In Victory Circle
IN VICTORY CIRCLE
And the Best Superbike of 2004 is...
THE MOST TELLING OBSERVATION about this new crop of Superbikes resulted from something that Technical Editor Kevin Cameron said while he was examining them outside the CW shop. Told that we were having a hard time picking a winner, he asked, “Why, is it because they’re so alike?”
Au contraire, mon frère. It’s because they’re so different.
We titled this year’s middleweight sportbike comparison “Four of a Kind” (CW, May) because the 600cc Fours all seemed so similar. These lOOOcc Fours, on the other hand-despite being separated by mere fractions in performance testingcouldn’t be more dissimilar. Yet it’s interesting to note that in spite of a decade or more’s evolution, despite the displacement increases and decreases, the changes and innovations, each bike retains its familial feel.
In winning the racetrack portion of our testing, the Suzuki GSX-R1000 continues a tradition of production-racing excellence that extends back through the Suzuki Cup Series to when Wes Cooley first won the AMA Superbike Championship on a Yoshimura-built GS1000 in 1979.
The Honda CBR1000RR, by impressing Kevin Cameron with its mechanical refinement, confirms the company’s status as the technical leader-a position it’s held since the CB750 ushered in the four-stroke revolution in 1969.
The Yamaha YZF-R1, through its factory-fresh Superstock victory at Daytona, begins a new chapter in the history of a company that has traditionally dominated the 200, with 18 wins in the hands of racing greats such as Giacomo Agostini, Kenny Roberts, Eddie Lawson and Scott Russell.
In the end, however, it was the Kawasaki that topped two classes, and thus takes the overall victory. By raising the performance bar, the ZX-10R lands a heavyweight punch that started back before the ZX-9s and 10s and 1 Is and 12s, back before the Ninja 900 even, back when the Z-l was new in 1973. And by bookending that performance with a win in the street portion of our testing, it won on both quantitative and qualitative grounds. If that doesn’t make it the best bike overall, what does?
In all honesty, we’re a bit hesitant about naming a bike that gave us transmission troubles on the racetrack the winner of a comparison test-especially one as performance-oriented as this. And if the ZX-10R had missed one single shift on the street, we would have disqualified it in a minute. But it never did, so we didn’t.
After a somewhat lackluster run of liter-bikes in recent years and the moribund ZX-7R, it’s refreshing to see such a powerful move from Kawasaki. A Kawasaki as Best Superbike? Maybe the end is near...
