Cycle News is a weekly magazine that covers all aspects of motorcycling including Supercross, Motocross and MotoGP as well as new motorcycles
Issue link: https://magazine.cyclenews.com/i/127813
RACER rEST- Tadayuki Okada's Honda NSR500V exiting a slow corner, even when you're (sorta) straightened up and flying right - and be prepared for a showboat wheelie Gary Rothwell would be proud of. You soon realize you have to do two things: One, short-shift to keep the front wheel somewhere near the tarmac, and two, play the throttle like a musical instrument, to get the right kind of drive out of a turn. Power wheelies are serious fun, but they also lose you time, so watch how you twist that wrist. Still, the Honda's midrange punch is frankly intoxicating: Riding this bike is t'he two-wheeled equivalent of getting high on a good bottle of wine. Nice vintage - gimme more. It pulls cleanly out of any of Eastern Creek's three first-gear turns from as low as 6,000 rpm, then really packs a punch from just under 8,000 rpm up to the pow!!r peak at 10,500 rpm, 1,500 revs lower than the smaller-engined Aprilia: That' when you have to modulate the throttle to avoid aviating the front wheel. The power holds to just on 11 grand, but then it falls off steeply - a sort of built-in rev limiter on the cylinder porting, whicl1 stops you from overrevving it beyond the tolerance of those big pistons, whose existence you're always reminded of by the gruff drone of the deep exhaust note. Honda isn't worried about getting more power out of the bike, says Hattori-san, but ins tead is concentrating on improving the midrange power delivery - in other words, taming that torque so you can accelerate out of turns wide open in the bottom four gears. Righ t now, you can't: Still fun to try, though. But the upside of all that torque is that the SRSOOV is an incredibly forgiving bike to ride about as ideal to courselearn Eastern Creek with as Doohan's V-four SR500 was unsuitable. The V-twin imparts huge confidence so - for example - if you mess up your gear pattern and come into a turn a gear too low, it'll forgive the error and let you pull clean!y if fractionally more slowly out of the bend, then resume normal service. This must make it a great bike to ride in traffic, the key area where it surely scores over the Aprilia, which is also harder to start because both pistons on the twin-crank motor fire together, unlike the single-crank Honda which is a true V-twin. The Italian bike also has less Honda's wa H onda did a lot of homework before deciding which way to build its SOOcc V-twin GP racer, but seeing if it could make a twin .competitive with a V-four over race distance was exactly the kind of technical challenge that liRe engineers thrive on. And of course, there's a precedent for Honda doing it differently: Think back to itS first-