No other sportbike so profoundly changed the marketplace the way the 1985 Suzuki GSX-R750 did. Club racing exploded, light weight became the most necessary feature and the GSX-R line became the very soul of Suzuki. Kevin and Mark talk about the introduction of the GSX-R and the evolution of the lineup across 750, 600, and 1000cc machines—and Hoyer says he still wants a GSX-R800. A what? Join us to take a ride on one of the most impactful sportbikes ever made.
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Listen on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6CLI74xvMBFLDOC1tQaCOQ
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
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SportsTranscript
00:00 Hey everyone, welcome to the SAG World Podcast.
00:04 I'm here with Kevin Cameron, I'm Mark Hoyer.
00:07 We're going to talk about the Suzuki GSX-R, the, I don't know, ultimate super sport legacy.
00:15 Is it the soul of Suzuki?
00:17 In a lot of ways, I think it became the soul of Suzuki on its launch.
00:21 Maybe not.
00:22 Well, it certainly did.
00:23 Yes, absolutely.
00:24 Because we- 1985, yeah, go ahead.
00:27 Yes, we think of Suzuki and we think of GSX-R.
00:31 Yeah.
00:32 And that's just how it is.
00:34 If their marketing people are pleased with that, that's off.
00:38 Well, I mean, what a profound- That's how it is.
00:40 Yeah, but what a profound impact that motorcycle made.
00:43 You know, '85, '86, I was in peak, you know, madness for motorcycles kid, reading all the
00:50 magazines and, you know, cover the cycle world.
00:53 There's GSX-R and FC 750 Yamaha.
00:57 And it was a little bit, you know, we were playing with imagery at the time.
01:03 So it was an '85 issue and we had the GSX-R 750 and the FC 750 and these were like the
01:09 new super sports.
01:11 We didn't have them in, there wasn't a comparison.
01:14 It sort of implied that it might be by the images on the cover.
01:16 Sorry.
01:17 Yes.
01:18 You know, it's just how it is.
01:19 It's a new stand.
01:20 You got to sell something.
01:21 You got to sell something.
01:22 And the GSX-R, I mean, it was so serious that it had a sponge holding the gauges up.
01:28 It was so serious about lightweight and it was so serious about performance.
01:32 It had the low handlebars.
01:34 It had the aluminum frame, aero oil cooled motor, zillions of close pitch fins that were
01:42 just beautiful.
01:43 But it really, it just said, no, lightweight is everything.
01:49 If you don't do something about it, everybody else, you're behind.
01:54 And of course, we know from reading about military aircraft that weight growth, the
02:01 pressure for weight growth is constant.
02:02 Oh, we've got to have this on there.
02:04 Oh, look, this new system.
02:06 We've been working on this 12 years.
02:08 Where does it go?
02:11 And before long, you have this ponderous hippopotamus and you have to have a revolution.
02:16 And that's what we've seen in the sport bike world is that there are periodic resets.
02:22 But I think this product was really carefully planned because there's Etsuo Yokouchi, who
02:31 designed the X6.
02:34 Anyone old enough to remember those alphanumerics?
02:38 The Hustler.
02:40 Yes.
02:41 And then, and the RG500 race bike, which Barry Sheen took to two world championships.
02:50 Anyway, Yokouchi said, after they had done the big heavy GS models, we're going to build
03:00 a bike that's 20% lighter, that makes 100 horsepower and has a top speed of 146 miles
03:06 per hour.
03:08 And, basically, what he was saying was, we've learned a lot in racing and we're going to
03:16 use that to sell product.
03:20 And how?
03:21 And how they did sell it.
03:23 Yes.
03:24 Well, I mean, at that time, I was just a punk who'd go and hang around the Suzuki dealership.
03:29 And there was a sales guy there who was very tolerant of me, knowing that I couldn't buy
03:34 a bike.
03:35 I didn't have a license.
03:37 But I would go in and I'd just talk motorcycles.
03:39 It was where you could go.
03:41 And on the same showroom floor, that is as a GSX-R750, first year, was a leftover GS1150ES,
03:53 which was their great big tube frame, big bore steel tube frame.
03:59 It had that bull door, super giant fairing with the giant round headlight.
04:03 I mean, it was beautiful.
04:04 They had a red one and a blue one.
04:06 They were beautiful.
04:07 But you sort of would like the GS1150ES.
04:13 But how could you ever choose that motorcycle when all the seriousness in the world was
04:18 right there?
