After Seven Years Building Custom Motorcycles, Max Hazan Is Already a Legend

"Interview and photography provided by Manuel Carrillo III"

At 29, Max Hazan decided to get back into his childhood pastime of riding dirt bikes, but things didn’t go exactly to plan.

"I got hurt right away," recounts Hazan, now 38. The self-taught custom motorcycle builder and land speed record-holder recalls his origins into custom bike-building sitting inside his small shop located on the second floor of a building in LA’s Fashion District. Right beneath him? A taco shop.

The setting is quintessentially Los Angeles, in spite of Hazan’s New York roots.

When Hazan got injured immediately after dirt-bike reentry, he was an unhappy contractor. His crash led to four months of recovery, and consequently four months off work. With plenty of time on his hands, he decided to build his first custom motorcycle.

“I had a bad crash and it was a long recovery, but hadn’t that happened, I probably never would have taken the time to build a motorcycle,” he explains.

And it was that first machine that would change his life. Immediately after building the first one, Hazan got hooked and built a second bike.

Hazan’s recreational motorcycle-building caught the attention of a California friend who owned a clothing store, and told Hazan to send the first unit over for retail display.

The bike sold in one week. Hazan sent unit number two to the West Coast, and it sold before it even got off the truck.

That’s when Hazan’s father pulled Max aside to say, “Hey, I think you’ve got something,” and suggested he devote the next year to building bikes. In that time, Hazan built three more, but unlike the first two, he had trouble selling his newest creations.

But Max’s fortunes whipped around when Dallas financier Bobby Haas commissioned Hazan to build a bike.

“That was the first commissioned project that I had,” Hazan recalls. “While I was building that, he bought one of the other bikes, too. (One of the three.) That was my break [....] and from then on, it’s been amazing.”

That first commission turned into five more over the years, one of which was the land speed record bike.

“You couldn’t really open the throttle up until about 200,” Hazan states in a matter-of-fact way about a machine he believes can crest 240 miles per hour if the Bonneville Salt Flats’ surface conditions are optimal.

Much of that speed capability is courtesy of the Motus V4 engine powering the cycle — basically a halved GM LS V8 offering 185 horsepower right out of the crate.

Though conditions were less than ideal at Bonneville, Hazan’s 207.9-mph average shattered the previous partial streamline, pushrod, blown, gas-class record of 182. He didn’t even know he’d broken the record until after the run when a racing crew member dumped a celebratory beer over Hazan’s head. “That was the best feeling,” Max adds.

Whether embarking on a successive bike that’s nothing like the previous one, or breaking past the 200-mph barrier, the inherent hurdles that pop up through Hazan’s work are what drives him. “It’s only satisfying when you challenge yourself,” he says.

As a bike builder and racer who thrives on pushing the envelope, the last thing Hazan needs are products that levy undue challenges upon him.

“Having an oil manufacturer like Motul is great because I would never work with a brand that I wasn’t already using,” he states.

No matter the application, from his lower-performance Harley-Davidson-powered builds all the way to his land speed racer — even the E39 BMW M5 he drives on occasion — Hazan puts Motul in everything.

“On the Japanese or Italian[-powered] bikes, when the oil comes out of the engine, it’s the same color as it went in: bright green. The other oils: they always seem to come out black,” he says. “It makes me feel better. And also when I see the little sighting glass to show your oil level, and it’s fluorescent green. It just feels better.”

Having oil products he can rely upon allows Hazan to focus more on his craft and dream up the next jaw-dropping project, which seems to be imbued with his bottom-line philosophy: “Take on whatever is the wildest thing you can think of, and just go for it.”

With every build, Hazan offers a profound statement. Each of his projects summons from the ether a novel perspective by which speed and passion can be symbolized through hand-crafted metal between two wheels. Hazan’s creations are works of art that have even garnered the attention of the late, great Anthony Bourdain who said of Hazan, “He intuits flow not just visually, but with a lifetime’s experience crouched low over bikes, nudging them to go just a little faster.”