I Feel the Need...the Need for Speed! (NOT!)

By Kalikianol Kalei

I never tire of telling anyone interested (and doubtless even a fair number who are not) that once you’ve been to Mach 2.0+ and an altitude of roughly 60K feet (that’s flight level Six-zero-zero, or FL600 to you turbine-heads in the audience), speed for speed’s sake becomes rather superfluous to the living of a fruitful and well-conducted life! I can state that with full confidence, having achieved that somewhat rare status.

In my case, that ‘ticket’ to blazing speed and hypoxic extremes of (almost no) atmosphere took shape in the form of Convair F-106A ‘Delta Darts’ (a 50s’ vintage delta-winged jet interceptor that served as the backbone of US Air Defense for almost 30 years, deterring those nasty old ‘Commies’ from any nefarious schemes to bomb the living pahootie out of the United States of America during the early phases of the so-called ‘Cold War’; we knew ‘em as simply ‘the Six’). But you can toss a few Lockheed F-104 ‘Starfighters’ (later to become known as ‘the Zipper’, thanks to the Italian Air Force who flew the very last specimens…the F-104S model) into the mix, as well (another brilliant 50s era Mach 2.0 capable stiletto-with-wings designed by Lockheed Aircraft Company’s Clarence ‘Kelly’ Johnson) and those two jet-turbine powered ‘sports jobs’ remain my two most favorite fast jets of all time, despite their now being almost 7 decades old! Even sitting stock-still, engineless on the ground, they just look both sexy and fast!

I’ve also flown Concorde a few times as well, back in the mid-80s when it was in its hay days, and ladies and gentlemen, I can assure you that doing a cool 1300 mph in your shirtsleeves is a treat, even if its adrenalin-stimulating status pales somewhat when compared to flying a stubby-winged needle of a fighter, strapped to an 18K pound thrust General Electric J-75 jet-turbine engine equipped with an afterburner (the Brits call ‘em ‘re-heaters’, of course). In the Concorde, while the bird was flying itself (fully on autopilot) steadily eating up the nautical miles in its Trans-Atlantic supersonic corridor, one would be sensibly tucking into some of the best wines and cognacs money could buy, whilst dining on gourmet cuisine that would make Queen Lizzie II herseff jealous! No such luck in a fast jet fighter, naturally, unless you were even more blessed to have hours in something like an SR-71 (and descending to 60K feet at Mach-3!), where the day’s gustatory treat was likely a tube of liquified turkey paste that had to be squeezed through a tiny orifice in the front of your custom-fitted David Clark A/P22S-2 full pressure suit helmet.

At any rate, experience is…just as with age…extremely relative. When one is young and just discovering the innate sensory thrills of one’s youthful nervous system, still mapping out the envelope of one’s first decades of life like an experiential test pilot of human anatomy, speed just naturally seems to be very high up on the list of exotic thrills that every young man earnestly aspires to. That said, while speed in a high-performance jet aircraft in inarguably a thrill-and-a-half, the downside of a general preoccupation with youthful speed is sometimes unhappily associated with a coital endurance of just over one minute during bouts of hot sex with a particularly juicy specimen of lustful desire! Ah well…in this case, speed (not the same as that of traditional American patriot Minute-Men we’ve come to know through American history lessons, of course) becomes the enemy…at least in the opposite gender’s mind (to complicate things, now we must needs include a much wider gender range of possible hook-ups in ruminative categorisations of this sort, LoL).

But all of the above relates principally to those still captive by the hot-blooded years of youthful innocence, naturally enough, and by the time one hits the 7th decade of life, one is theoretically a whole lot schmarter than one was after after a mere two decades of life experience. Or at least that’s how the theoreticians say it’s supposed to work.

Evidence now suggests that due to a preponderance of marginally bright and aware (substitute the word eddicated here, if you will) people madly procreating like bunnies on hormones (a phenomenon regrettably amplified by an exploitative materialistic Capitalistic economy that is solely obsessed with selling stuff rather than looking out for the best interests of consumers) it seems that a contemporary rite of adolescent passage the offspring of these not-so-bright progeny are prone to is the purchase of either a grossly overpowered automobile OR a two-wheeled pocket-rocket that can go from 0 to 60 mph in only 2.5 seconds! GAAK!

