Light Is Right!
LIGHT IS RIGHT!
CW COMPARISON
BRIAN CAITERSON
The ROAD To SPORTBIKE high performance. it would appear, is paved with metal shavings. How else can you explain the prevailing design philosophy that "less equals more" and "smaller is better than bigger?"
It's difficult to determine where this line of thinking got its start. Perhaps, in prehistoric times, Grog watched a small dinosaur evade a larger one and hollered, "Gad!" or whatever was the equivalent expression of the day. Certainly, as far as modern sportbikes are concerned, the trend began in 1985 with the revol utionarv aluminumframed Suzuki (ISX-R750. Honda upped the ante in 1992 with the CBR900RR, which by weighing next to nothing managed to outperform Openclassers with signilicantlv larger-dis placement engines. And the trend came full circle in I 996 with the latest Suzuki (iSX-R750, which beat the CBR at its own game by spotting the competttion as much as 350cc and still kicking ass.
All of these bikes raised the bar in terms of performance. and pushed the reset button on enthusiasts' expecta tions. Overnight, everything else had become underpowered and overweight.
This th~it's ;~it~g agnand for more reasons than one. Honda has rethought its CBR900RR, Suzuki has fuel-injected its (ISX-R750. and both Kawasaki and Yamaha went hack to the drawing boards to give us the allnew ZX-9R and YZF-R1. Stellar motorcycles all, but which is best? That. sporthike fans, is the eternal question.
To find the answer, we did our usual Tour de Southern California. We began with quarter-mile testing at Carlsbad Raceway in northern San Diego County. Next, we ran the bikes past the official Of radar gun at our top-secret topspeed testing facility. We then headed t~ `~ illow Springs international Raceway in the~ Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles. Naturally. we took the long way there and back, navigating the twisty mountain roads of the Angeles National. Forest (and way too many free ays) en route. At the track, we mount ed race-compound Bridgestone BT5 S radials and Unipro oii-board lap timers on each bike. Lastly, a spin on the Dynojet dynamometer at Cycle City in El Toro brought a close to our testing.
420 pounds... 130 horsepower.... 170 mph...maybe downsizing isn't such a bad idea after all
By the time we were through. we knew which bike worked best on the street, which worked best on the race track and-most importantiy.-whic worked best overall.
Unfortunately, El Niño (the tropical storm, not the cleaning lady~s kid) foiled our plans to run on the big track at Willow Springs, limiting our outing to the shorter, tighter Streets of Willow Springs road course. But in retrospect, that wasn't a bad thing. Because whereas you once needed a fast,.. sweepitig circuit to properly ev,~Iuate Qpen-class sportbikes. nowa days they're so light and short that it's a joy to toss~the~ through tight turns. Besides, even today's top Superhike racers plytheir craft on sinuous speedway infield circuits punctuated with first-gear chicanes, so you could argue that we were just keeping pace with the times. Far be it from us to buck a trcnd.:' . ,
