Honda CBR 900RR Fireblade

l'm Mick Doohan.  Mick  'Westy' Doohan. Yanking my forearms to hoik my body weight over the Honda's front end as it tries to hoik me off the back through the first three gears. Wap, wap, wap, waooooow. Jeez. I'm going to die. Eeek. No I'm not. Prat.

I'm back. Made it. Phew. Try something else. Flat fast, flat-out sweeper. Nail it. Focus. Edge my bum over. Attack. Nora-bleedin'-Batty! This thing just holds it's line. Inch perfect. Just dip your shoulder and hold it. Fantastic!

Try again. Wap, wap, wap. Flick. Hold it. Easy. Glance down at the speedo. Damn. 125mph. Can't be right. 125mph round a CORNER? A corner I do at maybe 100-110 on an EXUP? But I was hardly trying. Scour those hedgerows, keep snatching glances in those mirrors double-take every pale blur. Panic, giggle, get a massive superiority complex and, 20 minutes later, get home. Sanctuary.

The Honda CBR900RR Fireblade may rewrite sportsbike rules but I don't think anyone told the police (two narrow escapes but, touch wood, so far so good) or, for that matter, my granny. She wouldn't be impressed. The CBR may look excrutiatingly sexy, but, face it, it doesn't look particularly special — leave alone revolutionary. 'Yes, very nice dear,' granny would say before pottering back inside to put the kettle on and dig out those favourite sweeties you could last digest when you were eight...

So yes, revolutionary power-to-weight ratios aside, the CBR is about as straightforward as a modern sports bike gets. There's no inverted forks, no banana single-sided swing-arms, no mind-blowing engine technology, no complex headlights, no LCDs, no secrets, no bullshit.

Instead it's neat, unfussy, uncomplicated and focussed. A bit like having an image of an EXUP under a microscope, big, splodgy and blurred, and Honda has simply turned the focussing knob to reveal a bike that's sharper, smaller and clearer.

Smaller is the by-word. With that weight and wheelbase the CBR is tiny by normal (ie EXUP/GSX-R11) standards. But that doesn't mean it's tiny in human terms like, say, a KR-1S is to anyone over 5'6". The seat is flat, surprisingly deeply-padded and RC30-wide. The pegs are rubberised (rather than shin-scarring bare metal) and quite low, much lower than a GSX-R11's. While the bars, about level with the top yoke, are a comfortable distance over the fat, chunky tank and nothing like the long radical stretch you'd find with an EXUP. Out and out racy? Nowhere near as much as you might expect. All day comfy? Not at all bad. Pillions? Um, dunno. No grab rail, awkWard side panel bulges and high pegs do not great expectations make. Never mind, there is a cavernously useful storage compartment for your lock, oversuit or girlfriend's phone number under the scat...

The cockpit layout proffers no surprises — except that it's on a Honda (I had to keep reminding myself of this every time I got on it). No VFR-plushness, instead EXUP-style clocks, RC30 switchgear and a battle-ready purposefulness. The closest comparison I can make is to think of the GSX-R750, but without quite the same bar crispness yet compensated for by a touch more class: the immaculately crafted top yoke, the slightly better finish. Or even as an EXUP but with a few of its annoying little niggles (narrow mirrors, average headlamp) all sorted because... well, because it's a Honda.

What seems even less typically Honda is the engine. This is a fun engine. F-U-N. And when was the last time Honda built a roadster that was anything else but serious, sensible, functional, immaculate? (The RC30 doesn't count, it was built to win races, and do it seriously. Besides its first gear is no fun at all.) Time to check the name on the tank again.

The CBR mill does all the other usual Honda stuff as well of course. Very smooth, surprisingly flexible from three-and-a-half all the way to the 11,000rpm redline, faultless cable clutch and so on. It's just that I reckon someone must have thrown a wobbly at some stage during the development programme and decided to have some, shush now, f-u-n. Either that or they've got a closet Hawaiian shirt-wearing, hard living laddie hiding behind his Honda uniform in the R&D shop and I just hope I get invited to one of his parties. Or even two.

