Yes i have no doubt it's a hoax, and yes their are a lot of bikes that have their torque(hp) reduced in the lower gears to help prevent accidental wheel stands etc, but all allow full power in the higher gears and if limited for top speed will use the ecu to cut in at certain rpm and gear combination's their bye allowing max acceleration in top gear to the last ounce possible.yes it may be a hoax....
But your line of reasoning baffles me...no one has don't it so...what? its ridiculous on the merit of not having been done before?
lets see...there is a HORSEPOWER limiting switch on the new gixxer 1000, the busa and even the benelli's so limiting horsepower is a know quantity.
I would suppose that if you wanted to cut top speed its easy with a speed limiter but what if you wanted to keep acceleration at a maximum? how would you do it? you cant use a rev limiter unless it only kicks in during top gear...but if you have throttle by wire you can write all sorts of algorithms to limit POWER in any part of the rev or speed range..
Its plausible...especially as we know the bike already had a funky top speed limiter that changes when the computer feels all the inputs of a quarter mile run have been met.
I 'm sure they could limit top speed using hp reduction only if they wanted to but it would terrible way to do it , ie 220 k's on the flat would become 190 on a gradient ,and as stated earlier it would take a bloody lot less hp than 197 to limit it to 220k's(there by reducing acceleration in top gear substantially).There is a very good reason why man has not reinvented the wheel