HONDA MEAN MOWER
P102
Feature
once the pedal is lifted, it's go time.
Firing the CBR1000RR motor up gives a very fa-
miliar rumble as Honda's fitted a Scorpion exhaust
system to it—Mean Mower sounds like any other
four-cylinder superbike—but the mower chassis its
bolted to makes for a strange aesthetic.
Okay. No pussyfooting around. Time to crack on.
Clutch out, I trundle to the line that signals the
start of the quarter mile ahead of me, and let her
rip. I'm used to the acceleration of a superbike. I
experience it for a living. But to be immersed in it
barely 10 inches off the ground, that's something
else entirely.
The Mean Mower picks up speed with the kind
of intensity I remember bikes did before I got all
old and jaded. In the first run, I barley hit 98 mph,
simply because I'm trying to recalibrate my brain
to how fast I'm going.
I only get two more runs, and on the final
expedition I hit 118 mph. It's freaking terrify-
ing. Stiff as a board, I'd rather go 200 mph on
a bike than 120 mph in that thing. It acceler-
ates so hard, with such an ear splittingly rad
soundtrack, for a second there I feel like one
of Honda's Indycar racers—until I realize I'm far
from the fastest of the journos here.
Regardless, the Mean Mower 2.0 is one of
those wonderful pieces of maniacal engineering
that makes me happy to be a part of this indus-
try. It has no place in this cotton wool society
we now live in.
As Hunter S. Thompson once said in the
greatest road test ever written in the Song on
The Sausage Creature, "We are motorcycle
people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's
funny. We shit on the chests of the weird..."
The Mean Mower is indeed weird, and that's
why we love it. CN
Rennie could barely
fit in the Mean Mower
but still got it up to
almost 120 mph.
