(Editor’s note: This story originally appeared in August 2013 and is being reprinted now as part of our run-up to Speed Week 2016!) These photos were taking in the impound lot at Bonneville on Saturday night last year. The significance of that is the bike you see and the the people you’ll see wrenching on it were going to be running for a record the next morning. The rider is Alp Sungurtekin who is seated on the left hand side of the bike as you look at the photos and his crew is Jalika Gaskin who is seated on the right. They’re both wrenching on this bike to get it ready for the record run as soon as the sun peeks over the mountains in the morning. The story behind their thrash is absolutely freaking awesome and it centers around the small LED flashlight you’ll see Alp holding in his hands.

As the bike was sitting in the staging lanes, a piece of the shift linkage failed and fell into the transmission case. (Forgive the clumsy nature of this technical description…I am a bike dummy for the most part) With said piece disappeared, most racers would have pulled out of line and just gone back to the pits. Instead of doing that Alp and Jalika dove into their tool box and pulled out anything they thought would work to replace the missing piece. They settled on the case of that LED flashlight to replace the missing piece of the linkage. How did it work?

Alp rode his 1952 650cc Triumph down the course in a swift enough fashion to qualify for the M-VG (Motorcycle/ Vintage Gas 650cc) record. The current record, which was set in 1998 by Eric Vaughn stands at 127.835mph. Alp was faster than that…using pieces from a freaking pocket flashlight to get his bike down the course. That rules on levels that we rarely experience.

Outside of that ingenuity and refusal to be overcome by circumstances, the scene of these two people sitting on a tarp, nursing a 60 year old racing motorcycle back to health for nothing more than the drive of going faster than someone else did 15 years ago is a beautiful thing. I say that not in the snarky way, I mean it sincerely. When Bret Kepner and I walked away from these guys, I actually got a little emotional in considering the situation. To me, these photos are the summation of what this event is. There are no frills, there is no big support team, there’s no speed parts store around the corner. You figure out your business and do it better than anyone ever has or you go home and get your act together to try again next year.

Alp and Jalika, you rule. Plain and simple.

(Oh, and this is a tid bit that has little to do with anything but something you should know. Jalika? Yeah, she’s a professional fashion model, like big time magazine international fashion model out here getting dirty and wrenching on the old Triumph….freaking awesome.)

SCROLL DOWN TO SEE THE PHOTOS AND DRINK IN THIS REALLY, REALLY COOL SCENE –