We had already seen what the Hayabusa could do to straight expanses of asphalt on the open road, but with its illustrious dragracing credentials we would be doing everyone a disservice if we didn't take the Busa out to the local dragstrip for a few runs.
One of the allures of the Hayabusa has always been that it is a force to be reckoned with at the dragstrip, even in stock trim. Thousands of happy Hayabusa owners will argue that the bike doesn't meet its full potential without anything less than a bottle of nitrous-oxide attached to it, but even more owners can say its fine just the way it is. After all, the bike is really, really fast right off the showroom floor. It is for this very reason that Kawasaki went through such great lengths to make sure their challenger had the muscle and the engineering to go head-to-head with the Busa in the arena it has owned for nearly a decade.
We just couldn't wait to find out how they would fare in the quarter mile, so we signed up for our local Friday Night Drags to see how the two monsters would do in some bracket racing. We're happy to see a trend at most drag strips encouraging street racers to take it to the track. It's safe and fun, and you get a grandstand full of people listening as the announcer pumps you up.
I took the task of controlling the potentially slower
Hayabusa, since I had spent quite a bit of time at the strip during the ZX's introduction. Brian Chamberlain, MCUSA's Creative Director, would be riding the
ZX-14 in his first foray into dragracing. We survived three practice runs and discovered that bracket racing on a dragstrip is not as easy as it looks. For the first round of eliminations we both lined up against a couple of street riders and, honestly, we felt we were going to win our respective races and end up in a mano-e-mano battle for the bike class title, as well as the inter-office trophy.
That pipedream was quickly extinguished when the Gixxer punk, who showed up late and only got one run in during practice on his 1000, waxed me off the line and eliminated me in my first race. BC took a win on the ZX and now I was in the loser bracket where I was promptly dispatched in Race 2 by a kid in a '66 Mustang with a 6-second head start. Reaction time can be a killer and, as you can see in the video, I was caught sleeping at almost every light. BC lost his semi-final race against that same Gixxer pilot and was subsequently dropped to the loser bracket which set up the anti-climatic final showdown of our drag strip competition. Both of us dialed-in a 10.0 so there would be no excuses this time.
We rolled to the staging lights in a cloud of smoke after an extended burn-out to get the crowd fired-up and assumed the starting pose. My heart was pounding and all I could think of was how much grief I would get if Chamberlain beat me when he had zero drag racing experience. The yellow lights trickled down while we sat there pondering the prospect of losing and having to face the heckling for months to come. The tree went green and fortunately our sloth-like reaction times didn't come back to haunt either of us in this contest.
This wasn't the first time Ken had tried his hand at dragracing the new Kawasaki. At the press intro for the much anticipated machine Hutch got pointers from none other than dragracing pro Ricky Gadson.
BC was off the line first in .333 on the ZX while I launched in .425 aboard the Busa. The first 60-feet went to the rider with the better clutch hand, as I got a strong launch out of the hole and made it past the 60-foot mark in 1.870 seconds to BC and the ZX's 1.956. Both bikes were still burning-out and trying to wheelie but they were side-by-side and piling on mph like crazy.
The Busa and I arrived at the 330-foot mark in 4.683 seconds to the ZX's 4.867 seconds had a 0.226-second lead by the eighth-mile mark. Both bikes were passing 110-mph with the
Suzuki ahead by a fraction, midway down the track. The gap remained the same for the next half of the race, so the
Hayabusa took the win with an uncorrected ET of 10.484 at 135.48 mph while the ZX-14 crossed the line in 10.683 at 137.65 mph. Both were our best runs of the night. Advantage: Suzuki. For the moment.
This microcosm of the battle for class supremacy was won in the first 60-feet, but there's more to drag racing than pure acceleration. It was impressive that Chamberlain was able to do as well as he did, a testament to the design of the ZX-14, for which
Kawasaki offers an impressive dragracing contingency program. Funny thing is, these same bikes had just completed nearly 1000 miles of sport touring with soft-saddlebags just a few hours earlier. The lesson we learned here is that the Hayabusa is not going to go down quietly. It was going to take our resident drag-meister, Duke Danger, to find out precisely how fast these machines perform through the quarter mile and beyond.
