A thousand-plus bikes in, and I figured I was past being rattled. Then I swung a leg over the Stark Varg SM, thumbed it to life, and heard almost nothing. What came next did the rattling for me. I’ve tested over a hundred machines on this little track, and this is the one that put everything else in the shade.
A race bike that just happens to be silent
On paper it’s an electric supermoto. In the flesh it’s a hard, mean, uncompromising race bike. The second you sit down the feedback’s right there, sharp and instant. Brembo stoppers, a stiff chassis, and a plank of a seat that lets you slide way up over the front wheel. Nothing about it is cuddly. The Varg makes 79 hp and weighs just 274 lbs, and it carries that the way a flyweight boxer carries muscle. You don’t climb aboard casually. You climb aboard with respect, because everything about the thing tells you it was built to race, not to pose in a parking lot.
Turning in plays by its own rules
Tip-in feels different than it does on anything with pistons, and that’s the battery talking. A lot of electrics fight you here. The heavy pack sits high, the bike runs wide, and riding it turns into work. Stark went after that with aggressive geometry, and it mostly works. The Varg hunts for the inside line instead of shoving away from it. The trade is a faint tippy moment as it falls in. Roll from maybe 30 degrees of lean toward 40 or 50 and the feel isn’t perfectly linear, there’s a little flop to it. That was my biggest hurdle all day: getting comfortable with big lean angles on this thing.
Ten laps isn’t enough, and that’s on me
Here’s the rule, and it doesn’t bend for exotic hardware: ten warm-up laps, that’s all you get. Ten laps wasn’t enough for me to find the edge of what’s an absurdly high cornering ceiling. I’ll own that. There’s more lean and more corner speed in this bike than I could reach in the time I had, and it’d take real seat time to unlock it. That’s not a knock on the Varg. It’s the tax you pay for something this single-minded, and I’d happily pay it again.
Both brakes on the bars, like a mountain bike
What clicked fast was the balance, juggling drive, braking, and body position. The wild part is the controls. Both brakes live on the handlebars, front and rear, so your feet do nothing but hold and place your body. No shifting, no rear-brake pedal down there. It’s strange for about two laps, and then your mountain-bike brain takes over and it feels completely natural. I loved using my hands as the steering tools and leaving my legs free to move me around the bike. By the end I was working it pretty cleanly, and honestly it cracks open a whole new way to ride.
More respect than a Hayabusa
The thing that keeps you honest is the torque. It’s just always there, instant, massive, no waiting on revs. And even though it makes no noise, I had more respect for it than I’ve ever had for a Hayabusa or any angry gas bike. You can feel something enormous coiled up underneath you. Truth be told, I rode it a touch too gently, because the hit is that brutal. Sure, you can dial the power and the throttle map down. But soften it too far and you’re right back to leaving the bike’s potential on the table. It wants time before it lets you trust it.
Eerie quiet, and the regen
Then there’s the silence. The Varg is spooky quiet, just a faint whir, which means you suddenly hear everything else: the tire working, pebbles ticking off the belly, little sounds a gas engine drowns out. It can rattle you if you’re new to electric. The other thing to watch is the regen, the motor braking as you lift off into a corner. Strange at first, but after ten laps my verdict is leave it alone, it’s good. That engine braking keeps the bike settled, holds a stable line through the corner, and means you barely touch the rear brake to fix anything. And yeah, you can tune that too.
The best electric throttle I’ve ever felt
Here’s what you can’t praise enough. The way the throttle, motor, and brakes talk to each other is the best I’ve felt on any electric, full stop. On a lot of EVs you crack the throttle, feel a beat of lag, grab the brake, and weird stuff happens. Not here. It’s smooth as glass, linear and even, and you can feather throttle and brake at the same time with stupid precision. Stark took the one real gift of an electric motor, that clinical, exact response, and actually delivered on it, with good hardware and seriously sharp software underneath. You feel it in every single corner.
Every kid wants one, and that scares me a little
One more thing jumps out: almost nothing pulls at young riders like this. The Varg quietly buries a pile of loud, screaming supermotos in the view counts we see and the demand we get. As a parent, that takes a lot of trust, and yeah, my own kids beg for a turn. Let’s be real: this might be the most intimidating thing you can throw a leg over. You need experience, or the discipline to set the power on that display to match your actual skill. And your kid will figure out that phone-screen menu faster than you will. Big torque plus a cocky teenager adds up to big hospital bills.
Where the lap landed
The video with the on-screen time isn’t live yet, and a quicker rider on our crew is going to show what this thing can really do in a clip down the road, so treat this as context, not a scoreboard. We ran timed laps on a tight supermoto track in Austria, and the Varg turned a 1:09.272 on Pirelli Diablo Rosso IV rubber at 82°F. Just above it sit the Suzuki GSX-S1000GX (2024, Bridgestone T32, 88°F) and the Honda CB650R E-Clutch (2024, Dunlop Roadsmart II, 88°F) at 1:09.1, plus the Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 ST (2025, Michelin Scorcher Sport, 86°F) at 1:09.107. Just below are the KTM 1290 Super Adventure S (2021, Mitas Terra Force-R, 100°F) at 1:09.3 and the QJ Motor SRT 700 SX (2025, Metzeler Tourance, 102°F) at 1:09.349. Read those with the tire and the asphalt temp right next to them, because both move the number more than you’d think.
About that track in Austria
This is a compact supermoto loop, tight hairpins, quick changes of direction, a couple of short straights. It’s not a big racetrack and it isn’t trying to be. It stands in for the stuff you actually ride: city streets, alpine passes, narrow back roads. Ten warm-up laps, one flying lap, simple and strict. What I really take from a day like this isn’t the time, it’s how fast a bike earns my trust. The Varg didn’t fully earn mine in ten laps, and that’s the most honest thing I can tell you. But it flat-out floored me, and the fact that you can chase this kind of adrenaline with zero noise, next to a schoolyard if you wanted, is genuinely new. I need to ride one off-road next. I can’t wait.