Pilot, Friends Use ‘Garage Technology’ in Champion Air Racer

Ever since he was a little kid, Jon Sharp wanted to go really fast, whether it was racing trikes, bikes or go-carts. But he never thought he’d be flying his go-cart a few dozen feet off the ground.

Sharp, 45, pilots Nemesis, a sleek 500-pound aircraft that looks like a cigarette racing boat with a 20-foot wingspan and candy-colored lettering.

During the five years since Sharp and his gang of garage hangar friends in Lancaster introduced the high-technology racer, Nemesis has dominated Formula One air racing, set a bunch of world records and won the Pulitzer aviation trophy three times.

“It’s like racing a go-cart at 250 mph, but you’re doing it 35 feet off the ground,” Sharp said, showing his trophy racer to the curious at a recent air show in a town where people are accustomed to watching Stealth planes soar overhead.

Part of the reason that Nemesis dominates its class of Formula One air racing may lie in Sharp’s background as a materials engineer at the Lockheed “Skunk Works,” which built the F-117 Stealth fighter, and the world’s fastest plane, the SR-71 “Blackbird” spy plane.

Some of the other guys on Team Nemesis--Dan Bond, Cory Bird and Steve Ericson--combined talents with Sharp to build the little racing plane, using a NASA-designed wing and the kind of advanced composite materials employed on futuristic fighter planes.

“We call it the leading edge of garage technology,” Sharp said. “We took a complete revolutionary tack to the problem. If it had been done before, we didn’t want to do it.”

In rented hangar space, working on nights and weekends, the volunteer crew made the new plane. Nobody entered a financial partnership, Sharp said. Designers, builders and mechanics got on board for the love of tinkering and the dream of racecourse victories.

“Mostly they were guys who would show up and say, ‘Hey, you got anything going on?’ ” He added, “It was like a little Internet of people who were between projects.”

Built in 1990 from “a clean sheet of paper,” Nemesis entered the field in September 1991. With Sharp piloting, the plane has won its class in the Reno National Championships in 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1995. It set a world speed record of 277.26 mph at the Experimental Air Craft Assn. Fly-In in Oshkosh, Wis., in 1993.

In addition to the Pulitzer trophy, the plane earned the Louis Bleriot Medal--Bleriot was the pioneering French pilot who first crossed the English Channel early in the century.

“Bleriot won the first organized air race,” he said. “The other guys in the race were guys like the Wright brothers and Glenn Curtiss.”

Sharp is a shambling, ambling Laker-sized man of 6-foot-3 who has to scrunch into the tiny cockpit. His easygoing manner belies his name, profession and game. The dream of racing started early and never left his system.

“I was always the kid in the neighborhood who raced tricycles,” he said. “When we got bikes, I organized a bike-racing club. I always wanted to go fast, and I kind of felt like I missed out on Indianapolis.”

The air-racing dream didn’t begin with the series of victories. It started nearly 20 years ago when he found a small racing plane at a modest price. Friends persuaded him to take it to a race in Mexicali, Mexico.

“We thought we had this red-hot airplane, and we promptly fell on our face.”

Years of tweaking and tinkering followed, evolving into a plan to build a little racing plane with sleek, stealthy advanced technology.

Formula One air racing runs like the closed track at Indy, except that the course is 35 feet in the air, with pylons marking the track instead of barriers.

“The day I’m not scared in a race is the day I stop,” he said, likening the butterflies in his stomach to the sort known by test pilots. “I have tremendous respect for these things, because they will bite you hard and fast.”

Probably fewer than 100 pilots in the nation share Sharp’s race class and passion, and he considers his rivals “a bunch of Snidely Whiplashes. They’re always out there, working hard to get us. And that’s fine. That’s how it should be.”

After the first victory at Reno, “we were so excited, we felt like we’d won the Super Bowl, the Indy 500 and the Cold War. It was the beginning of a celebration that has yet to stop.”

The lure of big bucks doesn’t fuel their drive for victory. The entire purse at Reno is about $65,000, with less than 10% of that going to the winner, whether it’s Nemesis or any potential nemesis of Nemesis being worked on in someone’s garage hangar.