Up Front

UP FRONT

Winners and losers

David Edwards

HOW MANY DIFFERENT MOTORCYCLES did you ride last year? Well, Cycle World's collective editorial backside has lovingly massaged the saddles of 106 bikes during the past 12 months in the process of bringing you road tests, riding impressions and feature stories on everything from $60,000 oval-piston wonders to national-championship Superbikes to neon-painted Harley customs to 18-mph electric scooters. The elite of those machines is celebrated in this issue’s 17th annual Ten Best Bikes Awards, the motorcycle industry’s most prestigious yearly prize ceremony.

But there were other good bikes worthy of mention in 1992, and others that, for a variety of reasons, didn’t quite make the grade.

Among the winners are Bimota’s Furano and Tesi. Okay, it’s easy to argue that anyone can make a good motorcycle for $40,000, but the FZR 1 000-powered Furano and the Ducati-powered, hub-center-steered Tesi each possess that uniquely Italian Bair for blending metal, rubber, plastic and now carbon fiber into a vehicle that’s as much art as automobile. A couple of winners.

Looking for exotica from the East? Then seek out another of 1992’s winners, Honda’s NR750. With oval-piston technology, voluptuous, carbonfiber bodywork, a titanium-tinted windscreen and a build rate of two or three a day until October of this year-at which time production will forever cease-the NR may be the most collectible streetbike ever built.

But the biggest winner in the exotic-bike sweepstakes has to be the Britten V-1100 V-Twin racebike, which packs more innovation between its two wheels than most NASA space shots. Straight out of its Air New Zealand shipping crate, John Britten’s avant-garde beauty came within a wrongly wired battery of winning the Daytona SuperTwins race. If I were head honcho at a motorcycle company in Japan, Germany, Italy or America, I’d march right down the hallway with a copy of the Cycle World story on the Britten, and ask how it is that one man working in a shed in Christchurch could have out-teched my entire engineering department.

Not that a motorcycle needs to be headline-generating to be a winner. Yamaha’s FZR600, long of tooth, short of tire contact patch and stiff of suspension, didn’t fare all that well in our 600cc comparison test, but it was Yamaha’s best-selling motorcycle in 1992, thanks to a healthy, $700 price reduction.

Suzuki’s Katana 600 also has been around for awhile, and while it lacks the styling pizzazz of front-line sporting 600s, this competent, versatile machine gives good value for the money, and has consistently been Suzuki’s best seller-as it was this year. A close second at Suzuki, selling just 100 units less than the Katana, was the GSX-R750, a triumph of long-term refinement and the best 750cc repli-racer on the market.

Over at Kawasaki, the likable EX500 topped the charts. In production for six years and coming back for at least another selling season in ’93, the EX Twin is one of the longest-running models in any manufacturer’s lineup, proof that you don’t need 150 mph, whiz-bang graphics or yearly styling changes to make a successful motorcycle.

The hottest-selling motorcycle in Ameica? The Harley-Davidson Softail, in its Classic, Custom and Springer guises, holds that honor, which makes it a big winner for ’92. The whole Harley sales catalog, in fact, qualifies as a winner. Worldwide demand for America’s Bike continues unabated, work on the liquid-cooled, multi-valve VR Superbike goes on, and the future looks very bright for the company that in 1981 came within days of going under.

Number two on the U.S. sales charts (arguably the number-one single model) is Honda’s CBR600F2, which as you’ll read in the “Ten Best” article and an accompanying sidebar is almost everybody’s all-world pick as Best 600cc Streetbike for 1992.

From Italy comes another winner, Ducati’s 900SS, which proves how much fun torque, low weight, good suspension, sticky rubber and a stiff frame can be. It’s a lesson that more bike-makers would do well to learn.

Losers? Well, first off, there are no truly bad motorcycles still on the market. There are some questionable ones. It’s been proven that the best way to construct a winning 600cc sportbike is to start with a 400 and build up. Suzuki apparently had other ideas when it debored and destroked the new liquid-cooled 750 GSX-R to come up with the GSX-R600, a goodlooking, sweet-handling package that weighs, oh, only about 50 pounds too much. As much as anything, the 600 is a victim of circumstance, coming out the same model year Honda’s feathery CBR900RR-maybe 1992’s Winner of the Year-which sets new standards for light weight, tipping the scales at 432 pounds, 54 pounds less than the GSX-R600.

Another curious motorcycle is Yamaha’s TDM850, which looks like the result of a midnight meeting between a Paris-Dakar rally bike and an FZR 1000, with a bloodless exhaust note thrown in for bad measure. It is a confusing machine, a situation not helped by Yamaha’s lack of advertising and public-relations support for the bike. At best, the TDM has the makings of being another Yamaha cult bike, much like the SR500, the Seca 650, the XV920, the Vision 550 and the SRX600. Too bad, because it really is a very good motorcycle.

In this issue, you’ll find the first of the 1993 models, with the rest set to be released soon. Check in with us every month; we’ll let you know who’s winning and who’s losing.