Having put in the best part of 1500 miles on the Yamaha R1 I’ve learnt a few things. Rider aids give you two things, they help bring you to the bikes limit but they also allow you to tailor the behavior of the bike to your daily needs, moods, attention span.
The R1 isn’t a heavy bike, 454lb wet and it sits just 32 inch off the floor, I reckon a 12 year old could swivel it round on its side stand. I can't see any reason why you couldn’t run this bike as your first big bike. The days of “it’s an animal to ride” reputation are long gone. The R1 with its calm natured crossplane crank engine will swim away with all the elegance of a great white but, with a flick of the wrist it will swing its tail and fire you down the road like a shark through water. Watch out though, that flick of the wrist should be saved for the track because the R1 is capable of stupid speeds in any gear.
The R1 doesn’t come with ABS. There’s not much point in going on about that either. If you haven’t had it before then great, you wont know what your missing, if you have, then you will miss it. That little bit of comfort you get knowing the bike will stop at its absolute fastest rate without you having to manually find the breaking limit is a comfort. But, we’ve all managed without it for a long time now haven’t we.
The three power modes mean you are free to adjust how fast and how angry the R1 is during day to day life. Three bikes in one? Well nearly. Put the power mode on “A” setting and the throttle response is razor sharp with virtually no twisting needed. It’s much harder to ride smoothly with the bumps of the everyday road riding feed through the suspension and up into your wrist force you to jerk at slow speeds. Put it on STD setting and everything is much more controllable. I’m a all or nothing kind of guy, believe me I would have the power mode set to A all the time if I felt it was worth it, but its just more practical to save that for the smoother more composed environment of the track. STD setting still offers you 95mph in 1st gear and 185mph in 6th. What ever rev ranges you choose to spend your time in is up to you, needless to say the R1 is up for it set to standard setting. In B setting the R1 behaves more like a 600 Sports bike, if you spend some time flicking between the three settings you can really feel the differences.
The R1 is proving to be truly versatile. The principle of switchable power modes is as I’m finding, a great piece of tech to have not so much for the differences in power but more the way that power is delivered. On track it will be A setting all the way!!!
Exhaust test coming up, I’ve got some tiny ASV levers to test out and ill be on track soon to get some video.
