About me

I club raced in the 80's winning a couple expert championships and a second place in CCS Endurance Racing in the GTU class.
I started collecting and restoring older AMA Superbikes in 1990.

Like many baby-boom enthusiasts, O'Shea got involved early and has remained hooked on two-wheelers ever since. The classic-racebike-collection bug bit him toward the end of his club-racing days as he was poking around the Loudon pits in '89. "I saw an old Honda CB900F endurance racer with some factory parts on it," he recalls. "I bought it, restored it and sold it for decent money-money that ended up paying for my first real AMA Superbike, the ex-Merkel/Shobert VFR750 Interceptor. That one cost me 10 grand-a lot of money back then. Hey, I'm a blue-collar union guy, so I'm not rich. But I'm glad I took that plunge. That VFR is really special.""I was looking at some HRC parts from one of Fred Merkel's VF750 racebikes, which was part of a large cache I got from American Honda years ago," he says. "I figured I had enough parts to build a cool Merkel-replica Interceptor and even be able to use some of Fred's original parts. It's nice to be able to pull brand-new works parts from actual HRC bins. It only took me a week to piece the bike together."

Blowing through stacks of exotic, rare and way-pricey HRC parts to build a mid-'80s AMA-spec Honda Interceptor sounds like some sort of utopian, old-school Superbike enthusiast's dream. After all, the early-'80s-when Honda jumped into AMA Superbike racing with loads of technology and what amounted to an open checkbook-were some of the most dynamic years in series history. I have traveled to many countries meeting friends that collected or built replica superbikes.

It is indeed, and there's a neat story behind the purchase.

"I bought the bike from Ruben McMurter in '91 at his home in Canada," O'Shea recounts. "We cut a deal over the phone, but for some reason the deal didn't include the frame. Ruben said he had to send the frame back to California [McMurter had signed a contract to return the bike after Daytona in '89], but that didn't stop me from driving up there in my '68 Ford Galaxy convertible. My idea was to convince him to include the frame or we had no deal. When I got there we headed to a strip joint to have a drink and talk. The next morning the ball was in Ruben's court. Well, the deal got made, I got the frame, we packed up the car and I headed south in a convertible jammed full of the rarest VFR in the world!"

Besides being rare, O'Shea's VFR is perhaps the most famous racing Interceptor in the world (though his current project, the first-generation VF750F that Freddie Spencer rode to victory in the '85 Superbike race at Daytona, might give it a run). In '86, Merkel had just come off two successive AMA Superbike Championships and was eager to ride the new aluminum-framed VFR. But the bikes American Honda received in early '86 for him and his teammate Wayne Rainey were nothing like the production VFRs trickling into dealerships.

"It was a true works HRC racer that came race-ready, complete with the NW6-coded engine," O'Shea says. "Honda sold kit HRC parts to privateers with an NF1 designation, but the works bikes had very rare NW6 parts. Internally, the engines were totally different from production, with a 360-degree crank (the stock VFR had a 180-degree orientation) and loads of titanium. NW6 parts included the GP-spec swingarm, billet-magnesium quick-change Showa fork, cams that ran on needle bearings and the $22,000 Keihin magnesium flat-slide carbs. The Honda works motors were like Formula 1 engines, versus the Yosh-built GSX-R production engines Kevin Schwantz and Doug Polen rode. American Honda owns the B bike to mine, and the other two were destroyed. So there are just two."

Asked about the parts cache he'd mentioned several times, O'Shea replies, "Over the years I developed a good relationship with Team Honda-Brian Uchida especially. They knew the bikes I'd gotten were in good hands, that I'd treat them with respect. So I'm talking to Uchida on the phone one day and he says, 'We'd like to get rid of all our surplus HRC parts-VF and VFR stuff, everything we've got.' So I ask him about a price, and he asks me, 'What do you think it's all worth?' I ask him what's there, and he says there's so much he couldn't even begin to inventory it all: 'Eight or 10 pallets worth,' he says. He said Honda didn't want to be nickeled and dimed to death.

"So we come up with a price: $12,500, delivered. I didn't have the money, and almost passed, but I ended up borrowing it. A week or two later, eight pallets show up at my buddy's machine shop. I see this and think, "Holy shit! There are wheels and engines and frames and titanium engine parts, a little of everything. So I call Uchida and say, 'Well, the eagle has landed,' and he says, 'Nope, another eight pallets just left here.' Whoa! I ended up with mountains of stuff: boxes with 'Spencer forks' written on them, HRC engines, radiators... It was crazy; a gift, really. And to think I almost passed on it!"

Asked what's happened to the parts, he says, "I've gotten rid of a lot of it. I've helped people restore their Honda racebikes, traded for parts or bikes I wanted, etc. The wild thing is that it's never gonna happen again. That was a special time, but it's gone now."

Uchida echoes O'Shea's sentiment: "Yep, no one will ever have access to those types of parts again. Now, everything goes back to Japan. What Brian's got is really rare and really special."