Waaaaaaaaaa! Good morning 8000rpm.

No Honda's ever sounded like this. Ouch. Ooohhhh. Mmmmm. And so what if the pipe looks a bit dreary. Here, what until then was merely impressively useful performance, transforms into addictively laugh-a-minute shenanigans — and bugger everyone else. Put an EXUP at around 7-8000rpm and it's infernally frustrating: the engine's harsh, tensed up, waiting to be unleashed and almost impossible to ride legally on the motorway. Stick the CBR at 7000 and it's quite pleasing really. It'll cruise softly, smoothly, acceptably. Then knock it up to eight and it's as if horns grow out of the fairing. The ally can bellows a downright wicked blare, acceleration slides smoothly into the next dimension and, if you slip the clutch aggressively in the first two or three gears, it wheelies. Easily. Outrageously.

The gearbox is quite BAD too. Bad by Honda standards at least. This side of their big singles and trailies it's probably the notchiest Honda item I've used. If it had Yamaha on the tank, you probably wouldn't notice it. But because it's a Honda you do. Well, for a bit anyway. Then you realise the ratios are so nicely spaced. Fun-nice. First equals heart-racing wheelies to order all the way to second. Third and fourth equal unparalleled B-road zappe-rery. Think I'll be Mick Doohan again for a while. Fifth? 125mph corners. Ahem. With schizoid sixth tagging along not too closely for either those really big numbers on the speedo or lazy, hung-over, roll-it-about pleasantries. Six different types of fun all in one gearbox. Nice.

Then again, maybe that's got more to do with the chassis than the gearbox. It's all down to being able to use all 124 of those mustang-mad horses everywhere, anywhere you like. ("I've got a GSX-R1100. It is a splendid machine...oh dear, there's a corner coming up.") It's all down to its revolutionary lightness and razor steering.

The Fireblade steers so quick it's baffling. I'm baffled and judging by all this crap about steering dampers people have been spouting on about recently, I think just about everyone else who's ridden it is baffled too. So lets clarify things a little. The CBR's steering is deliciously light. With its 16-inch wheel and KR-1S-sized trail it was bound to be. Add to the equation the way it accelerates, its overall light weight and stumpy wheelbase and, yes, 'twitchy' might sometimes be an appropriate word. But it's always controllable. It never threatened to tank-slap even when a moment's mental aberation meant I once found myself accelerating hard out of a corner on the catseyes. I never had to grasp the bars in a fit of panic and it was always fun. Steering damper on the road? No problemo. On the track, maybe.

And that, in a nutshell, is what makes the Fireblade so (here we go again) 'revolutionary'. It steers so quick, it's so light and so easy to hold a chosen line. You don't have to set yourself up for corners in the measured way you do on a conventional 1000cc sportster. Instead you can take all sorts of hilarious liberties the like of which you might try on a ZXR400, but never, normally, on something capable of nigh-on 170mph. On a GSX-R11 you just can't use the engine in the same way or overtake in the same way you can on the CBR. You have to treat it more gingerly, with more respect. Both bikes have the accelaration to squirt past an errant artic. Only the CBR is nimble enough to be flicked or wiggled back in before becoming a grille adornment for that other errant artic coming the other way. You can use all that engine.

It even absolutely rails ultra-fast sweepers — mostly, again, because of pin-point accuracy of the steering plus the rigid lightness of the frame. The worst I can say of those massively beefy forks is that I hardly ever found myself thinking about them. They did the job. The rear single shock, when the going got hot, was, set on two of the seven preload settings, a little soft for my bulk and in need of a tad more rebound. But all the concieveable adjustments are all there waiting to be played with, and probably much less critical given the weight of the bike.

The same could be said of the brakes. Because it's so light it brakes like no other litre class bike, or rather, it stops like no other. The twin floating discs and four-pot dual opposed Nissin calipers offer a strangely subtle, deceptive sensation at the adjustable lever — nothing like the fierce bite of an EXUP's. They do stop you damn quick, but I do suspect they're slightly vulnerable to fade, especially on the track.

