205 mph outside Minneapolis

[CrimsonBrian]

Hey everyone, if you are interested in seeing the actual ticket, you can head on over to http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0922042speed1.html. This guy must have completely taken leave of his senses. I bet he was close to travelling thru time...

[GJPinAU]

I remember a few years back reading an article about car safety.

It claimed that due to cars becoming safer, that more idiots were surviving accidents and therefore we would have a lot more idiots on the roads in the future. And now they are breeding idiots.

200mph. Every 18 year old female driver in Australia can do that with cell phone in one ear and ashing her cigarette out the window at the same time as sending a text message in a 30mph zone.

[winfred]

one of my personal favorites, on the way home from work in 5:30-6:00 traffic this choad in a boxster with the top down merges across 5 lanes of dense traffic at 80 mph, at the point where the two main interstates combine into one WITH one hand on a cell phone AND the other grabing the rollbar behind his head, dude musta had a prehensile dick to pull that one off

I remember a few years back reading an article about car safety.

It claimed that due to cars becoming safer, that more idiots were surviving accidents and therefore we would have a lot more idiots on the roads in the future. And now they are breeding idiots.

200mph. Every 18 year old female driver in Australia can do that with cell phone in one ear and ashing her cigarette out the window at the same time as sending a text message in a 30mph zone.

[SharkmanBMW]

I love the fact we get a stopwatch reading to 0.01 seconds - "the myth of accuracy"* if ever I've seen it. Sure the stopwatch reads to 0.01 seconds, but it's ******** that the man using it can really time to that.

Still, it does sound quite fast.

A standard Fireblade did something like 188 mph in this country's Motorcycle News a few weeks back. I was devastated, since my own Hayabusa pulls only a niggardly 180 or so (reading 186 on the speedo, apparently). 188 mph would give 4.78 seconds - as an engineer I have to say that's "about the same" as 4.39 seconds when we're talking about manual timing. So the bottom line is he was running his Blade flat out.

The MotoGP bikes pull 215 mph down the straights of the longer tracks - they are a 1 litre engine, no nitrous, no turbo and making about 230 bhp. Of course, they aren't terribly long-lasting but neither is anything running nitrous.

Someone who's never ridden a bike just doesn't get how quickly they get there, that's the big difference to a car. If I want to take my 540 past 150 on the clock I need at least 3 and preferably 4 miles of straight, empty motorway (I, er, I should imagine). I've had a Kawasaki ZX12R at an indicated 175 mph on our 1 mile straight** which has a 70 mph (tops) bend at the bottom of it. My Blackbird was knocking off 150 mph on the clock in half the straight for noise testing purposes - that's just half a mile. I went from standing to 150 to standing in 3/4 of a mile and I'm no expert at it.

I'm not saying it isn't fast, but the reality is that it doesn't last long. It's also quite uncommon for a motorcycle to cross the median and kill a family of four coming in the other direction.

I hate the "speed kills" moronic message. Bad riding/driving kills. Picking your moment and maxing something out is not the same thing at all. On the Isle of Man there are no speed limits on roads out of town and then there are the Autobahns in easy reach for us here, too. The Autobahns are the safest roads in Europe per passenger kilometre - and the US road system is horribly dangerous by the same measure.

Of course, doing it unlicensed is a bit dim and maybe it's a shame for the gene pool that something other than a traffic policeman intervened in this particular incident.

Damian

* "The Myth of Accuracy" - A Paper wot I wrote in October 2000.
** I work at a test track. And test things.