Top speed limited by agreement

With rumors and then pre-release announcements of much greater horsepower in Kawasaki's Ninja ZX-12R in 2000, clearly attempting to unseat Suzuki and regain lucrative bragging rights, the speed war appeared to be escalating. There were growing fears of carnage and mayhem from motorcycles getting outrageously faster every year, and there was talk of regulating hyper sport motorcycles, or banning their import to Europe.[8][12][14][19]

The response was a so-called gentlemen's agreement between the Japanese and European manufacturers to electronically limit the speed of their motorcycles to 300 kilometres per hour (186 mph).[4][32] While Honda did announce that its motorcycles would not go faster than 300 km/h, Suzuki and Kawasaki would not speak on the record about this issue.[33] The agreement between them and the other brands has never been officially acknowledged by the manufacturers, though media sources report it via unnamed informants, and by testing the top speed of motorcycles known to be capable of exceeding the arbitrary maximum.[18][33] The informal agreement went into effect for the 2001 model year.[2][3] So for 2001[2][3] models, and those since, the question of which bike was fastest could only be answered by tampering with the speed limiting system, meaning that it was no longer a contest between stock, production motorcycles, absolving the manufacture of blame and letting those not quite as fast avoid losing face.[18] Both Kawasaki and Suzuki would claim, at least technically, to have the world's fastest production motorcycle. But the speed war continued underground, out of the spotlight, with fierce competition among enthusiasts of the "200 mph club", albeit with the slight technical modification necessary to bypass the speed limiter, separating that war from the ostensibly at peace world of stock motorcycles.[15][34]