VOL. 50 ISSUE 48 DECEMBER 3, 2013
P49
The naked ZX-10RR: Tons of trickery.
(Above) A four that can be ridden
like a twin? Yes… because you can
actually make it a twin.
(Left) The ZX-10RR gets Showa
rear suspension.
(Far left) Traction control: Red
button means plus; blue button
means minus; white button allows
Sykes to switch between the two
different engine maps.
ment in acceleration and throttle
response – so much so that
when I rode it at Aragon mid-season, I'll readily admit that I found
it pretty daunting.
The pickup was so vivid that
you really needed to pay attention
to how you worked the throttle,
especially exiting second- and
third-gear turns. That's where a
combination of the four-cylinder
motor's undoubted performance
and work-in-progress digital
throttle mapping (coupled with
what appeared at that stage to be
rear grip problems) made it pretty
fearsome and not altogether well.
But a bike that was good enough
to come within half a point of being crowned World Champion.
The Aragon race soon after
my test last year was the breakthrough.
"I was watching the race on my
DVD player after, and I saw where
Tom was missing traction at the
front, not at the rear as we'd always thought," says Sykes' Dutch
race engineer Marcel Duinker.
"His style is to brake very late
and deep into corners, then turn
and fire it out, and if the front tire
is moving about, then he has to
take a wider line through a bend,
and this means he's on the edge
of the rear tire for longer, which
eventually wears it out, so grip
falls away. So we made quite a
radical change in the setup of the
bike as a temporary fix, and that's
when he began his run of good
results that so nearly brought us
the title. But then for this year,
Showa's new SNF fork has completed the job, and together with
various other improvements,
that's what's allowed Tom to be
so much more consistent with lap
times, and tire life."
That wasn't something I was
going to discover in eight laps of
Jerez, especially as I was entrusted with new tires for my first session on the Kawasaki. But what
did immediately come over was
how much more refined its power delivery is now - even though
power-wheelies in the bottom
four gears are a fact of life, requiring you to force yourself to
