Back in August, 2022, we told you about the absolutely bonkers, 372-horsepower TTS SuperBusa built by U.K. supercharger specialist TTS Performance. Bodywork was designed by Kar Lee, and modifications were handled by TTS Performance, which is building 40 of these bikes for customers to purchase as an extremely limited-edition item.
Naturally, though, there’s still at least one question that people are likely curious about, and that is, how fast can this absolute monster do a quarter-mile? The team decided to take it to the legendary Santa Pod Raceway to find out. Could they get it into the nines? Realistically, that’s the goal they hoped to hit.
As ever, there are a number of factors to take into account. As TTS’ Richard Albans points out, it’s a stock wheelbase and stock tires. Apart from supercharging the bike, TTS didn’t do anything else mechanically in its conversion. Although some other drag racing enthusiasts thought they could surely do better with all that power, getting a good time is about successfully applying that power in the best way possible to get you quickly down the lane. Things like headwinds (which were definitely present), course condition (dry, thankfully) and rider weight are also very real considerations.
The Run What You Brung class was crowded at Santa Pod that day—and so, over an eight-hour race day, the TTS crew only got a total of six runs in. Much of it was, of course, spent getting to know how the settings worked, and how best to use them. Traction control, it turned out, should just be turned off. Lift control needed a bit of fine-tuning to find the sweet spot, but things were looking marginally better by the end of the day.
By the sixth run, TTS managed to get it down to a 9.9, after having run in the 10s all day previously. So, they did succeed in getting into the nines—if just barely. Were they happy with it, though? Of course not, so they went right back the next week for another go.
Unsurprisingly, a week of reflection and absorption of what they’d learned apparently did some good. All their times were in the nines on the second weekend—and progressively got lower and lower, eventually ending up with a 9.3 by the end of the day. Congratulations to the TTS Performance team on this achievement!
