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Bikes are only as quick as the amount of power they can actually put down to the ground.
Apart from that it depends on the job in hand. 80bhp is more than enough with which to cross continents (my BMW R100RS ate miles like i do ice cream) but a 2-litre 6-pot with 160bhp and 100mph @ 2000rpm sounds even better to me!
In the real world, a good rider on something like a 2005 GSXR600 will not often want more power on the road.
BTW
Anyone here like the RC30 (VFR750R)?
Other than the Everest-like first gear, the bike was virtually perfect.
Fantastic handling, immense shove (for an old 750) once you had got to 30mph (first gear did 85), better made than probably any bike i have ever owned and a glorious sound, rough and gruff at low revs changing to a spine-chilling scream as it neared peak revs. (Open end can, naturally).Those last two phots show 2 of the very best sounding bikes in the world, the Jota’s legendary 3-cylinder howl being outrageously addictive.
Bill White, who had previously worked for the London dealer Sondel Sport, ran Beeline Racing and he was very under-estimated.
It was he who supplied me with an 80-mph FS1E, he who completed the tuning job on my 1981 RD350LC by fitting some huge Lectron carbs and fine tuning the motor to over 70bhp, massive power for a road-going 350 of the day.
I think he is no longer with us but i had some great biking days due to him.The Aprilia had to be given a top-end freshen every 3000 miles and a full engine job every 10000 miles. It was totally bananas in first gear and wanted to flip as it hit 8000 rpm.
There were a few 2-stroke tuners, Stan, Terry Beckett and Beeline Racing from Woodford, Essex.
Stan had the 310cc kit quite soon after the bike appeared.
Yep, the capacity hike helps a lot with mid-range grunt, or what little it had that is.
The difficulty was that there was precious little of anything below 8000rpm in stage 4 tune, a real on/off switch powerband.
But in the right conditions it was great.Stage 4 porting tune, 310cc big-bore kit, hand-bent expansion chambers, totally modifed intake system, 100 octane fuel and other changes gave it 75 bhp at the rear wheel.
It flew and yes, as a track bike, you would love it Gix.Ask Stan how fast a stage 4 Aprilia RS 250 will go, geared up and with a small, light rider on board, Gix.
quote:
Originally posted by sidso youre talking modded bikes then well i had a ts50er (and no that doesnt say TOSSER)with a 65cc top end kit which could do 65 mph with a slight down hill turn
another toy was a honda MT50 with i believe an H100 engine that could piss a lot of people off it was easy to mod the 50cc learner bikes of my teen years because most of them had a slightly bigger brother with an 80cc engine running in a very similar if not exactly the same chassisAye, there were normally bigger versions around.
80+ mph on a FS1E was quite scary, when i think back.[:0]This particular Aprilia was a Stan Stephens-tuned bike, with around 75 bhp at the rear wheel. (That is substantially more than what you got as standard and involved a lot of work.)
The early 1990s GSXR750 was not particularly powerful and i can assure you that 75 GENUINE bhp and just 130kgs makes for a vary fast bike indeed.
Both on the road and during the many track days i took it on.It was timed at 158 mph by my friend’s Fireblade, which must be around a genuine 150mph i would say.
Don’t underestimate the little two-stroke, it outhandled the arse off the GSXR750 of the time.
Fact.Road? Forget it.
But as a track day tool?
Wow!Just wave goodbye to the guys on their 1000cc street sports bikes as you mop them up with ease!
OK, let’s take rider ability out of this, to clarify what i am actually asking here.
Has anyone had a small bike, or maybe one with a name for being slow/boring which they have given a surprising amount of power/turn of speed to?An example. In the late 1970s, the Yamaha FS1E had been trumped by several Italian supermopeds and was no longer the quickest 49cc screamer around.
A friend had already put a Honda C70 engine into his woefully slow Honda SS50 and had got the little 4-stroke putting out around 3 times the standard 2.5 bhp. It certainly shocked a few Fantic and Garelli riders (and me on my FS1E) as it breezed by.
A gentleman called Bill White, who used to run Beeline Racing in Woodford, sourced me a Yamaha YB100 engine, which he tuned to around 15 bhp.
This was then put into the FS1E i had kept from my sixteener days and the gearing was raised by a street or three.
It made the brakes rather overwhelmed but it was a shock to people when they saw an FS1E doing 80 mph!
The Aprilia was a similar kind of sleeper–not many expected a 250 to go over 150 mph and stick with the then-latestGSXR750 in a straight line.
