Though he's small of frame and soft spoken, Ed Krawiec is a giant in the world of Pro Stock Motorcycle drag racing. The 2008 season champion missed taking the following year's crown by only two points, and kicked off this year as the points leader, shattering the track qualifying record at the season's first race.

I caught up with him during the 2011 MotoGP weekend in Indianapolis, and learned about the basics of NHRA motorcycle drag racing and how he makes his 385 hp Harley-Davidson Screamin' Eagle Vance & Hines V-Rod do what it does.
Tell me about what makes a good drag racer. Obviously the machine has to be up to par. But beyond the machine, what does it take?
A lot of people say it's mostly the rider, and in a lot of cases it is.

But I do believe the mindset of the rider comes down to basically being able to be in that zone where you can push everything out of your head. You have to leave everything behind you and get on that bike. And when you're on that bike, you do what you're brought there to do: focus, and race. That's the easiest way to describe it, but the hardest thing to do. Because when you get on that motorcycle, everything has to become second nature to you. One of the key things is, it's gotta be natural reactions and natural abilities.
We use terminology of being ahead of the bike or behind it. I've been racing now for five years with this team, I've probably made a total of 500, 600 runs down the dragstrip. And I'd say within the last year I've actually come to myself and said, "I'm ready, I feel I'm 100% sure that when I get on this motorcycle, I don't have to think about what I do." It just naturally happens. Once we start it up, it's like everything pushes out of your head and it just happens.

I don't even think about popping the clutch, or how I'm going to sit on it, or where I'm going to put my feet. That's where your natural ability takes over.

What does "ahead or behind" mean?
When you're ahead of the motorcycle: basically as soon as you pop that clutch you're getting into that tucked position, your race position. You're setting up so you know you're going to shift first gear, you're watching the shift light, you're waiting for that shift light.

When you're behind the motorcycle: perfect example is, you're sort of just holding on, you're at the same pace with that motorcycle. I could tell you, midway through third gear, it fell off a little bit. And we can go watch the G-meter and you can see the bike actually fell off a little bit in third gear. When you're behind the motorcycle, the easiest way to say it is, you're hanging on. You're there for the ride. You're not actually riding it. When you need to make a correction going down the track, you've got to be ahead of it to where if the bike is starting to go left, you've got to pull it back and go right with it. When you're behind it, usually by the time it's going left, you're already far enough left that now you have to make a major correction. Our motorcycle takes a lot of finesse to go fast. Anybody can ride a motorcycle and get it down a track and probably put up a respectable time. But it's that next group of riders that can bring it to the next level and make it that much faster. Terminology would be, how many hundredths you leave out on the track.

When you make a run, obviously as a drag racer, we're searching for that perfect run. There's never a perfect run because if you made perfect runs, you'd want to quit racing. But we try to make as near perfect runs as we can and try and get every last bit of E/T [elapsed time] out of the motorcycle. I can come out of a run and be like, "I left a hundredth out there or a hundredth and a half," and that way I know, okay, this is how fast we should go. That's what we search for.