DATELINE PHILLIP ISLAND, VICTORIA, OZ: Is it
February, mate? Next time I start going off on how nobody needs anything
bigger than a 600 sportybike, will somebody please just smack me and
tell me to shut up. I've come to my senses again. You need at least
1000cc at Phillip Island's fabricatedly fast GP circuit; otherwise
you've got no real chance to emulate the Suzuki and Ducati GP teams that
just finished testing before the GSX-R1000 press launch came to town,
leaving all sorts of nice black stripes out of the corners.
After the little downhill right called Lukey's Heights, there are two
lefts that lead onto the main Gardner Straight; the first one's a
little slower
,
and you have to short-shift just before it into third or you'll run out
of revs halfway through. Dude. Maybe it's all the TT-R125-ing I've been
doing or maybe it's the GSX-R's new 32-bit CPU or the tires or the
track or a combination of all of them--but it gives great pleasure in
that corner to be able to spin the GSX-R's tire up, controllably, with
the throttle, all cranked over. An nth of a degree of throttle rotation
(after you have your personal tuner remove all the slack from the
throttle cables) perfectly controls the bike's slithering angle of
attack. The fastest way, of course, is just a hint of
wheelspin--and remember to keep that outside peg weighted. Then, zot,
into the short chute, bang it into fourth, try not to turn in too soon
for the even faster left onto the front straight... Now you are moving
fast, okay, faster, trying to pull the slightly reluctant beast down to
the apex without upsetting it whilst attempting to get the throttle to
the stop at the same time. And while you're doing that, the black
stripes left by the GP crowd are piling into your faceshield like grainy
tracers from some old WWII film as the G's push the bike to the red and
white stripes at the exit. And only when a faster guy slithers by do
you understand that thesestreetbikes are leaving their mark on the
track, too--accelerating hard enough at the top of fourth gear to pick
up the front tire and leave the clip-ons slack in your paws. Dang. The
stock steering damper feels like a good thing to have.
A
600 might work on a tighter track. At Phillip Island I just can't see
it... In fact Yamaha brought us here for the first R6 intro, way back in
the last century, and it was good but it's not the same. I suppose the
liter-bike better suits my "style;" lacking grace or finesse, it's
nice to be able to just whack the throttle open and send yourself
smoldering downrange, with little regard to decorum or the tachometer.
As
a matter of fact, as engine man Norihiru "No Relation" Suzuki points
out, this year's GSX R1000 has even more urge than last year's bike--the
one that soundly thrashed the Yamaha R1 and Honda 954RR at Fontana and
on the dyno, the bike we mentioned would rip your tits off on its way to
winning last year's comparo. More efficient combustion sounds innocent
enough. What we've got are pressurized intake ducts which have each
moved 20mm closer to the bike's centerline, thanks to the new stacked
headlights, which
increases ram-air effect. Then all that air gets stuffed through new
throttle bodies, with new four-hole injectors controlled by a much more
powerful 32 bit ECU and 256 kilobytes of ROM, the better to read the
eight injection and eight ignition maps.
Expelling all that
is now more efficiently handled by a muffler expanded all the way from
4900 to 6900cc, which greatly relieves the GSX-R's "small-muffler"
anxiety from last year. The whole urethral system is now titanium and
lighter--except for the aluminum muffler shell, which Suzuki claims is
actually lighter than its ti equivalent. We've also got four new 35mm
vent holes between cylinders to reduce pumping losses, which Suzuki says
increases torque by two percent at high rpm. Our camshafts are now
rifle-drilled by a one millimeter larger bit, resulting in a weight
reduction of 45g for the intake and 35g for the exhaust -- and reaming
out the counterbalancer with a 2mm-bigger bit removed 30g from it.
Otherwise, Norihiru says, things are same-same in the engine. To me, it
feels like somebody threw in titanium rods and added about a point of
compression.
The
real changes, as you can tell by looking, have taken place in the
chassis. The steering head and swingarm pivot sections are still
castings, but joined now by extruded chunks of alloy with internal ribs,
which "allowed the engineering team to precisely adjust overall frame
rigidity, using data from the development of the new GSV-R MotoGP
racebike." Sorry, I was having such a fine time riding I forgot to ask
if that's stiffer or flexier? My cheeks and years of reading Kev Cameron
articles tell me stiffer vertically, maybe slightly less so
horizontally--ie, frame flex acts as suspension when the bike's on its
side.
An
speakin' ub de suspension as we jus wuz, I doan know why lately I hab
de urge alla time to speak like Jim in de book Huck Finn? It mus be all
de stress I bin undah. People gib me de funny looks. Nebba mine... The
cool 43mm cartridge fork wears a black coating on its sliders, which
Suzuki likes to call Diamond Like Carbon, and they don't think it's
funny if you ask if it comes in a can labelled Krylon. In actual fact,
the stuff reduces fork stiction about three times more efficiently than
the gold titanium nitride you're used to, according to Suzuki's pie
chart, and as a result of that decrease in friction the '03 bike has
ten-percent stiffer fork springs, a bit more compression damping, and a
bucketload more rebound damping.
