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It's your birthday. You sit before an inferno of flames (OK, maybe you're younger than I am). What kinds of wishes are going through your mind? Maybe a plasma TV? How about a new bike? OK, now we're getting somewhere. But what kind of bike? This is your birthday and you're making wishes! So let's make a wish.
You know you want something with MotoGP in its DNA. A lot of it. It's gotta have the signature pedigree of a world champion, say, Nicky Hayden. Of course, it should spring from the hand and mind of a god of Grand Prix ... Kyoichi Yoshii of HRC, the demigod behind the RC211V. That'd be the guy.
Naturally, such a creation would be light and lithe. 435 pounds, wet, at the curb, full of gas and ready for a long day of unwinding your favourite tarmac. And horsepower! TONS of it, natch, but hey, you're going for a ride so you need to be able to use it, not be prohibited by some vestigial survival instinct. It's gonna be small but comfortable. Precise yet forgiving. Fast though tractable. It's gotta wrap a whole lotta cool kung fu in something you can swing a leg over, but still become part of.
Close your eyes and blow the wax from those cheap candles across the room! Uh, oh...you forgot to take a deep breath! No worries, mate, because you don't need to wish. This bike exists, and this spring you can have one for less than Paris Hilton pays for a pedicure. Well, after the tip anyway.
No doubt this bike is the 2008 Honda CBR1000RR. There's not much hype in the hoopla. Honda went all out to redesign the new flagship liter bike, and they've adhered to a core set of First Principles to bring us something very special. These principles are: incorporate race proven technology, maximize power to weight, and create new technology. Honda invited MD to Laguna Seca to prove to us how well they hit the mark.
One of the first things you notice about the new 1000 is its styling. Maybe you like it, maybe you don't. But take a moment and think about what you see. It's narrower, for one. From the profile you can see that the fairing upper is shorter, almost stubby. Honda claims this is a functional design to minimize the effort required to change direction at high speed.
The exhaust pretty much catches your eye right away. Is that a bad thing? Or does it just intrigue you? It looks awfully low-slung, tidy ... and angular. The bike surely has reduced frontal area for improved aerodynamics. The integrated mirrors and turn indicators are pretty slick; that obviously consolidates two sources of drag.
What's tugging on the back of your mind is that Honda has placed function over form. No matter what, the design that performed better won the day. Are high pipes stylish? Maybe so, but they deliver mass high on the platform and near the rider. The single most important aspect of the "power to weight" principle for this mega-horsepower liter bike is not power or weight. It's where you put the weight and how you make and manage the power. Laguna Seca provided an excellent opportunity to put these principles to the test. There's no place to rest, and every turn flows into the next over elevation changes and blind rises. A good mix of fast turns and low gear exits provides a litmus test for throttle control and chassis response.
When you slip into the contours of the '08 CBR1000RR, one the first things you notice is that the riding position is relaxed and forgiving. But not so much that you can't be aggressive. And it's narrow. My average 5'10" frame was never crowded, folded, or forced to interfere with itself. Your legs can meld with the fuel tank and not feel like they're being pried apart. There's 1000cc of big inline four between ya and you'd never know it from the supermodel waistline. In fact, in the effort to reduce and centralize mass, Honda managed to make the engine 30mm narrower at the frame rails and 15mm shorter from the cylinder block. This narrow engine now has an integral bottom end and cylinder block. The sleeveless cylinders are more closely spaced and plated with a nickel silicon carbide (aka Nikasil) matrix that is similar to the platings used on Honda's grand prix two-stroke cylinders.
Since the engine is shorter, it allows 3mm shorter exhaust valves and moves the super-light cams closer to the center of mass. Together, the new cams are a whopping 1.1 pounds lighter than before ... and that's rotating engine mass. The larger bore pistons (up 1mm from 75mm) are of identical weight to the '07. All of that yields an engine that is 5 pounds lighter. The curved radiator is narrower as well, but the January test conditions at Laguna won't serve to test how well the bike cools. This might be one to keep your eye on.
olling down the hot pit and entering the track, some of the engine and geometry characteristics are already obvious. The HESD (Honda Electronic Steering Damper) senses the casual pace and steering around obstacles at low speed is effortless. You roll off a little, steer, roll back on, and there's an odd feeling. It's not jerky. There's no driveline lash, but there's something going on that doesn't feel like every other bike. It's the Honda Ignition Interrupt Control system. This is an interesting bit of new technology that you can't really test on a racetrack, but swinging around the gas pumps or maneuvering around the parking lot you might be glad it's there.
The IICS measures the rotational velocity differential between the crankshaft and the countershaft. This is zero when the transmission is fully engaged under acceleration or deceleration, but in the transition between the two there's a very brief moment of time when the gear dogs are off their leash and the cog is free to rotate a few degrees. At this point the countershaft and crankshaft are no longer rotating at exactly the same rate. And when this difference reaches a pre-programmed threshold (different for each gear and only between 2000 and 6500 RPM) the IICS will kill ignition pulses to soften the clack when the dogs engage. So this obviously isn't something you'll notice or need on the racetrack, or even during sportriding, but it's a good example of the lengths Honda has gone to in order to tame their new full liter beast.
Like any bike in its class, the CBR1000RR pulls hard and strong. Usually longer than you have racetrack, so there's never a moment when you're not under the spell of acceleration. At Laguna, you can fall deep into this intoxicating trance as you exit Turn 3 and rocket, with measured application of throttle, through Turn 4 and accelerate at just shy of relativistic speeds to Turn 5. You'll welcome the narrower fuel tank at times like this, as you can get a pretty good grip on it (or at least you'd better) with your legs.
Turn 4 doesn't require much braking, even on big bikes, but it does require that you roll out and set both your entry speed and turn point. This is a transition. You're on the gas, you're off, you're turning, and then you're on the gas again. But you wouldn't know it was so complicated. Honda's latest incorporates another bit of new technology called the Idle Air Control Valve.
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