In the latter context I refer to motorcycles, of course, something that has formed a substantial part of my life since I was a sophomore in high school (I began my powered two-wheel life on the pillion seat of a Cushman Eagle motor scooter that could do 15 mph on a windless day, but soon graduated to one of the ‘You meet the nicest people on a Honda’ 50 cc Supercub). There was no looking back from there, understandably, and from there I progressed through the engine displacements and motorcycle marques like a karate expert through a gang of drunk hooligans. Eventually (in the past 15 years or so), I acquired a few of the red-hot superbikes made by Yamaha, Honda, Suzuki and Kawasaki. Most all displacing 800ccs and above, with a goodly number being in the one-liter class.

One notable example worth mentioning was my 1992 Yamaha FZR1000, my first such exercise in neck-snapping superbike acceleration, but I soon continued with a Kawasaki ZX900, then a Kawa ZX1100C (both ‘Ninjas’) and onwards to a bike I consider one of the finest all-round sports-touring machines ever made…the Honda VFR800A. As of today, I have not just one but TWO Kawasaki ZX1100 ‘Ninjas’ (a 1992 model and another that is a 1994 model…both carbureted) and my faithful, fuel-injected 2002 (6th-gen) Honda VFR800 ‘Interceptor’. Although I now somewhat more enjoy tinkering and maintaining them than risking my geezerhood out on the highways among today’s highly distracted and unskilled motorists (the 4-wheel variety), I still harbor a keen appreciation of what they represent in terms of the previously alluded-to ‘rites of passage.

As a somewhat more eddicated (on second thought, let’s just settle for ‘slightly smarter than the average bear’ and let it go at that) and urbanely aware motorcyclist, I belong to that small group of two-wheel fanatics that includes none other than famed Arabist T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia, as he is known to most), who owned a Sierra Hotel (sh*t-hot) Brough SS100 of 20s/30s vintage that was capable of 100 mph (Lawrence loved speed and eventually it killed him, sadly enough, when he died ‘in the saddle’ on a blind curve whilst swerving to avoid two school boys who suddenly appeared in the roadway). And as a life-long medical person, I am, as I have many times repeated, well aware of the possible consequences of trusting too much in a one-liter, fire-breathing, two-wheeled road machine that is about as close to hitting Mach-2 on dry land as one may get! Fortunately, time and experience has mellowed me considerably and my Japanese dragons have to get used to being driven at speeds of about 50-60 mph max, in most instances (that’s like driving an F-104 Starfighter at roughly the maximum speed of a WW1 Sopwith Camel!), but hey…it helps keep me alive, so what the heck?

I am, y’see, VERY much aware of the laws governing the physics of speed, inertia and mass and I can only too easily relate to the sort of extreme injury that any collision between a car and a motorcycle can produce! Not so with just about anyone under the age of 30 and every day, just before drifting off to rendezvous with Zhou Gung (the mythical Chinese boat-master who paddles people off to the land of sleep each night…AKA ‘The Sandman’), I hear a dozen or more of those keen young potential organ donors out on the nearby Interstate giving their powerful sportsbikes the mechanical equivalent of a nervous breakdown, as the rev the poor things waaaaay past the redline! They build ‘em tough in Japan these days, but still…!

Anyway, very recently, as I was tinkering with one of my ZX1100 Ninja superbikes, I recalled a rather famous and I feel brilliantly amusing article that originally appeared in CYCLE WORLD in 2012, titled: ‘Fifty Years of “Do You Have Any Idea How Fast You Were Going?!” A Brief History of Speed.’

Written by hugely clever and talented motorcycle journalist John Burns, it graphically encapsulates the whole ‘extreme speed’ obsession that the world has had with its two-wheeled motor vehicles since roughly the early 70s! An obsession that has seen the rise of homologated consumer versions of fire-breathing racing motorcycles that today routinely sell in the twenties of thousands of dollars (in some cases).

And how, you may ask, is it possible for feckless youths who can barely shave yet to purchase such dangerously fast machines? Simply because in America youth exploitation has become such a lucrative market share that the only people who entertain a bit of care about such things as driver safety are a few parents here and there (most are simply too culturally wacked-out by their own materialistic desires that they aren’t much concerned about young Johnny smashing his brain to smithereens in a tight curve on his new Qwikasfuki or Fasariyass Sombeechi suicycle (0-60 in 2.5 seconds, remember!). Awesome, Dude…right?

