How do you make one of summer's most tiresome chores a little more awesome? Honda Motor Co. 's answer: speed.

Honda U.K. has come up with a lean, mean mowing machine that it claims can reach 130 miles per hour, or 209 kilometers per hour, a top speed that could make it the world's fastest lawn mower. Honda said that in testing the mower has exceeded 100 mph on the race track. That would easily beat the current record of 96.5 mph claimed by Bobby Cleveland of the U.S. firm Gold Eagle in September 2010.

The challenge was to create a machine that looks like a mower, cuts like a mower but can be as much fun on the lawns of suburbia as it is on race tracks.

Honda released a YouTube video on Wednesday showing that its new toy does just that. The tag line to the promo featuring Scottish racing driver Gordon "Flash" Shedden in the seat says: "What do you get if you take one lazy Sunday afternoon, one British Touring Car champion and the world's fastest lawn mower? Well here's your answer." Built with its British Touring Car Championship partner Team Dynamics, the machine—appropriately dubbed the "Mean Mower"—can go from 0 to 60 mph in about four seconds while roaring at 130 decibels, a level that calls for protective gear to avoid permanent hearing loss. To get the look and feel of a traditional mower engineers used one of its more conventional models, the HF2620, as a blueprint and took it from there. Honda added a new custom-made chassis and swapped the standard lawn mower engine for the 1000 cc motorcycle engine, about 50% more powerful than its standard mower, used in Honda's VTR Firestorm. The cutter deck is made of fiber-glass, helping the machine drop its weight to 308 pounds (140 kg), and the grass bag has been adjusted to house the fuel tank, a high capacity oil cooler and a secondary water cooling radiator. But, of course, clipping grass at 130 mph could be a bit unwieldy. Instead, using two electric motors spinning 3 mm steel-cutting cables at 4000 rpm the Mean's cutting speed is around 15 mph. That is still more than twice the speed of the original HF2620. There is no indication as of now as to whether the machine will be commercially produced. Follow Yoree Koh on Twitter @yoreekoh

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