An dat goes double fo de Kayaba shock out back; piston and rod
diameter remain the same, but de internal changes, Suzuki says, reduce
friction by 60 percent. That reduction in friction is said to improve
the rider's sense of what his contact patches are up to.
I think it's true. Hauling the flapping editorial fundament into Phillip
Island's
very fast turn one after zipping up to 160-something down the straight,
it's disconcerting to learn as you drift off-line that there are a
bunch of good-sized ripples about where a car's outside tires would be,
in about the spot where I remember watching somebody make a rapid,
unplanned horizontal exit on an R6. Mr. GSX-R seems to care not, and let
me say while I'm thinking of it, that the Bridgestone 011/012 tires on
this bike are right up there with the best street tires, given their
design brief probably did not take Phillip Island much into account
(these are different compound and construction than last year's). There
was one hairball push-the-front moment in the also-very-fast right that
leads up to Lukey's Heights, but the front tire regained grip before my
wrist had time to snap the throttle shut--a reaction normally not
measurable by human instruments.
Do it steer a little quicker? I think it do, but I also think Phillip
Island is a hard place to make that call. According to Suzuki again,
trail is down from 96 to 91mm, with 23.5 degrees rake instead of 24.
Confusingly, they also say there's less weight on the front patch
now--51.1 percent instead of 51.8? Could it be the 160 grams we lost by
downsizing the front discs to 300mm, and the 100g-lighter calipers?
Hmmmmm?
The
gas tank is subtly resculpted, a little skinnier where it meets the
rider, which makes the whole bike feel more nimble. While the beast does
sometimes feel a little reluctant to pull in to the inside edge of fast
corners, I was afraid to try preloading the rear a little (for quicker
steering) for fear it would affect the most excellent balance of the
thing zotting off the exits... with real racey tires and a little more
grip, of course, you would feel more confident about applying more force
into the handlebars, making the bike do your bidding. Then would be the
time to fool with suspension adjustments and maybe even swingarm pivot
height, via the kit parts which will be available...
Anyhow, that's sort of the nature of the liter-bike beast. In
exchange for super-quick handling, you get monstrous drive off corners
and really-big-gyro steadiness mic-corner, which is nice and reassuring
at places with big, long, smooth corners--and I don't know if an R1
might be a little more nimble, but I do think this GSX-R will smoke it
even worse in the roll-open-the-throttle places. In fact after I had a
look at the video, I began circulating many parts of the track a gear
higher and, I think, picked up a little speed; there's monstrous
upper-midrange to go with the 150-or so horsepower top end--and the new
"double-barrel" throttle bodies and four-hole injectors feed it in nice
and smooth alla time.
The
downsized brake discs and new four-pad calipers work fine, nothing
revolutionary, really; the only really hard braking zone is into Honda
corner, and when I encountered a little chatter in my first session, a
couple clicks ob de compression damping in de fork seems to have made it
go away.
Ya think?
What more can I say? Haven't you had enough? We at MO were not
overwhelmed by the looks of last year's GSX-R when it was parked next to
the R1 and 954 Honda, but the new bike really does look more the
purposeful animal it is this year--in its ominous black frame,
sleeker/pointier fairing, and John Holmsian exhaust can.
The ti mid-pipe turns a nice blue--much nicer than the flat-black
sewer pipe of yore. Did I mention the thing runs like a bat out of hell?
I will go so far as to use an exclamation point! A thing I shun! If
cars have gotten this much better in the last 30 years, I may have to
look into getting rid of the Jagrolet.
There's nothing wrong with Carruthers' right wrist!
And
so concludes the 2003 Motojournalist GP season--another midpack finish
for me. I shall not approach the speed of D. Canet, Team Cycle World, in
this lifetime, but it's enough for me to have repeatedly spanked P.
Carruthers, the Cycle News entry and son of Kel--and I'm sure my kid can
spank his kid on KX65s too if any of their four collective pods ever
descend. It was good to blow the doors off of D. Coe, Team
amasuperbike.com, upon his re-entry into the field after a ten-year
hiatus: Alas, the Coe-ster is back in form and too swift once again
to hang with. At PI, interestingly, of the seven Americans present,
three were former Cycle magazine co-workers--P. Schilling unfortunately
not among them. (T. Carrithers appears to be struggling to get back into
form after a bad advertising-industry get-off.)
Oztralia
is a helluva nice place to visit--much like California must've been
before we ran out of birth-control devices--and with fewer rats, the
maze seems a much friendlier place. Or, maybe I just haven't been there
long enough for everyone to learn to despise me? Business class is
definitely the way to go, but now that we're in a position to fly that
way (recumbent), what a shame that all we want to do is sleep, and that
all the flight attendants are even older than we are. Tragic really. No
more mile-high fantasizing. Food's good, though.
I know what you're thinking: When will the MO open-class shootout
happen? I know not; right now we're still rounding up 600's. All I can
tell you is that the liter-bike comparo has already taken place in the
wide open spaces between my ears, and the clear winner is this here
tire-spinnin,' front-wheel wagglin,' big-dicked!! Suzuki GSX-R1000! You
can keep all your 600's and your exotic twins and suddenly I'm over my
Buell XB-9S. This thing is for me. Stock for stock, it parts the cheeks
of every other sportbike I have ridden to date. (But that's just my
opinion...)
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