1/8 mile drag Commando performance?

It is a good Commando that will do that. I found that my bike accelerated quicker with close ratios than with wide, even though I raised the overall gearing..

Not to give away any secrets, but with a short geared car or bike, you can often start off in 2nd or even 3rd gear.
Its surprising how much advantage this can give for 2 otherwise equal bikes.
(its tough on the clutch if you do this often).(Don't try this uphill though).
I can recall my mother driving off in an unfamiliar new V8 - in 3rd gear - and she commented later it seemed terribly fast for 1st gear ! - it was good for 90 mph - and was quite forgiving being driven like that .....

Yves comment about reaction times and Xmas trees is a good one.
Magazine tests etc with a stopwatch wouldn't include that.
And you sometimes see folks at the 1/4 mile caught by surprise when the lights go green..
The old hands are really quick off the line with the green, you'd wonder how they do it ?

A problem I've found with my 850 is that if you don't raise the overall gearing, you never seem to know how much gearing the motor will pull. I've always had the belief that lowering the gearing makes the bike accelerate faster. With the commando engine, that does not seem to happen. My feeling is that the heavy crank tends to spin up at the same rate regardless of the overall gearing. What I tend to do is get the crank spinning, then keep it in about a 1000 RPM range from 6 to 7 with the close box. When you race-change up through the box doing that, the acceleration seems to be fastest. I learned a very salutory lesson the day I tried to ride the bike in 5th gear and couldn't get it to move. I slipped the clutch and gave it a heap of revs - almost put the bike through a fence 70 metres away - and I am pretty experienced. I think Bruce Verdon makes a habit of sending the TTI box to customers with the wrong selector drum fitted.

acotrel said:

My feeling is that the heavy crank tends to spin up at the same rate regardless of the overall gearing.

Click to expand...

Which is of course purely a function of how much torque it produces.
No torque, no guts....

I am not used to riding a bike with so much torque. Every other bike I have ridden has been all piss and wind. From memory, even the Triumph Trident did not go near it. The Ducati SD900 wasn't too bad. The CB750 Honda didn't do much. I think my old hotted-up T250 Suzuki would have made it look stupid in a road-race, even though it would not pull the skin off a rice pudding. What I've found is that when the 850 is geared up to near it's limit, it is not real bad - it is fast ENOUGH to win. With the wide-ratio box, it was useless.