As it was, this time round we were lucky enough to have dodged the holiday return carriageway cloggings of the Belgium and the Dutch, and the motorway was reasonably empty so that sitting at 200kph for half an hour, even through the sometimes sinuous viaducts, didn't prove too difficult.

Actually, despite their reputation, we didn't see a single police car, and on the gentle, immaculately surfaced motorways both bikes felt beautifully composed. In fact, I'd go so far as to say I couldn't have thought of anything else I'd rather have been riding and was beginning to think that 175bhp might well be the sensible minimum for a road bike after all, so that we arrived at the Gottard services a few kms south of the tunnel in a stunning 28 mins, with the clock now reading 1.15pm or thereabouts. No time for a coffee or even a fag, though, because rather than take the easy route through the 17kms bore (the tunnel, not the whole of Switzerland...), Jim and I decided the best way to test the respective bikes' fully laden handling ability was by riding them over the top.

Only thing was, we hadn't banked on the rain and 500 metres from the top, the snow! Oh yes, from the 38C of Milan it was now barely +5C and the roads were soaking. A couple of half-baked wheelie-against-the-snow attempts at the summit, and we were ready to go again, and as luck would have it, five minutes down the other side of the valley, the rain had stopped and the sun was breaking through. On these slower, tighter unknown 120-140kph curves, the true mid corner superiority of the ZX-12 became apparent, and while struggling against the front-end planted Hayabusa in the wet on the way up, I could now hear the sizzling of the Kwak's platters at every braking point. At this stage, we hadn't fully realised how the Busa's badly worn rear cover was conspiring to push the front end wide, but when Jim came by up the inside as I ended up on the wrong side of the carriageway yet again, I couldn't exactly claim to have been surprised.

As we rejoined the motorway some 30kms and probably a solitary litre of petrol later at that altitude, the first thing we noticed was how quickly the traffic had built up. From Gottard to Luzern is a fairly fast stretch bordering some of the most beautiful lakeside views in all of Switzerland. But from there on in to the border at Basel, the constant criss-cross of motorway intersections is a fairly choked up suburban and at the same time, international traffic crawl, though the slowest moving race by far out of the very cosmopolitan automotive field is the native Swiss who barely broach double figures if they can help it.

We'd banked on about an hour and fifteen to the Swiss/German trenches, and again, a painless crossing saw us to the car park of the first services 100 yards into Frankfurtherland at 3.15pm. Reckoning the 128 kilometres out the other side of the Reich at Strasbourg would only take us 30 mins at 250kph, we even allowed ourselves the luxury of a warm forecourt bratvurst before gassing up and rolling onto the German Autobahn.

It doesn't matter how many times you've done it, it still feels odd to be doing twice the British limit legally, and to be passing Police cars in lay-bys who are more interested in prosecuting caravans in the outside lane than they are in persecuting motorcyclists screaming past at nigh on 300kph. Of course, some sections of the German motorway are restricted, and they can still charge you for dangerous if they judge your speed to be putting others at risk, but when we pulled up next to a Police Porsche no less at 220kph and he simply smiled at us, it made my day. As we'd run these bikes flat out against each other before, we didn't really get them to absolute maximum for fear that our luggage (including £10,000 worth of cameras) might take off - especially as I'd jettisoned a full can of beer from my bag at 280kph which bounced just in front of Jim's front wheel in an eery parody of the original bike's chain just a week before. But from entry at Basel to exit at Strasbourg (including the sausage) still only took us 42 minutes. It was now 3.58 as the sun began to dip behind the Macdonalds and the Hotel next door to which Jim had very naturally pulled up.

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