Five minutes to get across the borderless Strasbourg was all we needed before setting off on the tedious, but easy, clear, and ultra fast French motorway towards the smallest country in Western Europe, the Grand duchy of Luxembourg. Long time ago, before ZX-9Rs had been invented, this was always the way I used to cross Europe on my GPz900, and one particular motorway corner just outside Saarbrucken would always entice you in way too quick and then tighten up at 190kph. I remember thinking then; "If only this thing handled better". Yet here I was now, doing the very same thing, thinking the very same thing, but 30kph faster, so the better handling is all relative. To be honest, by this stage I was well in the Kwak's wake and just following Jim. There's no way I'd have gone in as hot as that on my own and at my ripe old age, I should have known better because at that speed I quite easily had my knee down trying to pull the Hayabusa tighter as it virtually ran off the edge of its tyres, while Jim was visibly cruising on the corner King Kwak.

To be honest, though, it's the one welcome relief from an otherwise fast, undulating but very tedious stretch, best dispensed with at 220kph, in a department of France where the only police you see are customs men at the Peage.

Judging our time and distance to exactitude, we backed off a little rounding Metz and up to Thionville knowing that we didn't have enough time to stop and fill up but that we would be running perilously close to empty by the time we crossed the anonymous Luxembourg border at Bettenburg. To be honest, I've always been a little petrol paranoid and sure enough, when we filled up on the ring round to Arlon, the Busa still only took 15 litres - not bad for the best part of 200 kilometres at around the same speed, though where either Suzuki or Kawasaki get their grandiose container claims for, God only knows. To this day I've never managed to squeeze in more than 17 litres in either bike.

Refilling was definitely top of mine and Jim's agenda by now, and though we could have made it 6 countries in six hours with a quiet bimble towards Namur, or even 7 in seven hours back into France or perhaps in eight in eight hours with a good tunnel connection to the UK, we opted instead for... breakfast... It was just then as we sat calmly outside the service station in the sun that three motorcycle police pulled up and wondered just how fast our motorcycles really did go...