And the brief story of that ride:
Rollie Free was hitting high 140s, noted that his leathers were fluttering / no skin-tight fit, that set.
Time for the record run was evanescing, he had fresh experience that bike was handling well, no wobbles, was rarin to GO --->
So he did That and juuust broke 150, a record which stood for n-years (too lazy to look up.)
And yeah.. slightly reduced reaction-time / inner-ear-gyroscope etc. are no hazard to piloting such a beast routinely.
[that was a Lightning, of course not a Shadow ]
Not about to attempt '100 map-miles in an hour' these days and I've seen 122+ a few years ago in the Plutocrat, just for a poor-man's 'dynamometer check' of HP at 4000' alt.
Still haven't found a good formula for extrapolating that test to likely HP at sea level. I no wind tunnel to calibrate shape efficiency.
You're also right about the (maybe 100K+ by now) and what Else that could do.
This scheme only works if there are so many C-notes flooding into Raptor HQ, that even Andrew stops updating the spreadsheet.
Certainly I'd overtly embezzle a few sacks of those for general kitty welfare, if I could. The Vincent would be chump change at the L Ron Hubbard level.
And we all know now that Barnum was Right, eh?
Zoooom