Styling & design
Why should we be talking about styling in the beginning of a track test? Well, let’s face facts. Ninety nine per cent of litre-class motorcycles sold in India will never even see the parking lots of a racetrack. Fewer still will ever approach the distant peripheries of their vast performance envelopes. In that kind of riding cycle, looks become rather important.
And both manufacturers know that. The R1 has come a long way from its origins and many would argue that the company has lost the plot a bit with the latest model (2009-2010). What used to be the best looking Japanese motorcycle of them all only three years ago has become a menacing looking stubby thing with a plump fairing, stubby exhausts and a gaping front end that always seems either startled or intensely hungry.
The Suzuki on the other hand, has evolved nicely. You can trace some of the lines back to the original Gixxer Thousand but much has changed, the headlight shape being the most dramatically shifting element of the whole lot. The new one is neat, I like the interesting shape and the gaping intakes - the Suzuki has presence. And menace. Suzuki’s experiments with the exhausts and their shape, on the other hand, I will never fully comprehend. The latest are these gigantic, curved titanium units that look a bit bigger in the pics than they really are. Then again, it’s nothing a carbon fibre Akrapovic stub won’t fix, right?
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