In sportsbike-mad Britain, I think it’s fair to say that the annual 1000cc group test is the one we obsess about the most.
As much as working out which of the latest 1000cc bikes rules is a brilliant job, it’s also a bloody difficult one thanks to the efforts put in by our friends from the land of the rising sun.
Yamaha’s new R1 has perhaps been the most lauded bike of 2009. With technology taken from MotoGP with a revolutionary new crank and firing order, the weekly press has gone crazy for it. The other new kid on the block for 2009 is Suzuki’s GSXR1000K9. All new from the ground up, the Suzuki retains similar lines to its predecessor, but promises to deliver far more performance. Then of course, we have the two bikes that are coming to the end of their two-year cycle. Kawasaki’s ZX-10R and last year’s litre class winner, Honda’s CBR1000RR.
At Visordown, we want to make sure we give each bike a fair crack of the whip. For us, this means levelling the playing field by fitting all four bikes with similar tyres. In the case of this year’s test, we went for Dunlop’s excellent GP Racer tyres, opting for a medium compound front and a hard, endurance compound rear, which we knew would last the test and work in all conditions. Sure, we could have gone for an ultra-soft race tyre, but then that would be hardly indicative of the rubber you guys will ride on, day in and day out.
To keep things fair, we chose several venues. First, we went to Donington Park on a cold and overcast Tuesday with former GP racer, Niall Mackenzie. Then we headed to RJS Superbike at Mallory Park to have the bikes performance tested on the dyno, before spending the rest of the day collecting data at Bruntingthorpe Proving Ground, putting each bike through ten test runs to make sure we got accurate performance data. For many that would have been enough. Not for us it wasn’t.
A day was spent riding from James Whitham’s house in Huddersfield to North Wales, dodging Brunstrom’s Bobbies and generally enjoying the fantastic roads around Snowdonia National Park. This was followed by a day at the awesome Anglesey circuit, which was deemed absolutely necessary. This was then neatly rounded off with a monotonous motorway ride south, with lengthy city stints in London to give us a good idea of how these bikes stack up against each other on the roads that you’ll ride. More to the point, we wanted a definitive answer as to which one we would want in our garage.
Five days and 1,200 miles later, we reckon we’ve found a few answers…
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