Quote from: flyinlow on August 06, 2010, 06:32:37 PM

So I started thinking about this, how could we validate how fast this guy is going? I watched the video again, couldn't see mile markers on the freeway so no way to figure it out that way.

Then I noticed the light poles. Light poles on expressways are 300 feet apart typically. I also zoomed in on the Long Island Expressway in Google earth and found several light poles in the median and measured the distance between them with the tools in google earth, it also came up to 300 feet.

I watched the video until he was doing 186 consistently and started timing from one pole to the other, it pretty much came out to 2 seconds each time. So lets do the math:
300 ft every 2 seconds is (300X(60/2))=9000 feet per minute. There are 5280 feet in a mile so:
9000/5280=1.705 miles per minute, so to get mph take 1.705 times 60 minutes in an hour
1.705x60=102.27 mph

186kph=115.58 mph
At max speed there is typically a 10% error in sport bike speedometers to the high side

115.58 mph - 10%=104.22 mph and my calculations show 102.27mph, pretty close.

Now my timer did not do tenths of a second, so I'm off a little, but I think I have proven that the bike is reading in kph and not mph. I think these guys did some creative video editing on the GPS to superimpose mph instead of kph and the video at speed is so blurry that he might show mph on the speedo when stopped, but they cut and splice many times throughout the video that they could easily change the speedo to the other setting. At speed, its too blurry to tell whether the indicator is kph or mph. The S1000RR picks up the speed from the ABS sensors, so changing sprockets would not affect the speed readout, only changing the rear tire size would do that.

As someone who *once* did close to 186, I'd have to vote that this IS mph, not kph.

As someone who *has been known to on more than one occasion* go 104.22, I can tell you it sure looks to me to be faster than 104. Either way I agree, they're attention whores.

PS. Also note they're going ~40 on the entrance ramp curves. If it where kph then they'd be going 24mph, and it looks to me like they're going faster than that, IMO.