2015 BMW S1000RR
FIRST RIDE
P84
up quickly, squeeze hard on the
extremely strong brakes to slow
for it. Monoblocs? Who needs
them? That's a feature from the
HP4 which didn't make it over
to the new model. Remember
not to touch the clutch lever, but
just grasp the handlebar grip with
your left hand as you stab the
lever back a gear; revel as the
auto-blipper takes effect with a
momentary musical rise in revs
from the great-sounding exhaust
(definitely rortier and more rau-
cous-sounding than before, but
in a good way) and just focus on
trailbraking into the turn and lin-
ing up your apex without having to
worry about fingering the clutch
lever or, of course, blipping the
throttle. You can use consider-
able revs on the overrun without
overcoming the effective slipper
clutch—the ultra-stable way the
BMW loses speed is very impres-
sive, and confidence inspiring.
Less ideal to start with were
the settings on the Race mode,
which, while delivering explo-
sive acceleration and heaps of
straight-line performance, rather
surprisingly had maximum engine
braking dialed in. This meant that
it was hard, if not impossible, to
keep up turn speed in a second
gear bend, because once you
back off the throttle, engine revs
fall away quite sharply, making it
hard to exploit the BMW's great
feedback from the front end in
using lots of angle to keep up
momentum. Looking at the chart
of different mode settings—an
important tool for RR owners in
setting their bike up right for each
given track—it was obvious what I
needed to do.
So for my next session I
switched to Slick mode (Pirelli's
Supercorsas have as much grip
as MotoGP tires did 10 years
ago), which has zero engine
braking as default mode. That
fixed it! Now, while I had to use
those great brakes a little harder
to stop at the end of the fifth-gear
main straight, with the recalibrat-
Now that the RR has been updated, BMW has dropped the HP4.
MSRP has not yet been announced.