Be all this as it may, there are now legions of these would-be motorcycle boy-racers all over the place and during the recent pandemic, with all its social unrest and dissing of law enforcement personnel, they (the LEOs) finally lost the ability to either control these young speed demons or put the fear of Gawd into them. Either way, they now proliferate with feckless abandon and no one is afraid of ‘The Man’, any more (since the Poleece have now all been legislatively emasculated, restricted, sanctioned, defunded or otherwise chased off into less hazardous professions…excluding the distaff types among them, of course, who never had any anatomical cojones to begin with, hee-hee, if you catch my drift).

It’s increasingly a problem on our freeways now, since there are generally only two large groups of motorcyclists left in America today: the big, fat, older and bearded dudes who preferentially ride Detroit Iron (e.g. Hardly-Goodsons, as I call 'em) and the puerile, testosterone-strung-out riders of UJMs (Universal Japanese Motorcycles). Both types can be extremely annoying, depending on the circumstances under which you encounter them and the persons involved, as our highways become so much more crowded these days with big trucks, SUVs and just plain stupid motorists of all types.

But enough. It behooves me to now present John Burns to you and let you read his priceless and most wryly amusing article (Fifty Years of Do You Have Any Idea of How Fast You Were Going?) on this subject (of needlessly fast motorcycles). To wit:

“The reason why faster is better is simple enough: Whoever gets there first gets to reproduce with the most desirable member(s) of the opposite sex and gets the best parking spot. Then it became more complicated. After the invention of cosmetics, getting there too fast was no good because the prey would still be in the bathroom anyway. At some point, enough speed was enough—and then it wasn’t the actual speed that mattered as much as the wealth exhibited by the ability to acquire it: As a commodity, speed has always been expensive.

“What’s curious is the fairly recent phenomenon of motorcycles that have more speed than you’ll ever need. Bikes that get you there before you’ve left, bikes that generate in about 15 seconds the sort of speed (and then some) needed to heave a fully laden 747 into the air. After being perfectly content with motorcycles that topped out at no more than 125 mph for the first 70 years of motorcycling, who decided we needed motorcycles that could do 185, and why?

“In 1925, the Brough Superior could go 100 mph; 24 years later, the Vincent Black Shadow could do 125. And according to Cycle World test results dating back to 1962, there wasn’t another production motorcycle capable of going that fast until the 1973 Kawasaki Z1 topped out at 120 at the end of a ½-mile test run—with (the testers figured) another 5 or 6 mph in it. (Unless you count the ’67 Dunstall Norton 750, which reached 126 mph but can’t really be considered “production.”) Granted, quarter-mile times were coming down all the while, but the plain fact is that nobody really saw a need to go faster than 125 mph for almost 50 years.

“The Honda CB750 of 1969? All done at 123 mph, and Honda for years seemed in no hurry to improve much upon that. Harley’s ’72 XLCH 1000 Sportster was just as quick in the quarter-mile as the CB (though the H-D’s top speed was only 116), and even ensuing Norton Commandos were quicker than the CB in the quarter-mile. It was enough for the Honda to be a technological marvel (after having excellent results with its four-cylinder racebikes for the previous few years) without having to rub the competition’s nose in it. Let’s be gentlemen.

“Being that 1969 was also the Summer of Love, lots of people’s thoughts turned to the subject. What thoughts were unconnected with love may have been too muddled by commonly used substances of the day to focus on anything as specific as motorcycle performance. Anti-Vietnam sentiment was reaching fever pitch, along with Easy Rider hitting the big screen. What? Do you mean to tell me that The Man is not always on our side? After about 1970—the year that brought the film version of Catch 22—the motives of our authority figures were suddenly not just questionable but highly suspect. At the same time, it was hard not to be impressed with the Saturn V rocket that launched Neil Armstrong to the moon. Or the Snake and Mongoose funny-car models. Mmmm, that glue smells good…

“Along with the Kawasaki Z1, 1973 brought an oil embargo to the U.S. from our OPEC friends. Suddenly it was more expensive to fill up the Pinto, not to mention time-consuming. Gas lines! One response to save fuel was the Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act (which spawned the Sammy Hagar hit, “I Can’t Drive 55”), signed into law by Richard Nixon in January, 1974. After that, the 85 percent of the driving population who regularly broke the speed limit were criminals and began to appreciate what Dickens meant when he said, “the law is an ass.”

“Expensive gas and increased law enforcement may have played a minor role in keeping motorcycle speeds flat for a time, but the biggest reason for the plateau is that the manufacturers really didn’t need to add performance; they were busy enough selling motorcycles as fast as they could stamp them out. In 1973, those Americans born in 1946 (ground zero of the Baby Boom) were turning 27 and already hooked like zombies on the low-potency 250cc gateway drugs of the ’60s.

