225-HP Kawasaki With Cooked-Off Clutch Puts Tesla Plaid in Its Place, Asks for a Rematch

The introduction to this story is based on the video attached, showing a quarter-mile race of epic proportions. It is a paradigm war – electric versus fire – and philosophies clash with two-wheel freedom versus four-wheel stability. Whichever the favorite might be, it’s one helluva 2,000-hp race that doesn’t move corporate-sized budgets.

No later than yesterday, we witnessed a tri-party bout between a couple of cocky Beemers and a blue-blooded Bugatti. It was a five-million-dollar drag race that showed precisely why big money doesn’t always proportionally equate to big gaps at the end of a drag strip. But that is the privilege of the obscenely rich to brag about their astronomically expensive toys that see the sun once in a blue moon.

Then there are the down-to-earth gearheads with a knack for intelligent spending (provided such a thing exists in the realm of performance tuning) that get just as much fun out of their builds as the rich get ego-pampering satisfaction when seeing the jaws of mere mortals drop at the sight of the hypocritically expensive machines.

Down in England, an event from the common sense part of the automotive community is one more dramatic episode of horsepower anarchy at its finest. Here it is, in short: a Tesla Plaid takes on a Kawasaki Ninja hyperbike and a massively beefed-up Porsche 911 Turbo S.

The extended version of the description would be this: a Tesla Model S Plaid races a wounded, modded Kawasaki ZX10R and a work-in-progress tuned Porsche with 900 hp (for now). Now, the Tesla does have several alterations to its factory-stock form – namely, its back seat is removed, and the front seats are replaced with light-weight race buckets for a little less inertia to overcome. Since old-fashioned tuning is off limits with this EV, the only improvement made is deleting the speed limiter, thus allowing the Plaid to blast past 200 mph (322 kph).

That makes a 1,050-hp tri-motor electric sedan carry 2.1 tons – without the driver – translating to an all-wheel-drive power-to-weight ratio of 500 bhp/ton. That’s electric power-to-weight, meaning the 1,400 Nm of torque (1,032 lb-ft) gets to the wheels in unreally fast times. To say that the Tesla is the bookie’s favorite on any given drag race would be an inconsideration of cosmic proportions.

However, a particular segment of piston-powered thrillers-on-wheels can give any EV a run for their money: a motorbike. Or, more narrowly, pointing to the usual suspects, a superbike. Lately, the undisputed ruler of the two-wheel realm has been the Kawasaki Ninja ZX family, and the turbocharged members of this shogunate are more than happy to draw swords against anyone.

But the naturally aspirated members of the high-revving riders’ club haven’t had their last say on quarter-mile matters, and one particular ZX10R from 2016 – with a few alterations to its factory design – is prompt to prove this statement.

A one-liter, 225-bhp tornado goes off to the rear wheel that’s also been taken aback 7.75 inches (197 mm). The 14k+ RPM inline-four is not a torque monster – in numerical values – but for a 197 kg / 434 lbs hypersonic land missile, the 117 Nm (86 lb-ft) is enough to boost the adrenaline of the rider to the tenth power.

Speaking of power, there’s a significant drawback for motorcycles compared to cars: the weight of the driver is critical for performance, so the absolute 1,142 bhp/ton rating of this Kawasaki is heavily axed when the rider hops on the saddle. The added mass of the biker shaves off 221 bhp/ton in this case, but the Ninja is still on top of the leaderboard with 821 brake horsepower per ton.

Taking the combustion side on this joust is a Porsche 911 Turbo S – the 992 variant, with a 3.7 flat-six twin-turbo tuned motor that outputs 888 hp and 1,000 Nm (738 lb-ft). The dual-clutch automatic has eight ratios to play with before sending all the muscle to all four corners. The Porsche weighs in at 1.64 tons, yielding a power-to-weight score of 541 bhp/ton.

Here are the facts: the Tesla won both rolling start and drag races, but the Ninja took a clean win in one of the stages. During a rolling start, the motorbike shot ahead and kept the lead all the way. Two things I’d like to mention. One – it did so with a fried clutch, and two – the concrete airfield strip vastly held the Kawasaki back.

During the warmups, the rider cooked the oil off the wet clutch in testing. This automatically eliminated the Quick Shift from the race – which can only underline the biker’s natural skill and talent that allowed him and his wounded samurai to claim the top spot on the YouTube channel motorcycle leaderboard in both acceleration and quarter-mile times.

The hyperbike ran a 9.72-second standing quarter-mile (at 146 mph / 235 kph) and shot off the line like a Ninja out of the internal combustion heaven, stopping the timer after 2.39 seconds in the 0-60 mph run. The Plaid achieved an expected 9.41 quarter-mile time, with a trap speed of 150 mph (241 kph), with the 911 Turbo S hot on its heels, at 9.63 at 146 mph (235 kph). As for the acceleration results, the electric family car reached 60 mph (97 kph) in 2.09 seconds, marginally faster than the Porsche’s 2.16 seconds.

The bikers could point out the mechanical flaws of the Kawasaki that prevented the katana from taking a clean win in all rounds. The clutch was gone before the races started, so the rider did his best while fighting with the strip’s bumpy surface. That’s why he refrained from riding low on the tank – he preferred to have a better view of the track and avoid the grooves, holes, and bumps that become downright deathtraps at those speeds.