanics training program.. I saw my first RD400 there… a 1978 Yamaha RD400 with a Daytona Special seat and a set of Toomey pipes.. It was for sale.. I borrowed the money and bought it. LOVED that bike. I got a job at Suzuki and the guy that did our boring came in one day and I asked him about porting.. oh that’s easy he said, 2mm up on the exhaust port, 2mm down on the intake.. I later found out that’s what he did on ever bike… but not before I’d cut the cylinders .. that porting, a set of DG heads, and not enough fuel.. first time we really opened it up down a longgg road and bang! Siezed the piston at the top of the bore, the wrist pin broke off the bottom of the piston, slid over caught one of the transfer ports and ripped it wide open…i rebuilt it with a new cylinder and a set of pistons.. talk about learning all my lessons on one bike… I needed a car so I sold my bike to my brother and we decided to build it into a roadracer. We both raced around the streets of whittier but honestly he was a better rider and I was a better wrench so that was the plan. So in our pursuit of two-stroke speed we met some good tuners including Tom Turner a famous world record holding two stroke dragbike racer with a shop in paramount. I ended up doing a lot of talking with Tom as he talked me through building that motor. I would spend hours day after day talking to Tom about getting the most hp out of that engine and for years later talking about everything Two Stroke performance across the gate in the door to his shop. I read everything i could find, scoured the internet on borrowed AOL late into the wee hours of the nights and talked to everyone that knew anything about two stroke engines. My brother got mixed up with some pretty tough drugs and things got put on a shelf. I kept the engine safe but he lost and sold most the chassis parts as he moved around. My brother who i loved very much died one day in a high speed pursuit on a ZX10 and I was left with a motor… I didn’t really want to roadrace.. oh i loved roadracing mind you but not so much the falling down part.  I Wasn’t into dragracing, but landspeed sounded good…  I Found out there was a Harley guy with a landspeed record right down the street from where I worked so I dropped in, bikes are bikes right? He did everything but laugh me outa there and call me an idiot, he pissed me off just enough to seal the deal.. Thanks Carl really.. So with Tom’s help I went racing, I did it on a shoestring and good science. oh I Still had a lot of lessons to learn.. i seized almost every other  month the first year (6 times) before I could afford to buy an Exhaust Gas Temperature guage. I got real good at getting the aluminum off the cylinder bores with muriatic acid and sanding the pistons down though.. but I was learning. I started building crankshafts, engines and porting for Motocarrera to help pay for my bills and my racing. Things were starting to click and with a lot of hard work I broke 3 world landspeed records with that 400, 156.92 unfaired at Elmirage, 159.115 unfaired at Muroc, and 164.73 faired at El mirage. I took what I’d learned and ran a small roadracing program for Motocarrera which did pretty darn well. Doug only had so much he could afford to spend but the rider Aaron Berry and I knew we could go faster. Aaron had a 400 so I made him an offer.. you pay and I’ll work for free and he said hells yes let’s do it! And we did.. we chased and broke the lap record for an RD400 at Willow Springs at 1min 34.53sec. Not to ruffle anyones feathers but I became a Christian about then and had to rearrange my priorities pretty drastically. I’d been working a full time job all day and running my two stroke shop out of my garage at night, raising my girls and trying to save a marriage she wanted nothing to do with anymore.. Religion or not it was an accident waiting to happen BUT in God's great mercy for me, and i sure didn't deserve it, He saved me right before it all came apart, as if He knew i would not have survived the slow motion train wreck of a marriage that ensued without the love i've felt from Him. I was "saved" briefly in trouble at 16 but went right back to what i'd been doing, but at just shy of 40 now my sister in law started going to a church close by that she really liked and kept inviting us, eventually i gave in and went, i walked in and the people were singing so joyfully as though they really meant it, but all i could think was what bologna.. but something inside me said no it's real.. so i came back a bit and started feeling it, it seemed like in the right place, when you didn't have to worry about what other people might be thinking you could poor out your heart in worship and somehow know that God was hearing it. They would have these services once a month in the evening were they'd turn the lights down low and play worship music for 2 hours, you could sing, or listen, or pray, and do your business with God without a word from anyone else, just you and God working things out.. i grew so much that year, lost so much baggage, it changed my life.. So after a lot of prayer I shut it down the motorcycle stuff, sold the whole lot.. everything.. cleaned out the garage, went through some bible collage training, i loved that, i love to learn.. and spent the next years working hard and helping with bibles studies and things. Well the early 2000's were pretty rough at work and my pastor knowing what i used to do recommended i take on some motorcycle work again.. honestly i really didn't want too, but he was right i was good at it.. i had to start all over, i mean buy new tools and everything but the business came in.. in 2014 i decided to build one last landspeed bike which after a lot of hard work at the end of a very rough first year set a new (another) world record in the 250cc modified production class at 143.767 mph.