"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.
This is actually the fourth Mille Taylor has owned, and he instructed Clark to spare no expense in turning this one into the ultimate example of the breed. The RSV R is already the most exclusive motorcycle available in the Italian maker's lineup, but that didn't stop Clark from tearing it down to the ground and replacing nearly every major component. Every effort was made to boost power and slash weight. The 60-degree V-twin motor was fitted with Clarkie's own Stage 2 Monster Motor kit, complete with 3mm oversized pistons, a Dynojet Power Commander tunable ignition module, an Evoluzione racing airbox and a full titanium Arrow exhaust system. The sleek factory bodywork was replaced with carbon-fiber pieces; the factory wheels were binned for super-light PVM forged magnesium hoops; and the pice de rsistance, a $9600 (!) gas-charged hlins Superbike fork with pressurized damping, was bolted on to the front. Hardly a single piece on this motorcycle is stock, and everything has been completely optimized. All buttoned up, the special Clarkie SBK treatment resulted in nearly 150 rear-wheel horsepower, 20 pounds less compared with stock, and a staggering (for a motorcycle, at least) $60,000 price tag.
Having the right equipment is only half of the go-fast battle--when we showed up at Buttonwillow, we wanted to make sure we had every advantage in place to make the best showing against the cars. Before the event the Mille was dropped off at top-notch Aprilia dealer Scuderia West in San Francisco, where it received a mechanical once-over, along with a fresh set of Dunlop racing slicks from Sport Tire Services to give us some stick on the track. And since there wasn't a chance of our seeing a fast lap without a decent rider in the saddle, we hired a ringer wrist-for-the-day: two-time AMA 250 GP National champion, current AMA Superbike rider and Buttonwillow-based riding instructor Chuck Sorenson. Lastly, hlins factory race suspension technician Mike Watt agreed to come to the track on D-Day to set the suspension exactly to Sorenson's specs. We were ready to rock. And roll.
Upon arriving at Buttonwillow, we sized up the competition. The paddock was packed with cars of every possible configuration, everything from mildly tuned Japanese econoboxes in the Limited FF (front engine/front drive) class to full-on, tube-framed Grand Am Cup racecars. Only one car there mattered to us, though, and that was the CEC Wheels/Novitec Ferrari Modena F360. The matchup was a no-brainer. Just as Taylor's motorcycle represents the ultimate, no-expense-spared, street-legal Italian superbike, the Ferrari was designed to be the ultimate street-legal Italian supercar. Said to produce 555 hp and 415 foot-pounds of torque from its Novitec twin-supercharged V8--and further modified with upgraded brakes, suspension, wheels, tires and aerodynamics (all by Novitec) that add more than $100,000 to the base price of a Ferrari 360--this car was clearly built in the same spirit as Taylor's bike, even if numbers such as a 3.8-second 0-60 sprint and a 210-mph top speed (!) gave us reason to pause. Topping things off, CEC had hired professional Trans Am race driver Tommy Kendall to take the wheel of the Ferrari for the day. Sorenson would have his work cut out for him.
We showed up at the track ready to throw down, but even the best-laid plans often go south. As we were late additions to the Time Attack program, we would have very limited track time for Sorenson to get up to speed on the Aprilia. The plan was for us to get an hour and a half of playtime from 8 'till 9:30 a.m., when the cars were scheduled to hit the track. We would then have from 9:30 to noon to fine-tune the Aprilia before Sorenson could return to the track over the car drivers' lunch break and hopefully turn some fast laps. As it happened, the weather wasn't cooperative, putting a serious dent in our available track time. A thick Central Valley fog forced officials to keep the track closed until 10 a.m., erasing our morning sessions and leaving us with just 45 minutes during the lunch break to do all our work.
The time crunch hardly fazed a professional rider such as Sorenson, who got right down to business at 12:01 p.m. After a few warm-up laps to acquaint himself with both the bike and the track, Sorenson returned to the pits and instructed Watt to increase the fork preload a touch and take out a bit of rebound damping in the rear in preparation for some fast laps. After these adjustments, Sorenson got back on the track and put his head down for the remaining 20 minutes. Falling on the collected experience of the 3000 laps he estimates he's run at Buttonwillow, Sorenson quickly found some speed. By the time the track steward gave the flag to end the session, Sorenson had turned a best lap of 2:00.312 on Buttonwillow's longest-possible course configuration. His quickest laps came when he nailed the difficult final "Sunset" corner, a diabolical, first-gear left-hander that leads onto the front straight. Dialing this corner gave him a good drive onto the front straight, allowing him to make the most of the motorcycle's superior power-to-weight ratio to build plenty of speed toward Turn One. Sorenson remained less than satisfied with the bike's setup (a result of the compressed timeframe that limited our tweaking time), but he was mostly pleased with his lap times given that he was riding an unfamiliar streetbike. Put him on his Superbike-prepped Yamaha R1 and he reckoned he could knock two or three more seconds off that lap time, but that would be unfair--the point here is streetbikes versus streetcars, so 2:00 was what we got. And given what was happening on the car side, we were feeling good about that.
Kendall had the advantage of significantly more track time to come to terms with the Ferrari, and by midafternoon we were getting nervous as he consistently lapped in the low 2-minute range, nearly on top of Sorenson's best time. The Ferrari's performance was somewhat hampered by an ECU problem: Apparently, it was set in "street," not "race" mode, and the elevated engine temperatures created after two or three hot laps tripped the ECU into "limp" mode, limiting Kendall's fast laps. Still, he looked like he was getting along OK--good enough at the end of the day to finish 14th place overall and second place in the Limited Rear Wheel Drive class, just 0.1 seconds out of first.
But who cares about the cars: How did Kendall's best lap stack up against Sorenson and the killer Aprilia? Chalk up another second place for the Ferrari, as Kendall's best lap of 2:00.767 was still a half-second slower than Sorenson's 2:00.312 lap, despite Sorenson's lack of track time and unfamiliarity with the bike. A look at onboard data-logging equipment (had we had any) would have showed some big differences in where the car was fast compared with the bike. Going fast in a straight line is one thing (mainly a power-to-weight issue) and though the twin-supercharged Ferrari was no match for the Aprilia in a straight line (at lower speeds, at least), going fast around corners is more complicated. The limiting factor when the road turns is surface area, and the vastly superior surface area of four big car tires and four massive brake rotors meant even with PVM radial-mount brake calipers and a fresh set of Dunlop racing slicks, Sorenson couldn't come close to the car's speeds through the middle of the corners.
When all the smoke cleared, the ultraexotic superbike was quicker than the ultraexotic supercar, but just barely. Throw in a different course configuration with a different ratio of high- to low-speed corners or a different ratio of corners to straights and the results very well might be different.
Judged against another set of criteria, though--speed to dollars spent, for example--it's simply no contest. Even though it seems insanely expensive (for a motorcycle) at $60,000, the Clarkie-built Aprilia is a stone bargain compared with a Ferrari that will empty your purse to the tune of $260,000! Looked at this way, even the most blinged-out Italian superbike represents a huge bang for your buck. On that front, there's not a chance in hell the car guys can compete. How fast you want to go, then, all depends on how fat your wallet is.