Commando engine into Dommi ?

Ashley, getting around corners fast is about being super smooth. With megaphone exhausts you get a bump when the motor comes on song. Most bikes are set up with neutral handling, so tend to run wide in corners, which can force you to back-off. If you get the bump halfway around a corner, you cannot be fast. If you are forced to slip the clutch on a bike which has a lot of torque and you get that bump, you can end up sideways and hi-siding. There are ways around it, if you have got enough gears and you can keep the motor spinning high. But with a four speed gearbox, a bump in the power delivery can be difficult to deal with. There are two things, one is the bump when the cam starts to work, the other is the bump when the megaphones start to work. If the two coincide, you can have the situation where you have nothing down low in the rev range, then everything happens with a bang as the power cuts in. That bike in the photo has a 2 into 1 exhaust, so it would be nice and safe. Not many featherbed bikes have that type of exhaust system.

Ashley - as soon as the motor of my bike fires-up, in my own mind I am never going to crash again. Is that reality ? However these days I believe I have experienced every kind of crash, so it cannot happen again. If things go wrong at high speed, I just deal with the situation. - At least that is the theory. If it doesn't work, I will probably end up as a wrinkly skin bag full of bone chips.

If you watch most on-board videos, you will hear the guys back-off when halfway through corners, when they start to run wide. If they get around corners with one smooth burst of power, they are usually much faster.

Some of Mike Edwards' on-board videos are interesting. He usually gets around OK on the Ducatis, but he is working extremely hard. In one of the videos he did several laps and he was all over the place. It was handling like a pig. When you ride a race bike, you should not get a hard time like that.