Stop Making Sense
STOP MAKING SENSE
YEAR OF THE NAKED
1988 SUZUKIGSX-R1100 AS BLUNT INSTRUMENT
GARY INMAN
Why would anyone want a 135-hp naked bike? You can’t hold on above 100 mph unless you have a UFC neck, and you won’t want to unless you’ve got the mental capacity of a mole rat. But let’s be realistic. Riding a high-performance naked bike does not encourage thoughts of threefigure cruising. It’s all about the l-inch punch to the Adam’s apple that is blasting up to the ton on a bike in the shortest elapsed time.
This is my blunt instrument—a tuned, big-bore, 1988 Suzuki GSXR1100 engine in a one-off, hybrid chrome-moly and aluminum chassis. It’s taken me more than four years to get to this stage, the project evolving since I bought the UK-built chassis for $400 from a friend who’d lost patience with it. I now know why he sold it. Cycle World featured the bike this rejected frame was originally built for: Steve Elliott’s Freddie Spencer Evo (Nov. 2011), a machine with a far more handsome GIA alloy frame. That Evo and similarly inspired bikes built by UK titanium exhaust specialists Racefit, plus all the Japanese muscle that runs in the All-Japan NKi naked race class, fired me up enough to endure four years of intermittent headaches.
The recipe is a mix of classic bodywork and rugged, large-capacity four-cylinder engines bolted to new, twin-bottom-rail chassis. Add good suspension, modern brakes and wheels, and top it off with a whole high-school full of attitude.
From day one I knew what the bike would be fitted with and what it wouldn’t. An oil-cooled Suzuki GSX-R1100 (or later GSF1200) was an absolute must, as were Keihin 39mm FCR carbs. They came from Sudco, even though there is an importer in the UK where I live. They were set up perfectly straight out of the box and the bike runs flawlessly—the complete opposite of what a dozen “experts” told me about flat-slides and streetbikes.
I knew I had to have a Racefit Ti Legend exhaust, a Brit-made 4-into-i that weighs the same as Mother Teresa’s conscience. I signed up for an endurance-style quick filler, too. Stupid idea, but it’s eye-catching and, again, British-made, this time by RCD. The final essential was an oil cooler in front of the head stock. Not very mass-centralized, but Fm not Marc Marquez, and my oil cooler, made for me by AH Fabrications, is featherlight. I came up with the idea of having the oil lines run through a tunnel welded into the 1980 GS1000 tank. The lines have dry-breaks in them, so it’s easy to split them and remove the tank.
Everything else was up for grabs, though I didn’t want Öhlins twin shocks. They’re good but too common. Mine are from Nitron. Some parts I got at very good prices—including the wheels, brakes, and front end. Others I didn’t. When you want just the right thing, you suck it up and pay what you have to.
I have nothing against all the neo café racers being built. I like a lot of them and really like many people building and riding them, but I wanted this Suzuki to be a bike not one “café” could compete with, except in a show and shine (and this bike will never be on display at a bike show).
It had to be faster, more exclusive, more powerful, more brutal, less clichéd. Some kind of antidote that perhaps only I needed to swallow.
The result is a bike Steve Elliott nicknamed The Black Arrow. It’s a stew of parts that were never supposed to live together but seemed to have gelled like The Rat Pack.
Having just finished the build, I’m in the early stages of shakedown tests. The ancient tank sprung a leak (now cured), and the gearing is too low. In fact, the whole bike is a little too low because the 2003 GSX-R1000 fork is so much shorter than what was intended for this frame. But I’ll live with it for now.
It doesn’t handle like a 2014 CBR1000RR, but I never thought it would. It’s good enough for me, though. And when I pass a line of cars, stamping gears ’til we hit fifth with a guttural howl, my whole being is jazzed, every nerve erect. This bike makes no sense, but that was never the intention.
