Haha! Riding a 1098 on the street is like bringing a bazooka to a knife fight. ;D I really didn't mean it to come across as I was pulling any kind of card, though. It's just my most recent experience with a big power, serious race bike, so I'm drawing off it.
I'm also not ragging on anybody's bike builds here. But having a ridden a few serious performance built bikes, my flavor of performance is slightly off. This means that to me whether it is a HD sportster cafe bike or a CB,XS, etc, if it makes under a hundred horsepower they are all solidly within the realm of current production stuff with numbers that are easy to obtain. While these bikes might be vastly superior to their OEM configuration (which is to be commended), a bike of equal performance can be readily had at the nearest dealer.
Now, I've built enough bikes to know that this is certainly not the reason we all build. But it makes me chew my cheek a bit that people will still decry as "old fashioned and slow" the merits of a current bike that could easily outpace many of the builds on DTT--while in stock trim. It's just not true. Obviously, this is not true for every build here, but certainly is for a good many.
I am all for building to the style, enhancing the performance of what ya got, and all that jazz...Lord knows I do enough of that to my own stuff. And most of us succeed with modifications that improve the performance greatly. But I have been humbled enough bya few (not just the 1098) bikes exhibiting true and very serious performance to see what is aesthetics and what really matters to performance in a very different light.
Styling, on the other hand, is entirely subjective, and I make no excuses or opinions on how any bike looks in the eyes of another.
I hope I haven't come across as condescending on the fine work that is put out on the DTT pages, since that is not my intent at all. Nor am I calling anybody else's bike slow or unerpowered. I just view the whole performance game differently than most, and build/ buy my bikes to suit their intended purpose. If that makes any sense...
In other news, I should be picking up the new 48 this Thursday or Friday...so stoked! ;D