Here is the latest on this "event" from planetsuperbike.com:
Smoking Run
205 mph ticket will cost *only* $215 but has other costs
by dean adams
Thursday, September 23, 2004
The Smoking Gun web site has procured a copy of the actual ticket written to a Minnesota man last weekend for traveling 205 mph in a 65 zone. What's surprising about the ticket is not just the horrible penmanship of the officer who wrote it, but that the fine for the actual speeding offense, as referenced on the ticket, is only $215.
By the description of the motorcycle written on the ticket (gray/red/black), it appears that the lad was riding an RC51 Honda. Which makes the 205 mph "reading" (the rider was hand-timed from above by a hi-way patrol pilot) all the more dubious.
Again, it is highly unlikely that any non-turbo or nitrous-oxide injected RC51 will top 190 mph.
The 205 mph ticket incident has been widely reported around the world; one the network news, by radio broadcaster Paul Harvey and even on NPR. To give an indication of the wide reporting of this incident, searching the Google News page for the phrase "205 mph" returns over 170 individual reports of the incident.
If nothing else, the 205 mph speeding ticket incident has become a wonderful little case study in media hysteria and illustrates how the mainstream media really don't care about information being wrong, at least if the area in question is a niche group they really know nothing about. Calls and e-mail sent to TV stations and newspapers detailing how it is very probable that the reading was wrong and that even a very modified Honda 1000 can't go 205 mph have been ignored.
Moreover, reports abound of motorcyclists informally trying to convince non-motorcyclists that this incident is based on bad data, but non-motorcyclists being unable to comprehend it. Best uninformed line from that "debate": "My V65 Magna did 165 mph in 1984; I'm sure the new bikes will easily do over 200 mph."
Bottom line: the majority of non-motorcyclist people believe everything they read in the mainstream press or see on television, especially if it's motorcycle doom.
On the one hand, for informed motorcyclists, this incident is sort of like being in on a funny joke where all your non-riding co-workers are exposed as moronic buffoons. However, on the other, it's also frightening because it clearly shows that the very same factors that almost brought government-led horsepower and speed controls to sport bikes in the late 1980s are alive and well today. Those being:
The media will fall over their own feet to publicize and sensationalize the behavior of one or more bad egg motorcyclists riding in an irresponsible manner--no matter what the facts are in the incident.
The public seem to be little more than peasants from the original Frankenstein movie--waiting for the go-ahead to run into the street armed with bad information and torches and scream "Kill the Monster!".
In the 1980s, what followed motorcycle hysteria in the media was government investigations of sport bikes like those led by Sen. John Danforth. Let's hope it does not happen this time.
ENDS
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