And the track is where my one final doubt raises its head slightly. There is no doubt whatsoever that CBR900R Rs will absolutely cream open class proddie racing this year. What the jury's still out on, however, is what tyres it'll achieve it on. The original fitment Bridgestone Battlax's wrought mixed opinions, I suspect because of a slightly harder than usual compound compensated by a slightly broader than usual contact patch. The result being a tyre that didn't seem to be working hot enough, but still gripping well. For the road I don't forsee any problems. For the track, I can quite easily see them quickly being binned in favour of a pair of sticky Pirelli MP7s or, possibly, Mich Hi-Sports. We'll have to wait and see.

Anyway, who cares? With the Fireblade Honda set out to "rewrite everyone's definition of open class performance" and considering what a cynical git I am sometimes you better believe when I say they have. If you want the quickest A to B roadbike around, this is it. No contest.

What it also is for me, however, is the most exhilarating, sexiest sportsbike around by a country mile; a much more forgiving, more practical day to day bike than you could possibly imagine, and, possibly, THE bike I want more than any other. In fact you could say I quite liked it. Even if it is 500 too expensive.

ENGINE/POWER

THE CBR900RR ENGINE: no tricks, no fancy materials, no complex valve or exhaust technology. In other words, a conventional liquid-cooled, DOHC, 16-valve, transverse four — with two important differences. It's radically small (barely larger than the CBR600F engine); and it's anorexically light: the engine alone weighs a whopping 33 lb less than an EXUP mill, already the lightest four in the class.

That comparison with the CBR600 is more than coincidental. Although the 600 was launched over a year ago it, in fact, was derived from technology developed for the 900 rather than the other way round. Simply put, the 900 has been in gestation for four years, the last two involving Hondas UK, France and Germany in an unprecedented testing and development programme. (That in itself is unparalleled, the usual period from drawing board to dealer being two.) So the programme was already well under way when Honda suddenly realised it needed an all-new machine for the highly competitive — and profitable — 600 class.   (Did I hear someone say ZZ-R600?) So the 900 engine became the basis for that of the 600 and the 600 programme leap-frogged the 900's. .

But the engine's not all-new. To minimise re-tooling costs both engines are based on the Japan-only CBR750. (Ironically, a new CBR750RR is rumoured for next year — destined to succeed the long-in- the-tooth RC30 as Honda's World Superbikes contender.) It follows car engineering practise with integral cylinder barrels and upper crankcase to enable block width to be kept to a minimum. The camchain drives down the right (another increasingly common ploy to minimise width); lightweight, flat-top slipper pistons, conrods and five-bearing crank do most of the hard work.

On the induction side, a mutha of an airbox (7.2 liters ) feeds a bank of the latest Keihin CVs before on through straight, downdraught inlet tracts into the pent-roof combustion chamber. The lightweight valve train is of the direct on-buckets variety and helps enable a narrow 32 degree included valve angle.  It's compact.

So, dimensions apart, no real surprises.  A claimed 122bhp is fairly impressive, but not unexpected.  For the dyno read-out to reveal a genuine 124bhp and a torque curve as fat as MCN's roving GP reporter Adam DuckWorth, however was.

PERFORMANCE

THERE'S PROBABLY QUITE a few horsepower junkies out there that won't like this...but I'll say it anyway: there's more to straightline performance than brute horsepower - and the CBR is the first roadbike to prove it. The CBR produces 124 brake, the established quarter-mile king, the GSX-R1100, makes 141. Yet the CBR is QUICKER. In fact it's the first bike to shoot straight to the top of motorcycle performance ratings for any reason other than brute horsepower. And that reason? A sack of spuds.

Everyone knows power-to-weight is where it's at for acceleration. The more a bike weighs, the more reluctant it is to accelerate, nevermind brake, change direction or lean into a corner. Until now most superbikes have tended to weigh approximately the same: the GSX-R at 4631b, the EXUP at 461. So the fastest accelerating bike was pretty much bound to be the one with the most horsepower and the best-suited gear ratios. (It helps, of course, if you ignore the industry agreed 125bhp limit, too).

