How Fast?

I go away for a day or two and some kid breaks 200 on the freeway? Well, color me unconvinced. A stock RC51 just doesn't have what it takes to run 205. You'd have to spend the price of the bike all over again, at a bare minimum, to get that kind of speed. He should be able to beat this one in court.

On a related note, I am always amused by people who claim their motorcycle can go XXX miles an hour, and offer the bike's speedometer as proof. Time for a little known fact: speedometers are wrong. More importantly, they are always wrong the same way. The speedo in any vehicle you might happen to own will consistently tell you you are going faster than you actually are. One of the bike magazines used to check speedos against radar guns. The speedos were consistently and inevitably low.

Of course, a few moments thought should reveal why. It is not possible to mass produce perfectly accurate instruments cheaply. So the speedos will be off. Given the litigous nature of American Society*, the minute some yotz crashes his bike or gets a ticket because the speedo read too low, he sues. The easy solution is thus to make speedos that are consistently low. Ain't life grand? It's much like gas gauges and the empty mark.

*Completely irrelevant link to a great song. L7 kicks ass!