04:20 Everything that you'd ever seen on a racetrack and you're just like, I don't know how many
04:24 people were just absolutely desperate to have it.
04:27 And then how many people actually got it?
04:29 And what a revolution in club racing.
04:33 Absolutely.
04:34 Because all those people who were stopped from going racing by the steady, you might
04:42 call it civilizing of the motorcycle buying public.
04:46 It used to be that you could get everything you wanted from Triumph to build a lovely
04:51 500 AMA race bike.
04:56 And you had to know how to do it.
04:59 And that stopped a lot of people.
05:01 But GSX-R was part of the second phase of super bikes.
05:07 The first phase were the big, heavy air-cooled sit-ups with tube frames.
05:13 And the Japanese realized that they weren't raceable.
05:19 You had to do a lot of things to the engine.
05:21 You had to do a lot of things to the chassis.
05:23 And that wasn't going anywhere with the general public.
05:28 Everything's raceable, Kevin.
05:29 Come on.
05:31 Everything is raceable, particularly, I mean, ridiculous extremes like stock footpeg RD350
05:38 racing, you know, with your hands up here.
05:42 Yeah, well, they hit them with the hammers.
05:44 They just, yep, it's a stock footpeg, but they smash them up to get them out of the
05:49 way.
05:50 So they realized that there was a place in the world for a motorcycle with that kind
05:57 of performance, but which you could just buy.
06:00 You didn't have to work it over.
06:02 You didn't have to have the Tri-Core Speed Parts Catalog and have a favorite machinist
06:08 and a second machinist in your Rolodex.
06:11 You could just ride this thing.
06:13 That was the marvelous thing about the GSX-R. It was ready to go properly.
06:19 Now what was done then, they started in to make an air-cooled, 100 horsepower, under
06:28 400 pound motorcycle, and they got, as it says, to 97 horsepower.
06:34 But one of the engineers, Chiaki Hirata, said, "We made the power, but the spark plugs were
06:43 full of aluminum."
06:44 And I've seen that.
06:46 It is so ugly.
06:48 You unscrew the spark plug and there's this gray squash on the end of it.
06:53 And it's like your heart sinks and you know you're going to be in the shop forever fixing
07:00 this thing.
07:02 So then they realized, "What are we going to do?
07:08 We're going to water-cool this thing?
07:11 We want to hit this price."
07:13 So there was another engineer, Masahisa Kamiya, who had some familiarity with wartime air-cooled
07:21 aircraft engines, and he knew that 30% of their cooling came from internal oil circulation.
07:31 And that included up in the rocker boxes to cool the valves.
07:35 They were using that oil for all it was worth, and they used a lot of it.
07:40 So what they did was they made this plan to get to the 100 horsepower level with air-oil
07:48 cooling.
07:49 The engine was covered with fins, as you remarked, and the inside just had all this
07:53 oil being pumped in all directions.
07:56 Squirts that were going down onto the hot tops of the combustion chambers.
08:02 And of course, that used to be why the Jalera 4s had their cylinders pointed forward, so
08:07 the air could come between the cam boxes, down into those fins, and then up and over.
08:12 Well, that's why they spread the cams out as well, right?
08:15 Yes, sir.
08:16 Yes, sir.
08:17 You get that opening.
08:18 So these people were bringing in a lot of ideas.
08:22 They were open to change, and they broke the back of the weight growth that had affected
08:32 high-powered motorcycles.
08:35 And for example, the other spear point of the second phase superbikes was Honda's 750
08:44 Interceptor.
08:46 But there was mighty Todd Schuster stepping into the bare frame and pulling it up around
08:53 him as if it were a pair of pants.
08:55 And he said, "In all the history of racing, there is only one frame heavier than this,
09:02 the 1953 Hudson."
09:03 A lot of people don't know that Hudson was big in NASCAR racing with a 300 cubic inch
09:11 flathead, but that's an aside.
09:13 Anyway, these are the roots of the GSX-R. Another mighty root of the GSX-R was the demonstrated
09:22 fact that racing sold motorcycles, because in '79 and '80, Wes Cooley, the late lamented
09:33 Wes Cooley Jr., won superbike championships on an air-cooled.
09:40 And that didn't do them any harm.
09:45 Went on Sunday.
09:46 So I don't know that they had any idea how successful this would be, that one day there
09:55 would be levels of GSX-R, something for everyone.
