The first time I properly scared the holy hell out of myself on a dirt bike involved an early 1980s Yamaha YZ80. Prior to the Yamaha, I had ridden small Hondas…a 50cc Monkey bike and a 70cc Mini-Trail, as well as a 200CC Fat Cat and an ATC200 three-wheeler. You want to know what all of those Hondas had in common? Four-stroke predictability. Think about it like this: in the world of motorcycles and ATVs, a four-stroke is an N/A block. The power is predictable, the application as smooth as you choose to be, and in the case of the ATC and Fat Cat, both were easy to manage, even in my early teens. By comparison, the YZ was a two-stroke, which acted more like a turbocharged four-banger from about 1990. Down low, it was safe, but once you came up on the engine’s powerband, hold on tightly, because even with only 80cc, that little yellow bastard would flat out book. I promise you that I was seeing 75-80 MPH on fire roads. The YZ490 that I rode was even more psychotic…you needed to approach that throttle with the utmost caution. If you didn’t mean it, you didn’t get into it, period.

Now, for a dirt bike, the YZ490 is a monster. But all of the major motorcycle manufacturers have aces that trump any of the dirt bikes on the power scale: literbikes. Crotch rockets. The screamers that will scare supercars with the right rider aboard. The Suzuki GSX-R lineup is one of many that seem to exist solely for the purpose of testing out a rider’s mettle when faced with gunshot acceleration, razor corner carving ability, and top speeds that would worry some of the fastest cars in the land. And it’s funny…nobody seems to have given thought to combining those worlds..

I take that back. Someone did. And you couldn’t pay me enough to strap my gear on for a shot, but if adrenaline is required for you to exist, few things will make your heart rate look like a digital tachometer quite like this!

(Thanks to Kevin Brown for the tip!)