No launch assist, but you're both right about the rest. From the video description (
emphasis added):
Quote:
A lap time of 1:58.66 is a pretty arbitrary number, but consider this: To cover Chuckwalla’s 2.7 miles and 17 turns Ari averaged 81 mph, just 11 mph slower than a stock CBR300’s outright top speed of 92 mph. And, of the less-than two minutes it took to do the lap, the bike was wide open for one minute eleven seconds, or 60 percent of the lap.
It’s true, this little CBR is on slicks, tuned suspension, has a quickshifter, and is up 8 horsepower on the stock CBR300’s 28 ponies. But still, last time we held a superbike shootout at Chuckwalla (with bikes like the Aprilia’s RSV4, BMW’s S1000RR, and Kawasaki’s ZX-10R) most of our testers only managed between a 1:54 and 2:05 laptimes. Editor Henning can consider his skills honed.
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You can be competitive without all of the arm's race bits. In classes that allow them, it may be handicapping yourself. It's a little bit like displacement - assuming you can cover the cost, would you compete with a bike under the class limit? Probably not, in most cases.
On the arms race thing, consider: literbike comparisons in 2015 made a habit of dinging bikes that didn't have
auto-blipping downshifts.