10:00 I think one of the--
10:01 But that's where it went.
10:03 Yeah.
10:04 And possibly, probably an unintended positive consequence was the proliferation in club
10:12 racing and so many clever people racing the same bike.
10:19 Absolutely.
10:20 It was massive, supportive R&D that would feed back and improve the motorcycle at the
10:27 factory level, because everyone was working on it.
10:30 It's called hot rodding.
10:32 And the results, winning the race, the results are plain.
10:38 We ought to look at that thing that you did to your GSX-R.
10:40 Yes.
10:41 I think I never raced an early GSX-R. I've ridden virtually every GSX-R since about 1995,
10:53 '94.
10:55 And one thing that struck me along that line from then to now is the broad target that
11:03 that bike can hit in terms of setup.
11:05 So you could have riders of many different styles with wanting many different feelings,
11:13 and the bike was sort of malleable.
11:17 You could get there from that point.
11:18 You could get there.
11:19 And other motorcycles have had a very razor edge kind of setup.
11:25 It works or it doesn't work at all.
11:28 And you could really, it seemed like the GSX-R was such a great tool.
11:32 And then you have all that support around it where you can call the guy and get like,
11:36 "Oh, this is, no, this shock really works."
11:38 And that might not give you the edge to win by doing something else the other people aren't
11:45 doing, but you had a damn good race bike and you could go out and you could rely on your
11:51 skills to get a long way on a bike that was broadly capable and easy to set up.
11:57 Yeah.
11:58 Yeah.
11:59 Well, and since that first model, now Suzuki did have a sort of dead in the water period
12:06 after they went to water cooling.
12:09 And I'm not sure how that came about, but those bikes, the early water cooled bikes
12:15 had all their power up high and it took them a while to get the idea rather like BMW with
12:23 the S1000RR super bike that the thing has to accelerate in order to reach top speed.
12:32 Top speed is great once you're there, but you have to get there off every corner.
12:38 And so they had a dark period, but without fail, every year that there were changes,
12:48 the changes were to maintain the focus, keeping the wheelbase under control.
12:57 They finally went to the vertically stacked gearbox shafts so that they could lengthen
13:02 the swing arm.
13:03 They constantly played with the steering head angle and rake as tires changed.
13:10 They never let it gradually mush out into a sofa, which is a tendency in this game.
13:18 Yeah.
13:19 Oh, well, we could sell more if we had a broader appeal.
13:22 Yeah.
13:23 Let's paint it beige like those millions of computers.
13:28 Fantastic.
13:29 So another thing that happened that came to my attention was in 1988, they shortened
13:39 the stroke four millimeters.
13:41 Now this is a natural thing if you're building a power sports vehicle into a constantly changing
13:50 and all market with a permanent appetite for power, you've got to come up with it.
13:57 And so you want to put bigger valves in so you can make, you can flow the air you need
14:02 at a higher speed.
14:04 And they did that.
14:05 And son of a gun, that 44.7 millimeter stroke engine just couldn't get out of its own way
14:13 off the bottom.
14:16 And they, it took them, they struggled with that.
14:19 And finally they went back to the longer stroke.
14:21 Now the thing that happens here is that as you make the bore bigger and the stroke shorter,
14:27 what you're, you're compressing the fuel air mixture from, it starts out as more like a
14:33 hockey puck and it ends up like a 45 RPM record.
14:38 It's really thin and wide.
14:41 And it's not a trivial thing to get the flame to travel in all parts of that and light it
14:48 up quickly.
14:49 Instead, it kind of crackles and, and makes a hissing noise.
14:55 Like the log fire and wanders across the chamber, wanders across the chamber, losing heat at
15:01 every millimeter.
15:03 So it took them a while to get past that, but they did get past it.
15:07 This, the team that has produced the GSXRs has never ceased to try to get there.
15:17 They're motivated.
15:18 And I've, I've always appreciated that so much.
15:22 And other companies put a lot of money into trying to win world superbike.
15:29 Suzuki has, has won the class on occasion.
15:34 Ducati almost always wins it because it's their lifeblood.
15:40 But as you, as you mentioned, when we were talking about this podcast, the huge number
15:48 of GSXRs going to club races, collecting Suzuki contingency, buying parts, they claim that,
15:56 that the contingency program was more than paid for by the parts sales.
16:02 And I remember one morning walking around a corner in the old Daytona, came to the end
16:07 of a garage and there was, there was a Reverend Kevin Renssel sitting on the, in the back
16:15 of his van with the doors open.
