I’m still working through the break-in period on my bike. I’m at about 750 miles of the 1000 mile period so I’m getting into the more fun range but I still can’t really let it go. It boggles the mind to wonder what kind of speed is available in those upper RPM ranges.
I have a hard time communicating to people what it feels like to be on a bike like this. Tyla gets a peek at it when she rides on the back, but I’ll never really push it with her on the bike. It’s hard to find the normal car test performance numbers for a motorcycle because motorcycles don’t get reviewed that way. Someone finally pointed me to the December 2007 motorcycle consumer news review on the bike. Now this is the 2008 model, but it’s almost a carbon copy of my bike minus a couple small tweaks.
0-60: 3.01sec
0-100: 6.79sec
1/4 mile: [email protected]
60-0: 121.9′
To put that in perspective, this list shows the fastest production car quarter mile times. This bike falls sixth on that list. Now I know there is a big difference between a car and a motorcycle, but I think it’s worth noting that if my bike (which lists for $14,299) raced a $650,000 Enzo Ferrari (pictured) in the quarter mile, I’d win by almost half a second. And for those of you that rode in my Mustang, that car was 30% slower through the quarter mile than this bike. And for 0-60 times? You almost can’t beat 3 seconds. My Mustang was around 5.5 seconds. This site would put my bike third on the list of all production cars.
Get on the highway and you can break the speed on the interstate in first gear. Second gear puts you over 100, and you still have four more gears to go through. So while it might look a little deceptive with the bags on it, I’ll probably never meet a car on the road that is faster than me (and not many bikes are either.) It also seems likely to me that I’ll never actually experience those listed speeds since I don’t have a death wish (or money to pay for the ticket/jail time.)
Like I said when I borrowed Simeon’s bike, I’m glad that I have the opportunity to ride a bike like this. Now I can be resolute in forbidding any of my offspring from owning anything similar until they’re out of college.