Forays into a world of pain usually just involve the bike bouncing a few times and the rider slumping face - first into the dirt, at which point
we encounter another slight problem as the respawn system is actually rather too generous, placing you back into the action so quickly that no time is lost.
Despite promising to get the VXR from nought to 60mph in 6.2 sec, the best we could extract from KE55 was 6.7 sec; even when on a strict diet of 99 RON super unleaded;
slight flat - spots in the power delivery when accelerating flat - out from a low starting speed seemed to hamper progress (we've
encountered the same
problem with other Astra VXRs we've driven, too).