16:17 He had a rack of carburetors in his lap and he had a cup of coffee.
16:23 And I thought, this is great.
16:25 This is the life right here.
16:27 And he looked up and he said, doesn't get any better than this.
16:34 And that's, that's the GSXR story really, because it brought high level motorcycling
16:43 to so many people.
16:45 It was a democratizing fleet of bicycles.
16:49 It was grand.
16:50 Yeah.
16:51 And it is to this day.
16:53 Yeah.
16:54 The 750 was such a, you know, we saw, we saw sport bikes have basically for a long time,
17:01 it was 600s and 750s and then V twins, you know, of a thousand CC for, for racing.
17:10 And a 754s having tested zillions of bikes over the years, 754 has always struck me as,
17:19 as very close to like the perfect motorcycle for, for sporting intent.
17:24 You add that agility that you get from the, you know, lower rotating masses in the engine
17:29 and all that stuff from a 600.
17:31 Yep.
17:32 And you get that kind of steering feel and agility, but just that little.
17:37 Right on the front wheel because the engine is, is a pancake.
17:41 Yep.
17:42 And then a little, a little extra kick in torque.
17:44 And I'd always deeply wished as the middleweight class started to grow that Suzuki would do
17:52 an 800.
17:53 I thought, man, that would be a, that would just be an ideal balance, fast sport bike.
18:00 But the 750, I mean, remarkable motorcycle.
18:04 I think of, of everything I have tested, the 2000 GSXR 750 stands out as, I don't know,
18:13 a shining moment, a hair raising, incredible, affordable, repairable, raceable, rideable
18:22 sport bike.
18:23 It made 125, 127 at the rear wheel on our dyno.
18:30 It got more than, yeah, it got more than.
18:33 If you were just kind of rattling around, you were getting like 44 miles per gallon
18:37 out of it.
18:39 And it weighed 399 pounds from the factory.
18:45 We drained the gas out, rolled it up on a scale and it weighed under 400 pounds.
18:50 And then the chassis set up and the geometry, everyone who rode that bike was just blown
18:55 away.
18:56 We took it, Paul Dean rode it to Laguna Seca up coast highway.
19:03 He roached the tires in one trip, just hammering it.
19:06 And he came back and was just like, he'd never stopped talking about what it was like to
19:11 ride that bike on the road up that highway.
19:15 We did a three by three, a group of three by three comparison tests out at Pahrump,
19:22 Spring Mountain Motorsports Park in the early days of it being open.
19:25 It was basically like a, they call them permanent tents and I'm not sure they're permanent,
19:30 but they are tents.
19:32 And it just had a tent and a pretty cool racetrack.
19:36 And we took, you know, it was RC 51, that kind of era, RC 51.
19:40 And it wasn't the Suzuki, it was the Aprilia and it was a Ducati.
19:45 - Just after the turn of the century, yeah.
19:48 - Yeah.
19:49 Miele was a twin.
19:50 We took the twins, 1000cc twins, 1000cc four cylinders, like CBR 929s or whatever, and
19:56 then 600s.
19:57 And then we're like, eh, why don't we take the 750?
20:01 So we had 10 bikes riding out to the racetrack.
20:04 And as ever, we're doing a big street ride and we ride them on the street out there.
20:08 And when you're going up the 15, you kind of hook it north at the Mad Greek.
20:12 We all stopped for dinner because it was time to eat.
20:14 We all, you know, we all ate Greek food and then it was dark and we just wanted to get
20:18 to Pahrump and pack a Mad Bikes.
20:20 We just hit the gas and I was at the front with another guy, headlights, high beams,
20:27 side by side to get more light going.
20:29 But we were doing 100 plus most of the way, 120.
20:34 And we just rode up there.
20:36 We did our track testing.
20:37 At the end of all that track testing, here's the GSX-R and we're just like that, you know,
20:42 all these things, they were great bikes.
20:45 The variety is so wonderful and 600s and Tora from V-Twins, you know, it's just all of that
20:51 variety, but everyone just sort of turned and looked at that bike parked by itself.
20:55 And it's like, yeah, it stands, it does stand alone because it hits this beautiful target.
21:00 And the funny part about that speeding through the night, through the desert was that we
21:07 did our track testing and then we kind of motored back during the day, you know, the
21:10 next after we did our track testing.
21:13 And it was like a, it was like a police camp out.
