Once upon a time, the Suzuki Hayabusa was the fastest thing on two wheels. It was the bike that ended the Speed Wars, the bike that killed the Super Blackbird, the bike so fast that it got regulatory attention — and now it can be had for 35 of your most crumpled hundred-dollar bills. Is that too cheap?
Think about it. You go and take the MSF, ride someone else’s bike around a parking lot for a weekend and get a shiny new license that you can immediately take up to 194 miles an hour, all for the cost of a nice set of wheels for a car. Is that right? Should we be allowing that?
Of course, price isn’t really the issue. Money and skill are rarely if ever correlated, and then only by what one spends on rider training, so limiting the Busa by dollars isn’t the most effective approach. But, in the absence of any sort of regulatory licensing tiers like you’d find in Europe, we don’t have any other way to stop idiot 16-year-olds from turning themselves into 200-mph red crayons on the highway.
Should we have something like A1 and A2 licenses? Almost certainly. But we don’t, and age generally correlates with wealth, so making Hayabusas more expensive is about the only way to make that kind of absurd speed even slightly limited by experience and skill. Hayabusa owners, start asking more for your bikes on Marketplace. You’re doing a public service.