The Fireblade changes all that. By scaling in a full 56lbs (or a sack of spuds) less than the GSX-R11, the CBR represents such a massive reduction in the usual class weight that it's nothing short of revolutionary. Not even Suzuki's radical GSX-R750 of 1985 chopped such massive amounts from the class norm. Ally that to a very respectable 124bhp and you've got a power-to-weight ratio at least the equal of Suzuki's 141bhp brute; far, far better than any other roadbike you can mention (even an RC30 with 112bhp at the same weight can't come close) and, in a nutshell, one helluva quick motorcycle.

(A counterpoint: to tune, say, a ZZ-R1100 to the extent where it's power-to-weight figure would match that of the CBR, would require as much power as a 500 GP bike - ie over 150bhp. And it'd still get burnt through the corners.)

So, how have Honda managed it? The crucial thing to remember is that, unlike the GSX-R11 which can be traced back to 1985; unlike the EXUP, which is basically a development of the first Genesis of 1987 and unlike the ZZ-R11 which harks back to the GPZ900 of '83, the CBR is completely and utterly a brand new bike: a brand new bike built with prime aim of being lightweight; a brand new bike Honda has spent four long years developing, honing, perfecting.

So it's not so much a case of where did they cut the weight from, on the CBR, as where they avoided putting it on. Take the engine. As an engine is by far the biggest lump of weight on any bike, it's obvious that unless that engine is uncommonly light it's impossible to remove enough weight elsewhere to end up with an uncommonly light motorcycle. To achieve this, Honda employed extensive computer analysis of every engine component to ascertain exactly the dimensions and strength required of each part and to enable their designers to craft the narrowest, lightest and most compact open class in-line four ever built.

That this was accomplished without recourse to expensive, NR750-style materials and alloys is equally impressive. Instead there's plenty of plastic (eg the gearbox sprocket cover) and intricate engine castings. Result? The 900 engine is only ten per cent heavier than the CBR600 (1471b vs 134), 50mm wider and just 25mm taller — and the 600 engine was already the lightest and most compact in class - but it's an astonishing 331b lighter than the engine of an FZR1000.

Elsewhere, everything has been pared down to a functional minimum. The gear lever isn't adjustable; the battery is a minute 8Ah item and the silencer is aluminium. The twin spar frame, using the engine as a stressed member, is lightweight aluminium. As is the unboltable rear subframe.

Conventional, right-way-up forks are lighter than inverted ones (and cheaper to make), but less stiff. So the CBR's 45mm teles are the largest diameter on record but with thinner tube walls to achieve more strength for less weight. Ditto the rear swing-arm: Honda's patented single-sided Pro-Arm might have been more technically pleasing, but a conventional fork made of extruded box-section aluminium could be made lighter with equal rigidity. Oh, and one final thing, the fairing's got holes in it.

HONDA'S AIM WAS TO PRODUCE the most agile open class motorcycle ever built, or, and I quote, to provide an "incomparable balance of cornering, braking and litre-class straight line performance." Being Honda, of course, they've done it.

How is quite simple. The only real way of getting a big bike to handle as nimbly as a small bike is to make it INTO a small bike. Ever seen a Harris Magnum 4 or a Bimota in the flesh? Small, aren't they? Much smaller than the donor bikes they comprehensively outhandle.

So, the CBR900 is small too: as stumpy as an RC30, as light as a CBR600 and with steering geometry as sharp as the 250 KR-1S. So, really, comparing the Fireblade's handling abilities to a 1000 EXUP or GSX-R1100, just because it has '900' daubed on its flanks (it hasn't, actually) is about as relevent as comparing the nutritional value of hi-fibre bran with hi-tensile steel. In fact it's so much more nimble that even the leader on the Fireblade project, Tadao Baba, insists that you have to compare it not with open bikes but with something like the CBR600. I'd say it handles even better than that.

Source Bike Magazine 1992