21:16 They were doing an endurance run.
21:18 There were a hundred motor homes filled with cops sleeping on the highway at 10 o'clock
21:25 at night.
21:26 We had no idea.
21:27 The only reality was like our puddle of light ahead of us.
21:29 We had no idea, but I'm sure we woke up a lot of sheriffs who were angry and we're sorry.
21:34 Yes, we're sorry.
21:36 Yes, we're sorry.
21:39 But you know, at the same time that that GSX-R 750 was making that rear wheel horsepower
21:44 and with that kind of fuel economy, um, I had an MV Agusta F4, uh, 750, uh, Brutale.
21:54 So the 750 naked bike and that 750 made, it was, you know, it was a sit up bike, so it
22:00 wasn't being super sporty, but it made, you know, 113 horse.
22:04 I want to, I want to say 110 horsepower, but I could not get it to make fuel mileage.
22:09 I called a Rago Ferrachi cause they were the importers at the time.
22:12 And I was like, sure, I'm like a Rago, where, where is it going?
22:15 And he's like, ah, I don't know.
22:18 Like he talked about the pri, they changed the primary ratio to try to limit the top
22:22 speed and it really, it made the deceleration very hard.
22:26 And there were things, there were just some issues.
22:29 They just didn't want the bike to go that fast.
22:31 But I mean, I tried to tune it.
22:32 I tried all these things to get the mileage out of it.
22:35 And here was this GSX-R, you know, making 15 more horsepower, easily 15 more horsepower
22:41 and making nearly double the fuel mileage out of the MV.
22:44 I would, I was lucky to get 24 out of the MV.
22:47 And it's just, man, it's just, and it's gone on and now you can race the thing in super
22:52 sport and you can still race that bike.
22:55 There's a home for it.
22:59 Remarkable impact.
23:00 Racing had quite an influence on those motorcycles because of course, 600s became big sellers
23:09 and everybody wanted to have the lion's share of that class.
23:13 And so the 600 races, they hired the best riders that they could and went at it.
23:19 It was factory racing.
23:21 And Miguel de Hamel is well known for his 600 accomplishments, but Suzuki soon had their
23:31 600 with a little short stroke spinning up to 16.5 and in the thick of it.
23:39 And in the early days, people were saying, "Oh, well, the 600 is really a street bike,
23:46 but the 750 has become a race bike."
23:48 Well, it didn't wait.
23:49 It wasn't long before the 600 had joined the 750 in that less, you know, unchained my heart
23:58 aspect.
24:01 But it's what we wanted.
24:02 I mean, when I say we, as the collective buying public, the people out there getting motorcycles,
24:08 you want to know why 600s got so awesome and why they invested so much and why they put
24:14 all that technology into a beginner bike, a little bike.
24:20 It's because at the heyday of sport bike sales, 20,000 GSXR 600s a year, more than 20,000.
24:28 All the manufacturers were selling massive numbers of those bikes.
24:33 And then, I mean, the leader class came around and buyers certainly migrated to the leader
24:40 class.
24:41 And the GSXR 1000, I mean, what an impact that bike made.
24:45 And I think back to the last sort of naked, not digital gorilla super bike, GSXR 1000
24:53 K5, the 2005 GSXR long stroke, I think it's 70 plus millimeters.
25:00 Freaking spectacular motor.
25:02 And when you talked about having the short stroke 750 and they're struggling and whatever,
25:07 I wonder if the guy working on the 1000s, like, "We're not going to have no torque here,
25:11 buddy," and making a chamber that they could really, that they could light off, you know?
25:16 Sure.
25:17 And we've all seen that Kawasaki stuck with that 55 millimeter stroke on their ZX10R,
25:24 whatever it is, in world super bike.
25:27 And it kept winning championships until I think officialdom decided, "Well, we're going
25:35 to issue these guys a lower and lower rev limit until they stand down."
25:44 But when it comes to standing up or standing down, I was very impressed by the influence
25:50 of two men on Suzuki when they had their time in the wilderness.
25:56 And I remember that they would hire the young hotshot and the rider would have a microphone
26:02 shoved in his face after first practice.
26:04 And he would say, "Oh, well, this bike's got a lot of potential.
26:10 Yeah, that's it."
26:13 And I'm like, "I can't make a lap time on it, but it's a GSXR, so I know that must be
26:20 me."
26:21 And so the two men were Matt Maladon and Amar Bazaaz.
