Here are a couple of photos of the new Kawasaki ZX14R bikes that Nancy and Jon got a few days before Christmas 2007. They'll soon deliver the bikes to Mike Rich Motorsports, N & J's race builder, who will prep them for land speed racing in '08 and beyond. Yes, one of the bikes is still in a box -- Mike would have to tear it completely apart to hot-rod it, so it was decided to leave the bike unassembled for now. It's easier to ship that way.
The instrument cluster. The speedo shows top speed of about 190, and the bikes will go about 186 as built. (In case you didn't know, there's an international agreement among bike manufacturers to limit top speed to that number (it's 300 kph). It'll most likely get disconnected for racing, partly because the speedometers are almost always quite "optimistic" (that is, they indicate a higher speed than the bike is really going), and also because the racer doesn't need to see what speed he's going. The tachometer shows a "red line" (top engine speed) of 11,000 rpm, but that'll most likely be raised when Mike installs the high-performance parts that'll be in the engines.
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