Back in 1999, motorcycle racer and multi-time Daytona champion Todd Henning suffered a personality-altering traumatic brain injury after a crash on his home-built Honda CB450-powered race bike. The bike was sold off, disassembled, and left in pieces in a New Hampshire shed for decades — until Henning’s son, Ari, rebuilt the machine to race it on film for RevZilla.
The latest installment of RevZilla’s CTXP follows the build, starting with Ari Henning and Zack Courts scrambling to get the bike back together in the New Hampshire shed that housed its parts. When the timeline got too tight, the two roped in fellow RevZilla host Spurgeon Dunbar to get them a mobile shop: A short bus with the seats pulled out, where Henning and Courts could continue to wrench en route to Barber Motorsports Park in Alabama.
‘A tangible, visceral, personal connection to the past’
Ari also wrote about the experience for RevZilla, where he echoed the same sentiment as he does in the video: Todd may have survived that crash, but his personality was fundamentally changed. It’s tough to reach the person Todd used to be, before the accident, but this bike provided a means of doing so. Ari could put himself in his father’s figurative shoes, and very literal handprints still molded into the bike’s grips:
Two aspects of the motorcycle were especially difficult to approach. First were the grips, an outmoded design that you heated and then squeezed, so the rubber molded to your hands. They presented dad’s complete handprints, palm to fingertips. They were a tangible, visceral, personal connection to the past. When I was eventually ready to touch them, it was to wipe them with a damp cloth, as if performing a taharah.
Then there were the tires, which I knew would show signs of the slide that took dad down. My own experience on the track told me what to look for, and there they were, the steeply angled streaks along the right shoulder of the rear Avon. The rest of the crash damage had been repaired — dents in the aluminum tank removed, frame powdercoated, bodywork replaced or repainted — but this evidence remained, and was unmistakable.
Give the full video a watch, and the full article a read. They’re beautiful odes to both the people and the bikes that have shaped motorcycle racing history, and shaped the Ari Henning we all love from YouTube along the way.