26:27 And Amar Bazaaz was originally in atmospheric studies at UMass, and he answered an ad that
26:39 said that Yosh wanted a computer guy.
26:45 And he thought, "Why not?"
26:47 He applied, they gave him the job.
26:50 And he said the first couple of weeks that he was there in the shop, he said, "I saw
26:56 that they had these sets of rear suspension linkage and none of them was complete.
27:03 You couldn't put a bike together because these parts are all squirreled away.
27:06 So I made it my business to find them all, put them back in the places and start figuring
27:11 out how to use them."
27:13 And Maladon's attitude was, "Well, if I'm not quick enough, I'm going to do more pushups,
27:19 more and more pushups."
27:21 And Amar showed him that by making little changes in setup, that he wouldn't have to
27:28 finish the race second and just completely knackered.
27:34 He could go to the party afterwards.
27:36 And when they began to win races, Suzuki took notice.
27:41 "Oh, if we sent these guys some better parts, they might even be able to make them win races."
27:49 And so there was this fabulous era when those two men so dominated AMA Superbike that schemes
27:58 were put in hand.
27:59 "Who will rid me of this disagreeable priest?"
28:05 And it was self-healing actually, because along came Ben Spees.
28:13 But it was a long era of GSXR domination because Maladon could ride and Amar could give him
28:23 something that he could really go well on.
28:26 Well, what a team.
28:28 I mean, really one of the legendary teams in American racing.
28:33 And Matt had opportunities for Grand Prix and World Superbike.
28:40 He even hopped on a Kojima for a while.
28:45 But once he got into a groove in America, he was making good money and he knew where
28:52 all the tracks were and they were only three time zones apart.
28:56 There was no Malaysia, there was no Middle East, there was nothing, not getting kicked
29:00 around the globe.
29:01 And he's like, "No, this is pretty good.
29:03 It's competitive series.
29:04 I got a great team."
29:07 He just kept on doing it, championship after championship.
29:11 And there was a time during which the other teams were sort of taking it easy.
29:19 It was like Honda decided, "Well, we're not going to do HRC bikes anymore.
29:25 We can just put a piece of abrasive paper over one finger and kind of rub it in the
29:29 port and that ought to be pretty good."
29:32 And it wasn't.
29:33 And Yamaha put a tremendous amount of effort into winning Daytona because their marketing
29:38 people knew what a motivator that was.
29:42 But then they'd look in the accounts and there wasn't a lot there to support R&D for the
29:48 rest of the season.
29:50 And so that left the field to Suzuki pretty thoroughly.
29:57 And they went on like that and I think there were people that were bored by it or they
30:01 thought it was unfair or something, but it was just that Suzuki had a professional racing
30:07 team that was supported by normal factory R&D.
30:15 And the others were sort of soft pedaling that because I guess they had budgetary problems
30:20 or something.
30:23 And so that was a grand era for Maladin, Amar, and the GSX-R.
30:33 Yeah.
30:34 And of course, yes?
30:39 Well, I think it remains, those bikes remain the flexible tools that they've always been.
30:50 And it's so interesting to see the evolution of the market now with GSX-8Ss, which there's
30:55 one right there.
30:56 That's an 8R, excuse me.
31:00 Race three bike, they're racing them successfully and they're fun and they're great.
31:06 It's just a different proposition from a focused inline four and different than, and it's not
31:13 called the GSX-R8.
31:14 It's a GSX-S8R.
31:15 And that's a very important distinction for Suzuki.
31:22 We've talked about the reasons for doing these twins and they're absolutely cogent reasons.
31:29 On the one hand, a large number of Americans learn to ride those inline high revving inline
31:37 fours with a lot of power up high and going fast on something like that requires a close
31:47 marriage of your foot with the gearbox.
31:50 And it's an acquired skill and people who have it are justly proud of it.
31:58 But it may be actually easier for a rider of today to go quickly around a racetrack
32:09 or any familiar piece of road on the twin because it is being given that wonderful Mesa
32:20 torque line.
32:21 It's just a flat table.
32:24 And there's a good reason for that because emissions have required them to shorten the
32:31 overlap period so that the intake and exhaust valves aren't open together so that the intake
32:36 can whisper to the exhaust and it goes out to Ann Arbor where the EPA goes, "I smell
32:43 something."
32:44 Thank you.
32:46 So when you shorten up the intake like that, the overlap like that, how do you get the
32:51 power back?
