Falcon,you make it sound like it is impossible for kawi to make horsepower that will rival the Hayabusa.I think you should be worried about the horsepower ,the Kawi may make.They have been at the top or near it since 1970 with the 900 bikes.Remember,they have delayed the zx-12 twice now as they want desperately to be king of speed again.Any one of the big four can make 200 horse @ the crank if they wanted.It's easy as all the power is in the heads,but why should they jump right to that.These companies know what they are doing for the bottom line for them is to make money.Kawasaki is downplaying the bike because if they came out and said it was one of the quickest two bikes on the planet,insurance companies would take a very close look at these bikes,and noone wants that! They would want to put horsepower restrictions on almost all street bikes and they have actually done something similar with wave runners.Another member said it best a few days ago..."Competition improves the breed", and this is great for all of us.Another thing to note is that Kawasaki builds a lot more than bikes. They also build planes so they know an awful lot about aerodynamics and ram air.While I am not crazy about that big air dam protruding from under the fairing,it is there for a very good reason and you will see other bikes do similiar things in the future as current designs do not work very well.It will be interesting to see the numbers the bike puts down when compared to the susuki on the same day.For the record,I will be buying the zx-12 or the hayabusa(love its looks),depending on its performance.For other members reading this,a zx-9 was the first production bike to go 9's bone stock.The #'s you see(182 hp which remains to be seen)are at the crank and without ram air which adds about 10%.You can generally take 10-15% off crank horsepower to get rear wheel horsepower which of course is approximate.
