I recently took the little Honda CRF250L for an more open road ride. I opened it up wide for a while and got to a top speed of 134km/h. I was on a slight decline and I do live roughly 1500m above sea level, which robs us of power but it did pretty well I thought. That's an indicated speed, I don't know how accurate the speedo is.
That long trip along with some commuting achieved my best ever fuel consumption of 3.275L/100km. That's gone back up to a more steady 3.582L/100km since then but considering the stop start riding and rather heavy hand on the throttle I'm really impressed.
I should point out that whilst it's only been 6 months of ownership and I really do love the bike, if I had to get a bike now I'd probably get the KTM Duke 390. It looks like a reasonably priced hooligan tool and it's only a bit more. I do have a soft spot for KTM though and it's service intervals aren't as long as the Honda's. I'd probably miss the Honda's ability to hit speed bumps at 100km/h but the extra power and I'd hope grip would be great.
On the grip topic I recently went through a bit of water in my road on the way to work and accelerated a little bit to much a little too early whilst turning and the rear end stepped out quite suddenly. I have some small movement from the rear before but it gave away so suddenly this time I got quite a fright. The front end so far has been rock stable. I'm going to have to be really careful when it rains, especially when it rains.