“Everybody played nice for a while, then Kawasaki did it again, this time unprovoked: The ’76 KZ1000 ran 12.19 seconds at 107.65 mph in the quarter-mile and topped out at 120 after a half-mile with quite a bit of steam left. And when pipsqueak Yamaha jumped in with its XS1100 in 1978—the first bike we tested that broke into the 11s in the quarter-mile (and ran 126 mph up top, all with shaft drive!)—Honda dropped the bomb: Its CBX six-banger ran 11.64 at 117.95 mph and was good for an official 134 mph after a half-mile—the first bike to break the 130-mph barrier. The CBX is a collector’s item. The XS1100 (XS1100 owners, take up your pencils) is returning to its elemental components in a junkyard near you.

“By then, the British were wheezing like the 'ventilation system' in Hoyer’s E-type and the Italians were enjoying a nice grappa. Now it was a Japanese civil war. And you know how nasty those can get. The ’83 Honda CB1100F was the first bike we clocked at more than 140 mph—141 to be exact—and was geared to top out at 144 mph. Suzuki’s ’83 GS1100ES was the first to break into the 10s—10.99 at 120.8 mph, with a top end of 140 mph. But it was all about the quarter-mile in those days; redline in top gear for the GS occurred 1 mph faster, at 141. These were truly “quarter horses,” winded, wobbly, and all-in at 1320 feet.

“In 1981, Holly-wood, in collaboration with Car & Driver Editor Brock Yates, brought us The Cannonball Run, a lighthearted romp/race across the U.S. that thumbed its nose at the 55-mph limit. The film, with a big cast of Hollywood favorites, was based upon actual events and named for the famous motorcyclist Cannon Ball Baker. After winning one (real) Cannonball in a Ferrari, Dan Gurney was quoted in the L.A. Times as saying, “At no time did we exceed 175 miles an hour.” Now it was not only acceptable to break the speed limit, it really verged upon being a civic duty for performance-minded people—much like drinking during Prohibition had been. We’re still here, we’re not going away. And we’re beginning to strongly resent the intrusion upon our pursuit of happiness.

“Meanwhile, in 1983, Honda tested the prevailing wisdom that “café racers” would never sell in the U.S. and introduced its first Interceptor, the VF750F. It didn’t set the dragstrip on fire, it could only do 132 mph on top and Honda only imported enough for AMA Superbike homologation. But it handled great, looked racy in its plastic nose-cone and perimeter frame, and people lined up to buy all 1200.

“‘Almost instantly,’ Kevin Cameron remembers, ‘club racers began to switch from Yamaha TZ250s as the beginner-racer’s mount to the new ‘raceable production bikes’—the Interceptor, GPz550 and some Suzukis. Incredibly, you could race those bikes without 30 hours of welding in plates, gussets and tubes to make the chassis go straight. Fantastic!’

“Obviously, a lack of wind protection on nearly everything that came before the VF was a big reason why bikes didn’t need to go any faster. Anything over 130 really jacked your blow-dried coif and blew out your Camel. But would people really buy motorcycles covered in plastic? The ’84 Ninja 900 was the emphatic answer: “Yes!” Liquid-cooled like the Interceptor, the right-sized Ninja ran low 11s, 145 mph at the end of the half-mile (a new record) and was geared for 152. Ka-ching, rang the Kawi register.

“Take this, countered Honda in 1985 with its ponderous but 150-mph-fast Euro-flavored VF1000R. Screw that, said Kawasaki with an ’86 Ninja 1000R that ran 159 freakin’ miles an hour. Gulp, that’s almost 160, Ludicrous Speed on a motorcycle! (Now, out of necessity, CW was back to measuring true top speed at a secret test facility.) “The final straw was Top Gun Tom Cruise smiling his way around San Diego on a Ninja GPZ900, flouting regulations, going inverted with Russian MiGs in his Tomcat and possibly also with a convincing hot blonde superior officer aerodynamic engineer genius. (Imagine how much richer Kevin Cameron’s bathtub ruminations upon “boundary layers” might be if he looked like Kelly McGillis? I digress.) There had been earlier rumblings along the Potomac that something needed to be done about these crazy-fast motorcycles (they’d already strangled our beloved muscle cars), but it may very well have been the idea of inter-rank heterosexual Naval activity in Top Gun that finally drove Congress to act.

