I love to go fast and nearly every bike I've ever owned I've pushed to it's top speed at least once. My Yamaha TW200 with the smaller rear sprocket will top at at 62 mph. Woosh!!! When I got the chance to drive fast cars home from work I'd usually try to make at least one top speed blast before I had to give them back. I only ever got to drive one car that I couldn't/wouldn't wind all the way out on a public road and that was the Bentley Continental Fly Spur. 186 mph on a public road didn't seem wise unless the car was dialed in a little closer than usual. I won't admit in writing what speed I did get the big Bentley up to but I did scare the crap out of my son. Imagine a motorcycle that's just at half throttle at 186 mph. Here's what bike going 370 mph+ looks like:
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"When my mood gets too hot and I find myself wandering beyond control I pull out my motor-bike and hurl it top-speed through these unfit roads for hour after hour." - T.E. Lawrence
An Important reminder from the past:
"I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations." - James Madison
3 comments:
I have a hard time gauging how fast that looks, because there was nothing to compare it too. They should have had a car going by in the same direction at 100MPH so you could see how fast it was being passed.
Also, That may have two wheels, that may be really fricking cool, and really fast, but that looked more like a super long, two wheeled car to me.
Top speed I've ever been on a motorcycle was about 120 mph. top speed I ever drove one myself was about 110 mph. That was plenty for me.
That sounded like a P-51! Now I wanna see what it looked like from inside.
I could get to L.A. from my house in an hour with that thing!...oh wait...I forgot about traffic. pffffttt.
True enough that the Bub 7 doesn't look much like a motorcycle but then modern sport bikes don't look much like motorcycles compared to fast bikes of thirty or forty years ago. At some point form has to follow function and where speed is involved your choices to go faster are horsepower or aerodynamics or both.
A Hayabusa with a hot rodded motor will put out 250 or so horsepower and run maybe 200 honest mph. Since aerodynamic drag rises as the square of speed, if you want to go 400 mph you don't need four times as much horsepower but 8 times as much. 2000 hp from a Hayabusa engine seems a bit extreme so the alternative is to make the bike as slippery as possible and for various reasons long is more slippery than short. Hey, get your mind out of the gutter!! The Bub 7 is said to be putting out about 400 - 600 hp so to go really fast the outter bodywork has to give up looking like a motorcycle and look more like a missile.
Also, the various forces acting on the components at extreme speeds mean that everything has be bigger and stronger to keep from being ripped apart. The swing arm on the Bub 7 has enough aluminum in it to build about 10 sport bike frames but that's what it takes to keep it together at 350+ mph.
Jac Brown, you're our resident "real" engineer here, feel free to weigh in with corrections to my ramblings.
(Jac's blog: http://lehmanhill.blogspot.com/ )
And if you guys really insist on speed with style make a visit to Leslie Portfield's web page:
http://www.leslieporterfield.com/
Leslie had the fasted "normal" bike at the September Bonneville meet at 240+ mph. She's pretty streamlined herself so that may have helped. :-)
Doug
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