Mark- Thank you again.
The gas thing does come up. It's inescapable. About a year ago, I spent an obscene amount of time trying to set up a race with some guy in the Dalles, Oregon. He wanted me to ride all the way over there to spank him, because he couldn't travel to Portland because he's pretty much limited to a distance of one-half the distance he can go on a tank of racing gas. Apparently, the gas stations along the way don't sell racing gas. He wanted to control every single aspect of the race, constructing an obtuse set of circumstances where he might be able to squeek by for a few seconds. I offered a multitude of more realistic circumstances, but in the end, he found the phase of the moon not to his liking or something, and he made it clear that he wasn't going to show and that further communication was pointless.
Which brings me to the difference between a roll-on and a race. One is a deodorant, and the other has a starting line and a finish line. Swatting the throttle for 5 seconds is not a race. Starting from freeway speeds and then letting off before I'm topped out in 4th gear isn't a race. A starting line and a finish line that only the Supra driver can see is not a race.
We are now seeing a new slant in the Supra vs Hayabusa thing. They weren't getting it done by structuring a "race" to play to the limitations of a dyno queen, so it appears that there are some vehicles that have been constructed with an even narrower focus to play to the weakness of high-performance motorcycles in general- the fact that the acceleration of bikes like the Hayabusa is wheelie-limited up to a speed somewhere North of 100 mph due to the (relatively) short wheelbase and high center of gravity. So the cars sprout drag tires and Chevrolet transmissions. Now the car won't go around corners anymore, and the top speed is limited to 150 mph or whatever. But it stands a better chance of getting the jump on a stock Hayabusa, at least until the bike's front tire comes down.
A typical ride on a Hayabusa may involve acceleration consistent with 9-second quarter-miles, top speeds in the area of 200 mph, braking hard enough to stand the bike on the front wheel, taking corners at three times the posted recommended speed, AND traveling hundreds of miles at 40 mpg burning 87 octane pump unleaded from wherever's handy. And they are as reliable as an anvil. There's just not anything that you can do to a car that's going to give it a similar performance envelope, at any price point. And anyone can walk into a Suzuki dealer and buy a Hayabusa for ten grand.
