"Drop a gear and disappear"

A little squirt up into the triple digits is fun from time to time but I wouldn't want to carry that sort of speed for any length of time.

Having that capability and handling will sometimes get you in trouble. I was coming home from a week long trip to a motorcycle rally on my MG Stelvio. About an hour from home, just wanting to get home at that point, I was ripping down the highway, passing people, wondering why in the hell highway traffic was so slow.

I looked down and I was doing 160kph without even working at it. Power was still available, handling was great and the windscreen and aero was doing a good job of keeping me out of the airstream.

I got off at the next exit and took the back way home. I figured I was probably going to kill myself or get my bike taken away.

I like my naked bikes, I can feel when I'm going too fast for my skill level.

Anyone have a link that's not instagram? I'm not signing up to watch a video.

In reply to pres589 (djronnebaum) :

Reminds me of this

Its old, but that bike and rider was wild.

In reply to DrBoost :

Sorry man, I looked and looked on YouTube, no dice. Basically, police car with lights and sirens pulls up on biker who then just LEAVES and shifts thru all six gears

Bikes are shockingly fast

Been riding all my life, with a few watercooled Buells in my garage currently. "Only" 150hp and about 80tq, but at 400 lbs it's too fast for my skills. I can only imagine what a 200hp liter bike would do

I keep it very 'sane' on the streets, too many accidents and no matter how good the brakes are, cars come out of nowhere at any speed. Keep my speed demon at bay until the track, safer environment.
 

In reply to DjGreggieP :

Jeeze that is some potato quality video.  Those riders are all the dumb, organ doners who haven't realized it yet.  Runway: fine.  Then in the wet: that's pretty dumb but you do you I guess.  Finally in traffic at speed: nope, you're a moron.

I do wonder about the green bike, if the lack of faring makes it super easy to lift into a wheelie (considering how hard Suzuki worked to keep the bike down and in contact with the road).

Cars should win every time, the only reason they don't is that 'street' bikes are literally purpose built race bikes with lights and mirrors, whereas 'street' cars are at best intended to look/feel/sound sporty, but are in no way anything close to a purpose built race car.  Take the bodywork and lights off a street bike and compare it to a MotoGP bike, the difference is in lots of little details, but they're not worlds apart.  Take the bodywork off an American Sedan or Touring car (maybe just the fenders and closures?) and compare to a GT1-3 car and if one is called a 'car'. the other should be called something else entirely.  Then compare those 'cars' to formula cars or sports racers and again, they shouldn't even be in the same category.

A 450 supermoto does the 1/4 in mid 13's to high 12's, does fairly well on a roadcourse, and can do 80 foot triples in the dirt.  Compared to a Group N car it's in the ballpark:

https://youtu.be/VSZiEmZ7Clw?t=249

But take some grip away and it's no match for a real racecar:

https://www.tf1.fr/tf1/auto-moto/videos/no-limit-loeb-vs-chareyre-duel-de-champions-monde.html

And if there's any doubt about the miniscule difference between a 'street' bike and a 'race' bike here's Sylvain Guintoli on a stock GSXR1000 with Ohlins suspension and slicks at an Endurance World Championship test day, listen to the commentary:

https://youtu.be/exMJsuSyeAE

In reply to grpb :

Speaking of supermotos, I took mine to drag strip and it cracked out a high 12 sec pass like nothing. 

In reply to KyAllroad :

Anything more recently done by MC Xpress seems to be sleds so maybe they adapted to doing something different with fewer people around. I just remember that bike and video making the rounds over a decade ago on some older forums, when things were found by a friend of a friends older brother who knew a guy...

In reply to grpb :

What an INTERESTING point! Huh. Ha, what if the streets were filled with F1 trucks, cars, and vans. 

In reply to P3PPY :

YES! Finally someone agrees with me.  Driving on the street should be EXACTLY like racing.  I have never in sanctioned racing seen or spent most of the race coasting, nor have I ever experienced racing where completely disparate vehicles are pitted against each other.  So, if BOP makes sense for racing, it should also make sense on the street.  Meaning vehicles sharing the surface should have roughly similar rates of acceleration and top speed, and people should be at WOT from when a light turns green until the next red.  Oh you don't want me to merge onto the highway?  Sorry, we're both at WOT constant speed already and I'm 2 car lengths ahead which is the way things will be for the next 20 miles. 

Unfortunately, this would require vehicles have things like throttles controlled by an actuator and ecu instead of a cable, and things like on board acclerometers to keep rates of acceleration the same, as well as some way of knowing what the maximimum allowable speed of the roadway is, all of which are decades away in terms of technology.

Oh wait, you were being sarcastic.  I cannot 'drop and gear and disappear' on my GSXR1000.  On the street it travels at constant speed within a trailer, and when on it's own two wheels at the track I cannot simply disappear from the other motorcycles, despite my best efforts.  I enjoy this ridculous 'street' machine, but that doesn't make it a good thing in the big picture.

In reply to grpb :

Totally not being sarcastic, just imagining how crazy that would be if "cars" were like the race versions that bikes are. 
 

There was an article somewhere years ago that compared the '72 240Z with the '72 Honda CB750, and what the 300 ZX woulda been like if it had developed the same way as the bike did, to the CBR1000. I forget the details but the pwr to weight ratio would have been um favorable. 

My bike will go 0-60 in 2.8 and quarter mile times in the low 11s. But it's electronically limited to about 115. So even if I had the urge to drop a gear and disappear I don't have the ability.  Probably why I'm still alive. 

Nick Comstock said:

My bike will go 0-60 in 2.8 and quarter mile times in the low 11s. But it's electronically limited to about 115. So even if I had the urge to drop a gear and disappear I don't have the ability.  Probably why I'm still alive. 

Its been so long since I've seen you post, I was beginning to wonder.

In reply to Appleseed :

I'm around.  Been a crazy couple years.  

In reply to Nick Comstock :

No kidding. Same here .

In reply to Appleseed :

I'd forgotten he switched bikes and was about to make some HD jokes.

ShawnG said:

In reply to Appleseed :

I'd forgotten he switched bikes and was about to make some HD jokes.

Something like, "Drop a gear and make a bunch of noise."

In reply to P3PPY :

Sorry I took it the wrong way, it makes me mad to think about a company like Honda for example, who is competitive across so many motorsport disciplines, putting so much effort into vehicles that will spend their lives accelerating hard toward red lights.  Imagine if a car trackday was filled with really fun stuff that the OEM's could do if they allowed their employees to do actual fun stuff.  Instead we, the untrained and unknowing, fiddle and fart around in home shops, cobbling bits and pieces together to the best of our limited abilities, doing bad approximations of things that wouldn't pass muster even for the roughest of actual prototypes.  Our cobbled creations are beautiful too, in their own way, but it would be nice to have a choice.