Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

The YZF600R is by far the most street-oriented bike in this comparison. Soft springs and damping rates make smoothness key in putting in a clean, mistake- free lap, and even then you'll still get smoked. Brakes offered strong initial bike and good outright power, but they faded at the end of the day. The Yamaha was by far the most comfortable ride on the street, and the solid midrange made squirting from corner to comer fun. that mood is geared toward full strafing runs and extreme lean angles. The handlebars clip on under the triple damps; the pegs, mounted high enough to stay out of harm's way on the race track, suddenly seem much too high. The flat spot off idle that you hardly notice on the track begins to bug you every time you leave a stoplight - at least the excellent dutch makes upping the revs and slipping away from a stop easy work. But the GSX-R was designed without much compromise in mind, and the dedicated will find it a livable street mount - particularly if it is used with any vigor on roads with a proper number of turns. There were no complaints about the super-quJck, accurate steering on our street ride - except that switching to the Suzuki invariably led to the rider trying to tum it off the inside of the first few comers! The chassis, so tight and so brilliant on the raCe track, punisheS the rider a lot in the daily grind, with the .stiffest spring and damping rates of all the bikes. Absolute performance has its price. THE VERDICT What most of us want from a motorcycle is simple: everything. A bike that asks not what we have to do for it, but what it can do for us. That eliminates one machine right off the bat: the GSXR600. But if all you ask of it is absolute maximum performance; it is the only choice - it just asks a lot in return. If you want the most comfort and practicality at the expense of outright performance, go YZF600R. (1I's the bargain of the bunch, too.) In the past, if you wanted the best of both - and to be those few steps closer to the bike that does everything - you had to take the CBR. But being the newest entry into the class, the real question is where the Kawasaki fits. Simple: on top. £~ othillf; bells laud ~ In the past, if you wanted top speeds over different sections of a CCIlIIW. split tl-s and lap times, you had to bust out your radar gun, stopwatch and calculator. ANi as far as whipping up a meaningful comparison went, outright lap time and top ~ was about the best you routd do. 'tYelcome to the future: Pi Research data acquisition. Around in most fonns of motor racing for years (where it hasn't been outlawed, anyway), we decided to give data acquisition (or telemetry, as it is also called) a try in the magazine testing realm. We were impressed. Our fir>t experien~ with the Pi Research data-acquisition system was at Freddie Spencer's High-Performance Riding School, where Spencer USt'S it on some of his CBR600s to help students undeTstand how technique affects speeds and ultimately lap times. We used it in an effort to illuminate the relative capabilities of our four test bikes, and to augment the subjective analysis of the machines. Scot Elkins (right in photo) and Ryan Tindall of Pi Research were on hand to install the equipment and knock the data into usable form for us. Using Pi's System 1 as our "black box," we used four of 12 possible input channels. These four are taken up by the common or "core" channels for the basic information everyone is after when they use telemetry, and it also happens to supply the system with the basic information it needs to function, such as where the lap starts and stops, and distance traveled from that point. A light sensor is mounted on the back of the bike and a lightemitting device mounted on a tripod is placed at the edge of the track. The device basically casts out a "wall" of light and pro"rides both time and distance references for the System 1 data acquisition. We used a front-wheel sensor that measures distance, an iaduction coil on a plug cable to sense engine rpm, a built-in accelerometer and a light sensor for the lap start-finish beacon. Included as part of the usual core channels is a gyro, which is necessary to generate a track map as it measures lateral acceleration. We used a SpenGer school bike to generate the track map, then overlaid the data we acquired, to save installation time. Section times and splits are set up on the map at certain meaningful distances past the light beacon. By far the best information for our purposes were the maximum and minimum speed measurements through the different sections (see chart). After all, the bottom line at the race track is speed. We were surprised at how good the mind's sense of relative speed is, and the Pi system backed up our impression of how we thought the bikes ranked at the track based on pure numbers. As expected, the GSX-R led the way in the maximum and minimum speeds through the various sections, with the ZX-6R generally very dose behind or dead even. Comer speeds in some sections were even a little bit higher for the green bike, but the overall pattern is obvious - the GSX-R goes fastest. The Honda surprisingly posted the highest terminal peed on the longest straight between corners two and three on the telemetry map - by over 1 mph. It wasn't enough to bring it equal on lap time to the Ninja, though. A glance at the YZF's numbers speak for themselves. Though only 1 or 2 mph in the slower sections, if that, at the top end of the scale the speed gap widens Significantly, and this is reflected in the lap time. Pi System 1 starts at about $3000. For more information, call 317/259-8900. 8 •• Me,. . . . . . ae.t.1 114.0' 113.2 49.4 46.6 133.7 57.4 126.2 45.6 80.0 56.3 114.8 114.5 1:52.07 51.7 49.0 46.6 45.9 133.4 134.8 56.& 56.0 125.3 124.6 42.7 46.8 80.7 82.4 55.8 56.2 114,5 113.5 114.5 112.4 1:53.50 1:53.68 'all speeds 112.2 111.2 . . . . . LIM _1 ...... _ r 2 ...... 2-3 IIIn. comer 3 ...... 3-4 Min. corner 4 Max. 4-5 Min. comerS Max. 5-finish At finish Beat lap time 50.0 44.7 130.6 53.8 120.1 44.7 78.4 54.3 109.0 108.7 In. 1:57.10 •

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