“Prodded by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, Senator John Danforth introduced the “Motorcycle Safety Act of 1987,” blaming the proliferation of superbikes for an increase in fatalities and calling the marketing of the killer machines “the moral equivalent of selling drugs to adolescents.” Manufacturers hunkered in bomb shelters, magazine editors trembled, the marketplace waited with bated breath. And then a funny thing happened: nothing. The AMA and manufacturers closed ranks to point out that superbikes were, in fact, underrepresented in fatal accidents, and who knows what arm-twisting went on behind the scenes, given that logic so seldom prevails? Anyway, the bill slunk off to die, and at that point, the tire-smoking lamp was truly lit.

“Kawasaki was ready with an ’88 ZX-10 housing an even more potent four-cylinder within a monolithic twin-beam aluminum perimeter frame rolling on modern radial tires. Now we are deep into the 10s—10.76 at 127.54 mph—and 165 mph on top. Yamaha and Suzuki answered with sportier liter-bikes that were quicker in the quarter-mile. Kawasaki chuckled quietly deep in its throat and called upon its bullet-train heritage to produce the ZX-11 in 1990, and now we could add gas and go 176 mph. The problem at this point was that not so many people could afford to, thanks to a recession following the previous (much smaller) banking debacle and a Gulf War that spiked gas prices. Hmmm, what was the problem, the manufacturers asked themselves as they looked longingly back at the sales chart bulge of the mid-’80s?

“Clearly, what the American people want is more speed, said Honda, as it launched the ’96 CBR1100XX Super Blackbird (the year after the double nickel was repealed). As a hyperbike, the dual-counterbalanced, 1137cc XX was (and maybe still is) the most refined of the flock—but it could only stir up 174 mph. Meh… Then suddenly, from out of nowhere, came this weird two-tone copper-colored thing from Suzuki in 1999. Hayawhat? Hayabusa! Not necessarily designed to look pretty, it was designed to slice through the air like the world’s fastest falcon. It was the first bike we tested to break into the nines, and it demolished the ZX-11’s ultimate-velocity record by running 194 mph. Holy mother of pearl!

“In 2000, Kawasaki returned fire with a new ZX-12R. A hush fell over the crowd. Will it do 200? No, it won’t. In fact, it wouldn’t even go 190—only a sluggish 187. It wanted to go faster, but it couldn’t, because it was electronically limited. What the…?! In October of 1999, we reported, BMW bigwigs had traveled to Japan, concerned that Hayabusas and things running amok on the autobahn were going to cause Bad Things to happen legislatively. A subsequent meeting in Bologna resulted in a voluntary agreement among manufacturers to “cease competitive marketing strategies with respect to maximum speed achievable.” That agreed-upon limit was 299 kilometers per hour, or 185 mph. The speed genie was corked.

“But not before Japan had learned its lesson once more: Speed sells. At the millennium, motorcycle sales took off on an upward trajectory such as had never been seen in U.S. history. A professional economist might blame most of it on the easy credit that fueled a magnificent bubble in home equity and put a hyperbike, a custom chopper and a pair of quads for the kids in every granite-countered garage. But we’re not economists, we’re motorcycle people. And we can’t wait to see who breaks the “gentlemen’s agreement” first, goes an honest 200 and launches the next crazy boom. In fact, one bike already has broken it, if our test equipment doesn’t deceive us, and how ironic that it’s the 188-mph BMW S1000RR we tested last August. Also the 188-mph one we tested in July, 2010. Correct, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the same BMW who instigated the “agreement” in the first place. Kawasaki didn’t do it this time, but Kevin Cameron reminds us it’s been putting a 300-horsepower 1500cc supercharged version of the big ZX engine in its watercraft for quite a few years. Surely, it’s not going to take this thing lying down forever?”

[* “For a while, CW’s top-speed testing was measured at the end of a half-mile, but the unfaired bikes of the time weren’t going to go more than a few mph faster, given more room. Most were geared to top out at redline just a bit beyond their measured top speeds.]

And that, friends and neighbors, is John Burns’ righteously droll 2012 analysis of the speed obsession we suffer from today that bears repeating here to amuse you in these dreary pandemic times! [I hope John understands!]

-------------------------------------------------------

[All rights copyright CYCLE WORLD and John Burns, 2012.] Borrowed shamelessly w/o permission, but with the best of intentions!