What will happen to this guy?


Minn. trooper writes 205 mph ticket.

WABASHA, Minn. — With a State Patrol airplane overhead, a motorcyclist hit the throttle and possibly set the informal record for the fastest speeding ticket in Minnesota history: 205 mph.

On Saturday afternoon, State Patrol pilot Al Loney was flying near Wabasha, in southeastern Minnesota on the Wisconsin border, watching two motorcyclists racing along U.S. Highway 61.

When one of the riders shot forward, Loney was ready with his stopwatch. He clicked it once when the motorcycle reached a white marker on the road and again a quarter-mile later. The watch read 4.39 seconds, which Loney calculated to be 205 mph.

"I was in total disbelief," Loney told the St. Paul Pioneer Press for Tuesday's editions. "I had to double-check my watch because in 27 years I'd never seen anything move that fast."

Several law enforcement sources told the newspaper that, although no official records are kept, it was probably the fastest ticket ever written in the state.

After about three-quarters of a mile, the biker slowed to about 100 mph and let the other cycle catch up. By then Loney had radioed ahead to another state trooper, who pulled the two over soon afterward.

The State Patrol officer arrested the faster rider, 20-year-old Stillwater resident Samuel Armstrong Tilley, for reckless driving, driving without a motorcycle license - and driving 140 miles per hour over the posted speed limit of 65 mph.

A search of speeding tickets written by state troopers, who patrol most of the state's highways, between 1990 and February 2004 shows the next fastest ticket was for 150 mph in 1994 in Lake of the Woods County.

Tilley did not return calls from the newspaper to his home Monday. A working number for him could not immediately be found by The Associated Press on Tuesday.

Only a handful of exotic sports cars can reach 200 mph, but many high-performance motorcycles can top 175 mph. With minor modifications, they can hit 200 mph. Tilley was riding a Honda 1000, Loney said.

Kathy Swanson of the state Office of Traffic Safety said unless Tilley was wearing the kind of protective gear professional motorcycle racers wear, he was courting death at 200 mph.

"I'm not entirely sure what would happen if you crashed at 200 miles per hour," Swanson said. "But it wouldn't be pretty, that's for sure."
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Information from: St. Paul Pioneer Press,

 

I've gone about 140 mph on my old crotch rocket (99 CBR F4). IT is scary. Couldn't imagine 200+

 

That ain't fast. My bicycle can do better than that.

"Son, do you know why I pulled you over?"

"No sir."

"I clocked you at 205 miles an hour."

"Really? It only felt like I was doing 120."

Would there be anything left if he crashed at that speed?

 

I'm wondering if his mittens had velcro????
Nat

 

That had to be one very modified bike!
I believe (and Im no expert) that most bikes have rev limiters and speed governers in them that choke back the speeds.
Perhaps Im wrong.

Rich

 

A simple computer tune would take care of that. A lot of bikes (especially the 1000cc+) are capable of speeds far greater than what they are allowed. Even stock.

 

a Honda??? Wow.. I would believe the Hyabusa, which is Suzuki's land-missle... stock, they pull around 190.

Of course...the error in a stopwatch speed from an aircraft could account for 10mph or so...

The earlier 2000-era bikes didn't have that speed limiter garbage, but it's easily disabled.

I've got that "kind of protective gear professional motorcycle racers wear," and believe me... it wouldn't help.

But, you've got 2 really well spinning gyro's at that speed... the bikes are really stable. My VFR800 saw 169 on the speedo (right around 155 real), and was not hard to ride at that speed... but there's no such thing as swerving.

I'm not saying where I did it, but I did spend a few years over in Germany.

 

Cool story! In my foolish days (are they gone ) I had a modified zx900 ninja that seen 185 mph more than once. Was it smart = no. Was it fun = yes. Will I do it again = hopefully

 

I've been on that road on my bike before, hopefully he was on the 4 lane section, cause most of Hwy. 61 from the Twin cities south is 2 lane and follows the Mississippi River, and is curvy, especially at 205MPH.

Think about it this way, you'd need to be looking way ahead of yourself running that fast. Every 17+/- seconds your going 1 mile. Luckily he only ran that fast for a short time.

If he keeps riding like that he'll probably never see age 21.

 

Maybe, but in this part of the country, a four legged road block would definitely have been the end. Seen many deaths from motorcyclists going 55-60 hitting a deer, much less 205! Then again, maybe he would have split the animal in half and blown right through!

 

Too many years ago on my old Honda CB 750 I got into a death wobble at around 120 mph. All I had on was shorts and the required helmet. I really thought I was a goner. This was on a straight road but I had one of those police type 'windshields' and I suspect the wind buffeting around that caused it. I had to slow down to around 100 mph before I got it under control. How I managed to hang on is beyond me.
I enjoy speed and have frightened myself many times on bicycles, motorcycles, cars and planes, but this one was about the worst. Never tried that fast on that bike again.

 

Lets see if I can remember some stuff from accident reconstruction classes( looong time ago)
1 mph equals 1.479 feet per second, so 205 mph equals ( wait, getting calculator)....301.35 feet per second.
Average human reaction time( identify a hazard and begin to react) .75 seconds
Time from seeing hazard to impact at 205 mph=15 seconds
Force equals mass times velocity... so lets say he wieghs about 180lbs( average) and the bike weighs at least what? 200lbs?
Then 301.35 fps X 380 lbs means 114,513 foot pounds of force to be expended upon impact.......hmmmmmmmm can you say " ouch"?


disclaimer- learned this stuff a couple decades ago and aint sure I am 100% correct, but know I aint too far off.....

 

Chrisreyn, your calcs reminded me of the following:


SANTA CLAUS: An Engineer's Perspective

I. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, since Santa does not visit children of Muslim, Hindu, Jewish or Buddhist religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per house hold, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

II. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second.

This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks. This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second --- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

III. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull ten times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them --- Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

IV. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second crates enormous air resistance --- this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

V. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

 

Thanks mexstan. You just killed my day.

 

Chrisreyn - need to add 200 lbs to the bike weight....and that is probably dry weight...oil, gas...probably around the 450 mark for curb.

nonetheless, 205 is movin' out. - JKE