Vance & Hines Gsx-R1249
VANCE & HINES GSX-R1249
THE SKYSHOT SUZUKI
AH, CONFIDENCE. WE LIKE TO SEE IT. WE ESPEcially like to see it when it’s associated with a flat-out, double-throwdown monster street-bike like this one, placed into our hands by Vance & Hines Racing (14010 Marquardt Ave., Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670; 213/921-7461).
While other participants rode herd over their “Built for Speed” bikes like timorous suitors, the V&H crew just punted its machine off the end of their truck and said, “See ya! Have a good time.” Their confidence was not misplaced. This bike just ran, and then ran some more. Real fast.
Yep, it lost points for not being fully street legal (see main story). But it made up for that by copping top-speed and second-quickest honors, running crisply and idling without complaint, making horsepower across its entire rev range and never even so much as fouling a spark plug. This, friends, is the way motorcycles are supposed to work.
But this kind of performance doesn’t come cheaply. To the purchase price of your GSX-R1 100 ($6600 list for a new one), add another $4600 in engine work.
It’s broken down like this: an 82mm piston kit, which brings the bike’s displacement to 1249cc; V&H Pro cams; a port-and-polish job on the bike’s cylinder head, in and of itself worth $1309; installation of 30mm, stainless intake and 26mm, stainless exhaust valves, heavy-duty valve springs and titanium spring retainers; heavy-duty clutch kit; Mikuni 40mm, smooth-bore carburetors and a set of velocity stacks for them; and a V&H Super Sport exhaust system.
It’s equipment and labor well used, as the engine’s dyno sheet records a peak of 189 horsepower at 11,000 rpm and 100 foot-pounds of torque at 9000 rpm—certainly enough to maintain the interest of even the most-jaded horsepower junkie for at least a little while. By the way, the cost of the engine modifications works out to about $24 per horsepower.
Not reflected here are the costs of two small, airflow tabs added to the bike’s fairing, the better to direct air from the rider’s hands, and a pair of Kosman Racing’s gorgeous, machined-aluminum, for-racingonly wheels—$595 for the front, $695 for the rear.
Even with its 185-mph gearing, this beast was tractable and docile on the street, the only clues to its ability to shred pavement being its shrill induction whistle as half the airborne particulate in the county passed through the engine’s velocity stacks, and its propensity to perform monster wheelies whenever throttle was applied too enthusiastically in any of the lower three gears. Our kind of motorcycle.
A final tribute to the Vance & Hines mega-GSX-R? Well, at the end of our three days of performance testing, it still needed its turnsignals wired-up and a license-plate bracket installed. The other three “Built for Speed” bikes already had those items-as well as ventilated pistons and a blown head gasket.
—Jon F. Thompson
