Travel finds: South Asian racers
This 150cc Suzuki bike has become a racing phenomenon in South Asia.
Have you ever seen Asian kids passing each other at over 130km/h, wearing only flip-flops and no helmet? Laying on a seat horizontally, like Superman flying? Drag racing each other on something that looks like a flimsy scooter?
Well here you go:
I have seen many of these videos before and was excited to find a bike here in Indonesia. A couple of days ago I spotted one on the side of the street and just had to turn around to take a proper look.
To my surprise, the owner handed me the keys, right after I expressed my interest for his bike.
The bike felt just like a big raser, only lower. It was predictable to lean in the turns, had surprisingly good power delivery and did not hit the red line before 11500 RPM.
You can easily call this one a rev-happy bike.
Now I get why the Suzuki Raider platform is so popular. It is a proper racing machine. Light and fairly fast.
Unfortunately for me, it is difficult to find the illegal races. The police has a high priority of raiding them. But I might get lucky.
Until then, lets take a look at some nice action i found online and a closer look at the bike I got my hands on.
Action:
A nice footage of a smal, local drag racing event. Especially interesting to see the crowd and some of the pre race preparations:
A rare example of a helmet camera footage which is actually exciting to watch. A group of friends racing the scooters across a 600km loop. Day and night. We can easily see how the top speed of a Raider makes him a dominant one:
Details:
A big front disc break has plenty of stopping power.
South Asian racing cockpit.
Four-valve single-cylinder engine, with a six-speed transmission and an option to kick start the bike.
Non-restricted exhaust with an aftermarket muffler makes this engine sound great. A noisy bike makes sense in the traffic here. It warns others that you are about to pass them.
I does not make sense not to have good tires on a performance bike. Notice the colourful details like rainbow spokes and purple screws under the frame.
Small chain sprocket for higher top speed. A smart choice in the slow going, local traffic.
A small bonus for the nerds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/motorcycle/comments/13miafe/hereby_i_present_to_you_my_squid_machine_the/
It is nice to see how some trends travel across the globe. Kids in Norway tend to tune their 125cc bikes to go faster and put on an aftermarket pipe to make the bike sound louder. Kind of the same as here.
It reminds me of how similar we actually all are.
On the way to Bali I came across this artwork on the floor of the airport in Oslo. It is written in Cyrillic: “and in foreign countries the world is the same”
