I'm very skeptical of claims that X technology has reached its zenith. In Michael Crichton's Timeline, there's a preface or whatever you call it noting that at the beginning of the 20th century, it was thought that science had basically discovered all that was left to be discovered. Only a small number of innovations, such as the airplane, remained to be found. Of course, this thought was soon smashed by the reality of the century, which was marked by a level of discovery unparalleled in all of mankind. Here's a statistic for you. Every four years, the amount of technical information that is generated by humanity equals the total amount of technical information created in all the history of time before it.
So, what causes our racing technology to stagnate compared with the rate of development before? Regulation might be a cause - that's surely what stopped unfathomable development of Group B rally cars. It's also possible that it's a cultural difference. At risk of being branded a racist by some excessively guilty-feeling white guy, I think it's very curious that all the big developments stopped coming right around the time when the Europeans stopped making bikes. Long-travel suspension, the two-stroke revolution, and even water cooling came about during the era when the European manufacturers were still in bidness, even if the latter was right at the end of said era. What's changed since then? Disc brakes I'll give you, that's important, although KTM blazed that trail. Upside-down forks which make the heavy part of the system move with the wheel (that's bad) and cause a national disaster when a fork seal is blown, that sucks in my book. Aluminum frames, we've covered that. Oh, I've got it! Bold New Graphics! I knew the Japanese gave us a big innovation!
I guess that's my rant for the day. Sorry if it comes off a little confrontational or anything, but that's just how it looks to me. I'm open to anyone who can elucidate and argument to show I'm wrong, but for the moment I still say our bikes deserve to be faster than they are now. Or at the very least, they should be faster than they were in 1983, and according to Super Hunky, they're just not.