"What if ..."What if you were filthy stinking rich and money was no object? What if only one thing mattered-insane, eyeball-popping speed, both in a straight line and around corners-and you could go to any length imaginable to achieve it? What if you just had to have the baddest vehicle on the planet, no matter whether it rolled on two wheels or four? What would you choose?
Which, in other words, is faster: a car or a bike? It's a fun little thought experiment and a favorite topic of conversation among benchracers on both the car and bike sides. Sure, the cagers have their arguments, usually related to the old "no replacement for displacement" recipe for horsepower and how four fat tires and four big brakes will help a well-tuned car through corners at speeds no moto can approach. The bike guys have their arguments, too, namely on the subject of power-to-weight ratio. Sure, the typical superbike makes significantly less hp than a supercar, but it also has to push less than 20 percent of the car's total weight. When it comes to horsepower per pound (the real determinant of acceleration), it seems as if a motorcycle would be unbeatable.
Arguments can (and do) go round and round forever, but who's right when the tires actually hit the track? We recently had the opportunity to answer this question when two of Primedia's leading car magazines, Eurotuner and Super Street, invited Super Streetbike to participate in Time Attack, a jointly produced racetrack event intended to find the world's fastest automobiles. The annual contest held at California's Buttonwillow Raceway pits the best Euro car tuners against the best Japanese car tuners to see who comes out on top. Greg Emmerson, the editor of Eurotuner, is a hardcore motorcycle enthusiast, and he was just as curious about the car-bike debate as we were. So when he asked us to bring a modified sportbike to Time Attack to do battle with the assembled autos, of course we said yes.
Step one was to rustle up the trickest sportbike we could find on such short notice. Luckily, a well-placed phone call to Aprilia USA's marketing maestro Robert Pandya paid off-he put us in touch with his friend Mark Taylor in Scottsdale, Arizona, who had just the bike: a $60,000 Aprilia Mille RSV R with a 3mm overbore, a $9600 hlins Superbike fork and carbon/magnesium/ titanium everything else. Exactly the sort of ultraexotic superbike we needed to stand up to the trick cars at the event.
Know this: Taylor knows exotic bikes. The license plate on this Mille reads "WEDS," and, as you might have already guessed, Taylor owns a trick bike for every day of the week, including a 2003 Ducati 999S, an '05 MV Agusta Ago 1000, an '01 Moto Guzzi V11S, an '02 Benelli Tre Limited Edition, an '04 Honda CBR1000RR track bike, an '03 KTM 650CS factory motard ridden by Ben Bostrom and many more. As we said, Taylor knows fast bikes, and when he wanted to build the ultimate Italian superbike, he knew just where to turn: noted Aprilia racer and tuner Aaron Clark at Clarkie MotoWorks.