205 mph earns biker citation

Possible future Darwin award candidate:

http://www.twincities.com/mld/pioneerpress/9716733.htm

Unfortunately this URL requires a sign-up to get to it, but googling
Google news for "205 mph" should provide other free links.

"The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old
Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving,
driving without a motorcycle license, and driving 140 miles per
hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.

Several law enforcement sources said Tilley might have set the
record for the fastest speeding ticket in Minnesota history.

No comprehensive records are kept, but a search of speeding tickets
written by state troopers, who patrol most of the state's highways,
between 1990 and February 2004 shows the next fastest ticket was
for 150 mph in 1994 in Lake of the Woods County.

Tilley, the son of a Washington County sheriff's deputy, did not
return calls to his home Monday."

....

Can anyone in the UK top that?

Somehow they managed to obscure what bike he was riding... the article
only says it was a "Honda 1000". The only suitable candidate for the
speed cited would be the Blackbird 1100, I would imagine. I'd hate
to find out it was an RC51, which would of course throw the claimed
205 mph speed strongly into doubt.

Obviously, timing the rider over only 1/4 mile with a stopwatch makes
it rather difficult to get an accurate speed, but even if the cop
was 1/10 second off, he was still going over 200 mph.

 

Heh.. that article is refreshingly free from "THINK OF THE CHILDREN"
type sound bites.

 

don't you have the CBR1000RR Fireblade in the states? I imagine with a
bit of tuning, you could get >200mph out of one. In any case, human
timed 1/4 miles at that sort of speed are likely to have a fairly high
margin of error.

 

Yes.

 

Yes, after visiting the Honda USA website, I can confirm that the
CBR1000RR is available in the US (although I openly admit without
shame to being previously ignorant of its existence) and I agree
completely about human error having a huge influence on measured
speed over a relatively short 1/4 mile distance.

However, even if the actual elapsed time for the 1/4 mile was 5
seconds rather than 4.39, which would be quite a noticable timing
error, that's still a very healthy 180 mph, which our state plod
would certainly look upon with a rather jaundiced eye...

 

And, according to my local ABC network affiliate, (KSTP Ch 5) it was
a "Honda CR-51, with a 1000 cubic inch engine"

Gosh, with an engine like that, he must have been hardly twisting
the throttle at all...

The expert (some guy working at a Honda dealership) interviewed for
the story claimed it would take $10,000 to hop up an [RC51] to be
able to attain a top speed of 205 mph.

 

Not the 1000 cubic inch model, they'll go 205 easily! But they're hard
to find, my local dealer is out of them....

 

1000ci =~ 16,000 cc. Must have been a Spagthorpe War Mastiff, which comes
with a 16,000 cc W-10. War Mastiffs are fully enclosed, so the rider had
no trouble holding on at 205 mph. Quite an achievement for a '40s bike,
lemme tell you.

(www.spagthorpe.com)

-Andrew

 

Not me (161 indicated) is the best I managed thus far. But a 'free' link to
a more complete version of events:

http://wcco.com/localnews/local_story_265090112.html

 

Local TeeVee news[1] has reported it was an RC51, not a CBR1000RR as had
been earlier assumed on this forum. So, unless a 20 year old squid
has gotten his deputy sherriff father to pony up the bucks for a huge
infusion of cash, it is decidedly unlikely that he actually was going
205 mph. More likely scenarios is that airborne plod had an itchy
finger on the stopwatch.

[1] the local Honda main dealer who was interviewed for the story was
enjoying their free airtime immensely.

 

And **** taking that round a motocross track!

 

Could have been a double outrigger gentlemans combination.

http://www.hurley-pugh.co.uk/fettler/fettler5b.html

Quite rare.

 

<fx: clears throat. Nasal whine.>

Tilley said "Where you want this racin' done?"
God said "Down on Highway 61."

Your honor, the defence rests its case.