It was bound to happen. Given enough time, someone somewhere on earth was going to come to a similar conclusion to me. Take a regular scooter, add a powerful motorcycle engine and shazamm…the worlds first superscooter. Now we’ve had superbikes for many years now and they’ve always been popular. It seems there’s always a male ready to pony up his hard earned cash to buy the latest 34 billion hp crotch rocket. (Woman are far smarter and less likely to engage in these penis measuring displays for obvious reasons.) The superscooter is a new category completely. For years scooters have been the poor cousin to the motorcycle, not for much longer, change is in the air.

Enter the Gilera GP 800. The Gilera isn’t really rocket science, really it’s just another maxi scooter, albeit with more power. It is however the first ‘scooter’ you can actually take out for a ride with your sportbike riding motorcycle friends and have a chance of keeping up. I won’t go into the full technical details on the GP800 as the full review has more of that here. I’ll set the stage. We decided that a comparison test was in order. After a little begging we sourced a Gilera GP800 and a Kawasaki ZX-10R, basically the fastest scooter in the world and the world’s fastest motorcycle. (Yes the ZX-14 is faster in a straight line but on a road or a track with actual corners the 10R is the current benchmark.)

Time for a battle. This was never going to be a battle at the local racetrack, the 10R would win that by so far it probably wouldn’t be measurable. What we wanted to do here was spend a couple of days riding the two bikes back to back on actual roads to see how they stacked up. Would the Gilera actually make a viable alternative to a powerful motorcycle? First up we tried the two bikes in the city.