Comment: 1000cc – scary or not?

Recently I had dinner with an old school mate. He’s relatively new to bikes (never once told me he was keen on getting a bike when we were growing up), and now he’s riding a Suzuki SV650.

He told me he was looking to upgrade to a Supersport bike. Now, being the tall bloke he is, I offered the option of a 1000cc superbike instead, seeing as he’s dead keen on sportsbikes.

“Mate, I’ll kill myself on one of those – they’re way too fast,” Andy told me. That got me thinking. Is it just a perception that superbikes, being superbikes, are too fast? I mean, hitting a bus on an R6 at 100km/h is probably going to give you the same result as hitting the same bus on a R1 at 100km/h. Maybe worse.

Superbikes have come a long, long way in the last few years. Almost all the major players have anti-lock braking and traction control as part of an overall safety package, and as a result I reckon most manufacturers are using them as an excuse to make their bikes faster and faster. I mean, have a crack at the new Ducati 1299 Panigale – a claimed 205hp! From a production bike!

Five years ago factory world superbikes were struggling to make that number. But that number is matched by almost every electronic safety net I’ve ever heard of: traction control, cornering anti-lock braking, variable engine maps, electronic suspension, wheelie control…

Compare that to the technology that hasn’t filtered down to supersport machines of late. None of the big four (Kawasaki, Honda, Yamaha or Suzuki) offer a supersport machine with anti-lock braking. Kawasaki is a grey area here, because it has the 636 ABS machine on sale in Australia.

In the right hands a supersport bike can go just as fast as a superbike, on public roads even more so. And seeing as a supersport bike is traditionally aimed at a rider of lesser experience, wouldn’t it be wise for all manufacturers to put more safety technology into their junior superbikes? I mean, you could turn all the systems off if you like, but surely the supersport range is ready for a few upgrades by now? I reckon they’d probably sell a few more bikes in this sadly ailing class, too.

The benefit of a good safety package was unwittingly demonstrated to me a few weeks back when I was out for a ride with some mates. One of the fellas had recently bought an Aprilia RSV4 R, the one with the aPRC system. It was in fact the aPRC system that swayed his vote, as the Fireblade he was looking at offered none of the safety features he wanted. After picking up his bike from a mechanic who shall not be named, my mate went blasting up the road in a haze of tyre smoke. Now, I thought it was pretty stupid to do a full rolling burnout just out of the city, until I realised it wasn’t tyre smoke but oil from the stripped oil filter spewing onto his rear tyre.

My mate managed to get round a corner or two and to a stop once he realised his traction control was chiming in a little too much. Have a look at the picture. I’ve never, ever seen someone with that much oil on their tyre and not go down. That he didn’t hit the ground was surely part an act of the great spaghetti monster in the sky, but mostly down to that brilliant safety system saving his arse.
I’ll admit that I love the idea of tyre smoking drifts on full lock while flipping the bird to the term ‘traction control’. But after experiencing many different systems over the past few years, even the average ones out there are better than none at all.

Once I explained all this to Andy he’d already made his mind up. Before dinner was out he’d already found a 2013 ZX-10R with anti-lock braking and traction control on Bikesales. After all, he said, he quite liked the idea of 160hp in his right hand but having that little safety sword in his armour in case it went wrong.