[jfar]

OK. I'm back and in one piece. More importantly, the bike is still in one piece. 2 of us made it 165 miles (2 loops) in just under 5 hours. Got to say, what a rush! Noticed a couple things about the DS. On the flats, there seems to be a low top end to the engine. I have a Trail Tech Vapor Tach that registered a hard cap around 7,000 rpm's. This limited the top speed to about 65 mph. I thought that with a Big Gun box I would be able to get around 8500 rpm's. We found that, while wide open in 5th gear, the throttle still had a ton of room to go before it was all the way open. We would reach a top end and, giving it more gas, only wasted gas. By our best guess, we did find that the DS could go nearly 85 miles on one tank (stock size). The shocks made a big difference - there were probably 10 total miles of volkswagen size whoops. While navigating those whoops we did notice that the DS tended to have a mind of it's own. If you had one tire flat and one hitting the whoops, the DS would try and dig in and turn. I learned that the hard way - dumped it at mile 25 pretty hard. We both got up, dusted off and moved on (heck, I had 55 miles to go). It's a beast that needs to be manhandled. I need to try and find out what the top speed limits are on the DS and what it can run at for extended times. I'm actually thinking about the Baja 250 in March but I don't want a Honda 450 passing me like I was driving to Church on Sunday (it happened - in fairness he was a pro and on a maxed out bike - probably moving about 95+). What do you guys think?