What do you do if you're a talented mechanic and have a crashed Ninja 250 on your hands? Why you turn it into a 500cc Honda-powered road racer of course. That's what Mike Hasek did in 1988 and the results were impressive. Today Mike works his magic at Vance & Hines. (Larry Lawrence photo)

If you know anything about Kawasaki Ninja 250s, you’ll notice right off the bat that this Kawasaki has a little something special. Check out the motor. It’s not standard Kawasaki issue. Mike Hasek was a friend of Scott Zampach’s and the Z-Man talked him into racing. Hasek got a Kawasaki Ninja 250 and ended up crashing big and tweaking himself and the little Ninja. He was just about to call it a day, but Zampach talked him into giving it another try. He decided to rebuild the Ninja and maybe race something else, then inspiration came to him. Hasek takes over the story from here:

I fixed up the Ninja and tried selling it.  No one wanted a two month old Ninja 250.  One night I was at home looking at my Ninja and a XL 500 I had. I started thinking about a motor swap.  I priced out a stock frame in case I messed up the original one. It was actually pretty cheap, so when I got home I cut all the stock mounts off and hung the XL motor in it. Within a month I was riding it. Right about then I took a job working for a Pro motocross racer and moved to Texas, then Brazil. I came back to Wisconsin at the end of 1987.  That winter I built a 540 motor to put in the Ninja.  My first race back was going to be Indy; it was always the first race in our region.  I came down with Scott, he had three bikes to tech so he told me to go out and he would come out when he sees me go by.  I made one lap and there he was.  We started to go faster and faster, Scott would turn back to check on me and I was right there.  On the last lap coming on to the straight I gave it a hand full and instead of accelerating it slowed and started to knock I quickly pulled in the clutch and coasted to the inside away from the race line. When I got back to the Pitt’s I could see a hole in the cylinder and oil everywhere.  Scott gets back all excited, “Mikey you are going to kill them guys, you were flying!”  “Scott my bike blew up!”  Then he told me how fast we were going and he was on his 750!  Well I put the motor back to a 500 and built it to last. It diffidently was slower, but was a lot of fun to race.

I raced at Grattan and signed up in the Clubman class as a novice.  After practice some guys came up to me saying that they would protest me if I ran in Clubman.  I went up to the tech people and asked if there was anything that I could be protested for.  It turns out that the rules had changed in regards to frame and motor combinations. Mine wasn’t legal with a Ninja frame and Honda motor.  I asked for my money back in that class and they told me they couldn’t do that.  Then I was asked which level I was entered, I told them I was a novice. They said to go ahead and race, because I would only get protested if I beat the guys who said they would protest me.  I said I was going to go for a win not just ride around.  I was then told that the regional expert champ in that class was there, and I would never be able to beat him being a novice.  Well I won my heat race in the novice class, and the next day I stated on pole for the novices with a few rows of experts in front of me.  At the start of the race I pulled a wheelie and just kept shifting till the front end came down. Going into the first turn I was in third overall, by the time we hit the off camber turn I had just passed the regional champ and never looked back.  I was leading the overall and won by a straightaway.  I pulled off the track, and got yelled at for doing wheelies by the starter.  Then the tech guy came up to me with the protest. He apologized for thinking I was just another back marker and then gave me the written protest.  The sad part was that the guy who protested me was on a RD350 and finished near last. After that season I moved to California.

Today Mike works at Vance & Hines in Brownsburg, Indiana. He’s the only guy I know with the balls to ice race during the relatively mild winters central Indiana. Not sure if he wears scuba gear on his ice racer.