I Know It's A Car Site...

[AMoffat]

:o

Sure I know it's a car site but check this out from the turbo - I can go like stink angle...

Snake's Venom

Story: Boris Milhailovic

Photos: David G Morgan

If you reckon a standard Hayabusa has plenty of mumbo then wait until you ride the S&R Pro turbo version. Boris did, and hasn't been the same since...

I don't know how fast I want to go anymore. Yesterday, I knew perfectly well. Today...well...I'm not sure. Yesterday, I also knew what "fast" meant. Today I haven't a bloody clue.

I am beset with doubt and confusion and I'm told that's normal. It happens when you ride a Suzuki Hayabusa with 240ps at the rear wheel and 23.6kg-m of torque, apparently. Eventually, they say, you get used to it...

And maybe you do, but that's no reason to think you really know what fast is. O Great Squatting Buddha, no! You don't know!

You may think you do, but like me, you're wrong. Snake's 240ps Hbut if you dial the boost up to 11, it'll produce 280" Hayabusa proved that to me.

This was proven because Editor Wootton obviously wants me dead and sent me to S&R Pro for a lash at their 500ps 'Busa, but it had been stripped down for improvements and modifications before I could get to it.

There's a big bike show in Sydney in May and the blokes reckon they need to tweak it up to a fruitier 550ps so they can freak out more people. I'm welcome to ride it after that, though, which is very considerate of them, and an offer which may yet provide Wootton with my shattered corpse.

However, on the day in question, I was honoured enough to have a crack at Snake's personal bike, which was bought new and turboed when it was about 800km old.

It's now got 25,000km on the dial. Some of them blasphemously fast, I imagined, as Snake wheeled out what at first glance appeared to be a very tidy Ԃusa with no exhaust pipes.

SPOT THE TURBO

It's only when you look a little longer that stuff starts to draw the eye. You notice the strange K&N filter peeping from the left of the fairing. It kinda matches the short, fat exhaust pipe hanging out the other side. Then there's a few extra gauges, some customised decal work and a sticker above the back numberplate that reads: "Speed limited to 370kmh".

I'd seen that sticker before. Once on a Volkswagen Beetle and once on a blown, stroked, nitroused and turboed Harley-Davidson Softail. Both times I grinned because the respective owners were just so full of hot sh*t, though the Harley bloke didn't know that.

But when Snake fired his thing up I couldn't have forced a grin at gunpoint. It sounded like his sticker may have been stating a self-evident truth.

"Um..." I said intelligently. "How come it doesn't sound like crap? All turboed bikes sound like crap."

"It's just tuned right," Snake said, enjoying the deep, regular rasp coming from the wee fat pipe and smiling. Snake smiled a lot the day I rode his bike. He struck me as a very happy man.

"Off you go," he grinned as I pulled on my gloves. And off I went.

TOO FAST?

Please don't misunderstand me. I still fervently believe that going fast is good and right and pure and above all, FUN. But Snake's bike is capable of speeds that are way beyond fun.

How far beyond fun only elicits a grin and a shrug from Snake. He doesn't know. Nor do I. Neither of us really want to find out, either.

Or maybe he does, but I just can't compute the speeds this thing is capable of.

And maybe that's just as well. Because the sticker doesn't lie. It's a question of mathematics - and I've never been good at that, but it sorta goes like this...

If a stock 160-odd-ps 'Busa can top out at 300kmh, a Ԃusa with twice that horsepower could probably top out at...er, some accursed speed well beyond the abilities of a mortal man - tattooed or not.

I quickly learnt my limitations as I casually pulled out to pass some cars heading out of Penrith towards Richmond. Up until then I'd been idling around under 4000rpm through traffic on what appeared to be a meaty-sounding stock Hayabusa.

And then the road opened out and I selected third thinking I'd just see what all this big horsepower business was all about.

Oh dear. Which is what I would have said if I'd had the time. The bike didn't accelerate. It just started to do 180kmh. And was warping itself to even greater heights faster than I could deal with.

Now, I can see smug 'Busa owners leering at me. "Yeah, that's right!" they sneer. "They go like stink, fool!"

I know that. I almost bought one, but came to my senses at the last minute and got a Speed Triple instead. So I have ridden them and I know they're insanely fast out of the box and that the Japanese softpeens changed the speedos so the world's governments could no longer see those numbers that began with "three".

Now double the horsepower, chief.

Kinda hard to wrap your mind around that concept, isn't it?

My synapses were certainly shorted out when I gave it a twisting in third for the overtake. Further shorting out occurred when I found some nice straight back roads.

ANGRY MOTHERS

This bike was something mighty special, I thought, looking at the speedo spin upwards at an appalling rate. It would have got a lot more appalling if I could've found five kilometres of straight road. Still, I can do U-turns and the 'Busa made some fine, if short, passes down some nameless road lined with pseudo-mansions. After pass number five, some mother-types had emerged to stare at me with their arms crossed.

I realised I was a phone call and five minutes away from helping the police with their enquiries, so I figured I'd pushed my luck far enough that day and skulked quietly back to the shop.

It was a horrible ride back. But only because "fast" was no longer what it once was. For all its record-setting qualities, a GSX-R1000 is a groaning sloth by comparison to Snake's weapon.

I also wondered (but only briefly) how stock 'Busa owners would deal with it when I told them their bikes were a tad sluggish by comparison. My main concern was my own state of mind. And returning Snake's bike without a foaming police escort.

Snake was grinning at me when I eventually arrived back at the shop, his deranged bike gurgling like a butcher chopping ox bones.

"It's a one-player game," he said. I gave him his key and grinned back, somewhat deranged myself. It certainly was a one-player game.

The profundity of such a truth should be graven in stone somewhere up high.

But should you seek this truth yourself, consider this: speed, per se, regardless of how much brainwashing the government attempts, does not kill.

Falling off kills. But falling off isn't a consequence of speed. Falling off is a consequence of stupidity. And stupid people shouldn't be wandering into S&R Pro and ordering turbocharged Hayabusas.

The rest of us would do well to note the following: if you're caught doing 140kmh in a 100 zone you'll do your licence. If you're caught doing 150kmh in a 100 zone, you'll be arrested. If you're caught doing 350kmh in a 100 zone, you'll be shot. On the side of the road. Like a rabid dog...

But you may well be grinning.

Note: If you ever do get used to 240 horses at the rear wheel (yeah, right), Jamie and Snake can fix that. How does 300ps grab you? Not enough? No problem. Here's one with 500ps, or even (are you seated?) 600. Yes...the Force is strong within these two blokes. Contact S&R Pro on tel, (02) 4732 2203.

[Lumpen]

I hate bikes,I really hate bikes from the first DR90 I laid on top of me when I was 9 to the Ducati 600SS mock-race bike that my brother tried to double and therefore kill me on BUT that does sound kinda cool.

But like this guys say,falling off kills and I just wonder how long the human smelling smudge would be if you fell off this?

It would make you cocky XR6Ters think twice though not to mention those pesky Tomahawk Missile owners...

Edited 23/03/03 11:15 PM by CJF077

[AMoffat]

Good read too. Sort of creams my Duke!

But then, the Duke as a standard would cream my (YET TO ARRIVE) XR6T.

Say, you don't want me to paste the site with Ducati stuff do you??

OK, I know where the door is..

[F6 RAPID]

And I thought my R1 was quick...... what a SLED !!!!!!!!! :lol:

Damn, I would love a ride!

[Dagabond]

This guy in the states used to have some excellant vid's on board a Turbo Busa seem's that you now have to register on his board to see em:

http://www.superkaos.com/