GIXXER JOHNNY #93
She was a beast from a forgotten era. Back before athletes cared about water. When dehydration was cured with beer after the game, and sometimes before it.
An oil-cooled relic still capable of breaking a femur and the velocity limits of polite society. A fully plastic-clad BBW with a tail section that could generate Onlyfans revenue.
She was acquired through a trade that involved an impound yard, a birth certificate claiming she was born a Kawasaki, and far less cash than an 1100cc Gixxer commands today. Suspect? Perhaps.
Upon arrival, she wore an odd mix of mid-90s drag-racing components. Namely Kosman clip-ons and triples that definitely had drag strip origins. But she was still wearing a stock swingarm and an unpolished frame.
Which told me immediately she hadn't come from back East - where dollars go into stretch & shine long before they are ever dumped into command & control. 
Not that any of her origin story mattered, because we were headed straight into the sprawl, and there be no maps for those territories.
THE BUILD
With glimmers of a promised cyberpunk future dancing in my frontal, I got straight to chopping.
Motor-wise she was already strong. A little cam-chain slap and cooked head gasket left her with a slight limp, but those defects can be overlooked when you've got a figure like that.
So the Airtech fairings, heavily modified for lower earth orbit, were fitted along with pants on the wheels and skirts on the rotors. It's a Portland thing.
The normal endurance-racing homage of twin filler tank and exposed battery were grafted on while 3D-resin velocity stacks ensured the Stage 3 carbs would never actually idle correctly. 
And finally the moment all the cyberboys were waiting for arrived—the elective surgery to her mids to accept the Raspberry Pi-driven LED panels. Because the future is nothing if not electric.
The rest of the build was a culmination of 30 years of inspiration and 20 years of accumulation. In particular, the polished Busa forks were of special import, a throwback to the East Coast drag scene she had not actually been part of.
THE SHOOT
Surviving an ICON photoshoot is no easy task.
Running at limiter for take after take through dry lake bed and urban decay plays havoc on 30-year-old sportbikes. This one was no different.
The amount of time spent riding the bikes is usually dwarfed by the amount of time spent keeping them pointed downrange. Out of the holy trinity of internal combustion, it is invariably spark or fuel that eventually give up the ghost first.
Gixxer Johnny held it together until a vibration and heat-induced voltage spike took out her electronics.
That said, she gave as good as she got over the course of three days and three locations. Piloted by Ernie Vigil and flogged hard, she was every bit the liter-bike-plus machine we had envisioned in our youth.
All show and all go.
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