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/128310
o ur-cylinde r naked bikes are back in business, thanks especially to Kawasaki's sharply styled new Z I000 with its big-bore ZX9R motor. But, begging its pardon, this and its rivals like the Yamaha Fazer 1000 and CB900 Honda Hornet are, relat ively speaking, distinctly wimpy bits of hardware, all attitude and much less action, fitted with low-spec, lower-rent, Iiquidcooled powerplants barely able to muster a measly hundred horsepower at the back wheel and bearing only a distant resemblance in terms of performance and specification to the maxi-sport hyperbike missiles they 're nominallydescended from. And more retro nudiesports like the Suzuki GSXI400 or Yamaha XJRI300 , with their air-cooled engines and twin-shock chassis packages, are mere pastiches of the bikes that inspired them, the high-barred early-'BOs AMA Superbikes that were so fast, so freaky and so, so spectacular, with engines easily too good for their chassis, yet delivering a literally awesome level of performance, coupled with all the thrills and often spills of tangling handlebars on the way into a turn . Nothing wrong with taking a trip down memory lane to offer born-again bikers a sanitized look at "the way it was," but don't try to pretend these are stripped-out Superbikes, 21st-century style, 'cause they ain't. Nico Bakker's Grizzly, on the other hand, is exactly that - and then some. But this Suzuki GSX-R IODD-based ultrarod streetfighter, with its 161 bhp motor slot- F ted into a specially made steel frame concocted by the Dutch master of creative chassis manufacture, came about in an unusual way. "I made it for myself, as a 30th birthday present for Bakker Framegebouw!" says the 5 7-year old Bakker, who made his first self-built chassis back in 1973 to go road racing and whose list of groundbreaking design features - Bakker was the first to introduce to motorcycle chassis manufacture - reads like a textbook of modern frame development. For the genial, mustached Dutchman was the first to employ a monoshock rear suspension on a Grand Prix race bike; the first to fit a rising-rate linkage of the type commonplace today to the rear end of any motorcycle; the first to fit upside-down forks to a street motorcycle; the first to fit a modern-style singlesided rear swingarm to a production streetbike - and a four cylinder, at that , some time before Honda did so on the RC30; the first to offer a four-cylinder hub -center streetbike for sale (ditto before Bimota did with the Tesi); the first to build a shaft-drive motorcycle with a deltabox-type tw inspar alloy frame (d itto the BMW and R1200RS); and the first to design , manufacture and fit a six-piston brake caliper to a motorcycle of any kind, before long Nissin did so . Oh - and Nico also built the prototype Telelever frames for BMW and the , most recent of his ongoing projects fo r manufacturers around the world to emerge was the innovative chassis for the new Laverda SFC1000 V-twin launched at last year's Bologna Show, which he helped create for the new proprietors of this Italian trophy marq ue, Aprilia. How's that for a CV? Okay, but back to the Grizzly How and . why, N ico? tion, high handlebars like a '70s Superbike, and not much fairing - so the wind is blowing in your face, and you get a real impression of speed even if you don't go so fast. But then, the finest thing is that sometimes you want to see how much power you have and fast you can go - so you go to 240 kph [about 150 mph] like I did many times on th e Grizzly, o nly for a moment, then back down to normal speeds before the The rear suspension featu res a braced aluminum fabricated swingarm with a WP Shock that is actuated by a Bakker-designed lin k . Magura makes the strllet fighter hand lebars, while an Ohlins rotarystyle steering damper keeps the front end stable. "I did many miles on the best funbike I ever built , the BMW Boxer-eng ined Kangaroo sports tourer that I later made twenty copies of for customers around the world ," explains Bakker, "but then I sold it! Very foolish, because this was such a com fortab le as well as sporty bike to ride , and nothing I've made since gave me so much pleasure . So when I could spare the time, I wanted to make another, but this time something with more performance than the Boxer engine has. Then I started looking around and realized there are lots of GSX-R1000 Suzukis for sale that have been crashed and written off, either by the owners who can't be bothered to repair them or by the insurance companies who won't pay for that. So, I made a naked streetfighter for myself to celebrate Bakker 's 30th year in business, with upright seating posi- traffic camera catches you! The w ind is too hard to go for five or 10 minutes like that , but while this is a bike you can break the speed limit on easily - maybe in first gear! you can have a lot of fun just riding it normally around town or out in the country. "It seems lo ts of other people fee l the same as me , because after I made the Grizzly and displayed it at t he Dutch bike show, I got several orders for cop ies. So I dec ided to make it in two ways. Either you can buy a complete bike, just like this one, for around Euro 25,000 ($3 1,582) depending on the specification. or else I'm making a much less expensive frame kit so you can fit the engine and electrics from a crashed Suzuki yourself. I'll also make a kit for the R I Yamaha, as well - that's a very good engine , too, and it seems people ride them just as hard and crash just as much as on www.cyclenews.com CYCLE NEWS . FEBRUARY 11,2004 31