Cycle News - Archive Issues - 1990's

1999 Middleweight Sportbikes By Mark Hoyer Photos by Frank Hoppen nl reams are what make this sport so enticing. Dreams of dragging a knee, hitting your favorite twisty section with a perfect rhythm, harmonizing with your machine and controlling it with fluidity, style and authority. Dreams of more horsepower, better handling and higher speeds. Dreams of racing and being the best. With its production-based rules, supersport racing makes the dream of being like Miguel, Ben, Eric, Doug, Nicky, Jason, Steve, Mat and the rest of that fast company as accessible as your local dealer. For in supersport racing, they. ostensibly race what you can buy, and if you buy one, you can go race.. The importance of racing to a manufacturer's image cannot be overstated, and the demands of racing have made this a set of very fast street bikes. What we have are four 600cc four-cylinder motorcycles - and one 750cc twin - with rear-wheel horsepower figures approa.ching the magic 100 mark and top speeds'in the neighborhood of 150 mph - and none of these bikes wastes its time getting there. In last year's shootout, the winning ZX-6R came to the table as the all-new machine, boasting impressively smooth, almost-750cc-like engine performance, a lightweight, competent chassis and ergonomics that were the best compromise between street and track. But time marches on, and with two completely new machines entering the class for 1999 - the Yamaha YZF-R6 and Honda CBR600F4 - we had to see how the Green Meanie would stand up to the pressure. Enter the highly anticipated Yamaha YZF-R6. Wild, PR-fueled claims of 120 horsepower aside, the fact that the R6 carne after the amazing Rl made it a bike that raised expectations of what a 600 might be. The R6's spec sheet will make you look twice, too, with its radical, TZ250-like steering geometry, highly tuned engine and light weight. In the Honda corner, prior to the official release of the CBR600F4 there were rumors of many things - fuel injection and a CBR600RR among them. In the end, Honda chose a more-measured approach, and kept the CBR600 in the "F" family. However, when Big Red was finished, about the only thing left of the old F3 was its spirit. An aluminum '~ 12 frame replaced steel, four-piston front brakes replaced the two-piston jobs of old, engine power w~s increased, dry weight decreased - aU the while maintaining th same eminently streetable package that helped build it legend. Though the GSX-R600 returns for 1999 with only minor tweaks (aimed at producing more power), it's a bike that you can never count out when you're turning a wheel in anger - it is, after all, the bike that carried Steve Crevier to the AMA 600cc Supersport Championship. And though we told you last year that it was the most uncompromising racerwith-lights of the bunch in last year's shootout, in the new 600cc world order, it doesn't seem so far out of line anymore. A new addition to our middleweight Speedway's world-class facility to itself for a whole day of testing. There are many people who helped make it happen, but at the core it was three-time World Champion Freddie Spencer, who runs, of course, Freddie Spencer's High Performance Riding School (702/6431099) at LVMS. The virtues of taking his school cannot be overstated. Take it, for you will learn to ride better, faster and safer. And it is the most sinful amount of fun you can have wearing leather in Sin Oty. Really. While we were in the same place as last year's 600cc Shootout, several things about our day at the track were different this time around. The net result, however, was the same: More than 1000 total miles were racked up among our five bikes, allowing for a truly complete subjective evaluation of how these bikes work around Las Vegas Motor Speedway's 2.48-m.ile banking-pIus-infield layout. Unfortunately, one element was missing. The company that provided the data-acquisition systems we used last year couldn't provide us with support this time, so it was back to stopwatches and we even screwed that up (more on that shortly). Race tires were provided by Dunlop in the form of D207GPs, and Dale Kieffer of Racers Edge Performance, a motorcycle performa.nce shop located in orth Las Vegas (702/257-3808), was on hand with changing and balancing equipment, as well as to cut a few laps of his own. . For stable, racerlike feel, head for the Ducati. The gauge package was the only one in the test that didn't have an electronic odometer, and it was the only one with no redline indicated. Singlesided swingarm and steel-trellis frame not to mention a desmo V-twin - really set the Ducati apart. shootout is the Ducati 748. Although the AMA doesn't allow the desmoquattro Vtwin to corn pete in its 600cc Supersport class (why not?), it is aUowed in the FIM Supersport World Series. There was a good deal of pressure from many sources n t to include the bike in the comparison, but as you'll see, it turned out to be entirely appropriate. Besides, if you asked someone for a 748 to ride on a track and he said yes, would you say no? We didn't. A Ducati on a race track? Talk about dreams ... THE TRACK While we're on the subject of dreams, this one ranks up there with just about any dream you can dream. Cycle News once again had the Las Vegas Motor

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