life

Last sunday I went to see the "32ste Snelheidsprijs van de Noordzee", organized by k.v. OSTEND MOTOR SPORT vzw. This is a motorbike speed race, organised on a regular street circuit.

The most spectacular races were the monobike sessions—these drivers seem to care almost even more for stage performance than they do for the end classification.
The most surprising race was the 50CC race, in which scooters and small motorcycles had to head up against each other. The motorcycles had slightly better acceleration, at least in first gear, but that was quickly offset by the need to switch gears. The scooters which did not need to change gears immediately overtook the motorcycles in speed; one could witness this after each serious turn. And the same showed before each turn: the motorcycles would have been able to outbrake the scooters, if they had not needed to gear down as the scooters had to.

But the most exciting races were the supersport races—even of only because of the speed factor. I've owned a Yamaha R6 (full power, i.e. 119 HP for a 169kg bike) for three years myself, and I have 2004 Fireblade now. And one of the guys I went with has been driving a Kawasaki ZZR 1100 for some years; the bike which has been the fastest production bike for a while, until the Hayabusha came around. But that ZZR guy is the one from which I got the title quote. And I believe he's quite right: I wear out my tires edge to edge, but I am sure I wouldn't be able to keep up with these race pilots for half a lap.

Anyway, just to get a taste: here's a low-res picture of the supersport 600 B race, and two small movies, one of the superstock 600 and one of the 3 Landen Cup which is a 3 country (BE, NL and DE) superbike championship.

Note: Those movies and picture were captured with a Nokia 6600, which is a nice phone, but has only a VGA camera unfortunately. And the movies can be played with xine (or totem, or ...) on Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems, and a recent quicktime player on other OSes.