Letter From Europe
LETTER FROM Europe
Riding the Bimota YB4EI
Bimota has followed up its success in snatching the World TT F1 title from Honda by launching a street replica of Virginio Ferrari's championship-winning YB4. Powered by a Yamaha FZ750 like the one in the racebike, the YB4EI is a replica with a single exception: Fitted with Weber/Marelli electronic fuel injection, it actually produces more horsepower than Ferrari's title winner, and that’s in street-legal form with airbox, muffler and milewide powerband. The benefits of fuel injection are immediately obvious the moment you sit on the YB4EI and fire it up. The throttle action is light and smooth, as well as ultra-precise. Accustomed to fighting the weight of four much heavier carb slides and correspondingly stiffer springs, my mind required conscious reprogramming to tell my hand not to
twist so hard. The other principal benefit of EFI becomes apparent almost equally quickly: Engine pick-up and response are dramatically improved. Again, you have to adjust mentally for this: With even the best carburetors in the world, you still get a momentary hesitation when you crack the throttle hard open. Yet on the YB4EI, when the time
comes, for example, to pull out from behind a truck and nick past before the oncoming car arrives, you just turn the throttle hard and the bike leaps forward immediately—no hesitation, no delay, just instantaneously effective action.
Another benefit of the EFI is the way it allows the FZ750 engine to accelerate so cleanly all the way up the rev scale from 6500 rpm, where serious horsepower starts, up to the 11,000-rpm redline. The precise metering of the appropriate amount of fuel under any con-
ditions results in a clean, smooth feel to the engine at almost any revs in almost any gear.
Bimota has scheduled 220 YB4EIsfor 1988 production, and these all use the same Anticorda 100 aircraft-alloy twinbeam chassis, Marzocchi M1R fork, 320mm Brembo front discs and four-piston calipers as Ferrari’s title-winner. More astonishingly, these 220 machines have all been spoken for by Bimota’s various distributors despite their megaprice: almost $24,000 in Italy.
Or perhaps not so astonishingly. It’s the most precise road bike I have ever ridden. The handling is beyond reproach, but to its finesse has now been added an equal dose of sophistica-
tion in the form of the fuel injection, and the immediate throttle response that results.
And—oh, yes—you also get improved fuel economy, though somehow I don’t think that’s going to
be much of a sales point with the average Bimota buyer. Alan Cathcart
