Chris Rivas of Fresno wasn’t the typical valley motorcycle rider. Unlike a lot of his friends, he didn’t take part in the valley rite of passage of riding dirt bikes. “I grew up dreaming of being a professional drag racer,” Chris admits. “I was very much into drag racing and the NHRA. I didn’t start riding motorcycles until I was 24 years old. In ’92 I bought my first Harley. It was an 883cc Sportster. It wasn’t long before I bought the 1200cc big bore upgrade kit. After looking over the kit and the engine, I decided that I could do it myself. After finishing the upgrade, I couldn’t believe the difference in the bike. It pretty much doubled the engine’s horsepower. Chris took his project bike to Famoso Speedway to put his Sportster to the test. “It turned the quarter mile in 12.8 seconds. From then on, I was a horsepower junkie.”
That led to Chris eventually competing professionally. He owns 3 track championships at Famoso Speedway. He went on to win the 2003 All-Harley Drag Racing Association (AHDRA) Super Gas Western championship, was runner-up in the 2004 AHDRA Pro-Stock Championship, and wound up 5 points off the 2008 NHRA Pro-Stock Motorcycle division points lead. Then, just before Christmas and weeks before the start of the 2009 racing season, Chris learned that their racing team’s sponsors were pulling out. Feeling he had accomplished what he wanted in drag racing, Chris turned his attention to Bonneville. In early 2009, at his shop in Fresno, Chris Rivas V-Twin, Chris and his technicians, Roger and Vince, built a modified (but mostly stock) Harley-Davidson Road Glide bagger as their first attempt at world speed records. In August of that year, the crew took their bike to the Bonneville Salt Flats. On his first pass, Chris felt good about the run. He would soon learn he had broken the world speed record in his class and ended running a best one mile average speed of 166.645 miles per hour!
Earlier this year, with support from S & S and Carl Brouhard Designs, Chris and his team took aim at a new milestone – topping the 200 mph mark. They took their newly built Road Glide, complete with a custom-fabricated full fairing. Through initial run, as Chris was shifting through the gears, he began experiencing serious head shake on the bike. “I was about half-throttle at 150 mph,” Chris explains, “I used every technique I knew to work out of the speed wobble. But, I just couldn’t work through it. Finally, after dropping to about 130 mph, the bike spit me off. The bike and I slid for about a quarter of a mile. Fortunately, Chris’s only injury was a broken hand. “I felt blessed to walk away from that one,” Chris recalls. They took the bike back home for hours of tweaking and adjusting. But two weeks later, their next attempt also ended with failure. “I still haven’t figured out what the problem is with that bike,” Chris says, “ But I know it will do over 200 mph. We’ll get it next year.”
Chris applies his knowledge and experience from racing to running his business, Chris Rivas V-Twin, which he owns and operates with his wife, Linda. “I wasn’t just a driver for hire,” Chris explains. “I was involved and paying attention to everything. I learned about engineering and tuning, head porting and compression ratios. There’s nothing about fuel-injection I don’t know. We treat our customer’s bikes the same way. After we do the work, we bench test everything and run it on our dyno. Before the customer picks up their bike, it’s dialed in.” That kind of attention to detail only produces satisfied customers. This is why Chris and Linda have a customer base from all over the state and the country. “Over half of our customers are from out of town. We even have a customer from Alberta, Canada,” Chris says. “He was making a trip to the states and decided to take a detour to Fresno and have us do some work on his bike.” It seems word not only travels fast, but it travels far.