32:52 You increase the valve lift and the overall timing is shorter.
32:57 So now you've got a lot of valve acceleration.
33:00 But because everyone's been playing the racing game, they know how to control valves at those
33:06 high accelerations.
33:08 So those twins benefit that way and they deliver a very rideable torque curve to the rider.
33:15 They are great.
33:17 They're great street motors.
33:18 They really are.
33:19 And I mean, they're fun at the track too.
33:22 It's just a different proposition.
33:24 And the other thing that's important is if you measure the distance around each piston
33:30 and multiply it by the number of pistons, that is the seal length, the length to be
33:37 sealed by piston rings.
33:39 On a twin, it's much shorter than on a four of the same displacement.
33:45 And that length is where a lot of unburned hard decarbons come from because as the piston
33:51 comes up on compression, some of that mixture is shoved into the piston ring crevice space.
33:59 And then when the spark lights it off and the pressure rises rapidly, it pushes even
34:05 more in because of course the cylinder wall is the farthest from the spark plug.
34:10 So this is a way to make a high performance motorcycle that is rideable by so many people
34:20 that meets Euro, pick one.
34:24 Yep.
34:25 Five plus X.
34:27 And they're keeping the bores moderate as well.
34:30 Yes, they are.
34:31 Not only is there fewer cylinders, but you're not going with 116 millimeter bore.
34:38 Just a little 60, what?
34:42 63 or 66 millimeter stroke.
34:45 Yeah.
34:46 Short guy.
34:48 So it's been a great ride with the GSXRs because they accomplished all these tremendous
34:57 things and they made a lot of Americans into really good motorcyclists, I think, because
35:07 they had something on which they could learn that didn't cost an arm and a leg.
35:15 The old rule in club racing used to be, don't race anything you can't afford to crash.
35:22 And of course, if you're a track day guy and you bring all your carbon fiber and titanium
35:28 up there and then throw the thing away, it's easy to be out 10 grand.
35:34 Well being in this position of testing a lot of exotic motorcycles for a very long time,
35:41 the stress that you feel getting on a titanium framed NCR Ducati, like a Milona, which is
35:47 their kind of race bike.
35:49 It's a beautiful, it was a 944, I think, high revving titanium.
35:54 I mean, it was Poggi Polini in NCR, like making everything possible out of titanium.
36:00 Poggi Polini, yes.
36:01 Oh God, it was great.
36:03 But you go out on a bike like that, I'm like, I think we're doing 86%, 90.
36:08 Okay, we'll go a little faster, but for a very short period of time, let's see what
36:13 happens.
36:14 Let's see how it goes.
36:15 Let's get some information from as fast as we can go.
36:18 But you get out on a GSXR, you're like, ah, they'll make more of them.
36:23 You're going with it.
36:24 I remember one story that stands out, one experience that stands out was 2004, they
36:30 were refreshing the 750 and the 600.
36:35 And I did a story called the last samurai and we went to Ryuyo in Japan, the legendary
36:42 Suzuki test track.
36:43 Kevin Schwantz was there and he drove us around bolstering our confidence in someone who had
36:48 crashed here and high sided and then drowned in the lake because there was like a water
36:52 feature.
36:53 Watch out for the crosswind, the back straight, you were in sixth gear.
36:57 It seemed like for seven minutes, you'd come off this first, second gear corner, pretty
37:02 tight, right?
37:03 And then you were just upshifting and you'd got into sixth and it just, you were there
37:07 forever until you, you know, break for the next corner.
37:10 That's a sea breeze there.
37:11 Yeah.
37:12 And while there was a, there was a gap and I'm a, you know, I'm a bigger guy and I was
37:17 like probably 210 at the time and I'm against all these little road race dudes and we're,
37:22 I'm drafting them up the front straight because you could, it was long enough.
37:26 You could really get a good draft going and you're closing in and then you'd hit that
37:30 opening and the wind would push the little guy to the side and then I'd hit it.
37:35 I wouldn't move quite as much and I'd lose my, I'd lose my draft.
37:39 But um, remarkable track and you know, riding the bike on that track, having the confidence
37:47 like you get on a, if you've ridden a lot of the bikes you get on a GSXR and you're
37:51 like, Oh yeah, yeah, this makes perfect sense to me.
37:54 And a terrifying track really, uh, for going fast anyway.
37:57 I mean a race pace, uh, you'd go up the front straight where they had the tent set up and
38:01 all the engineers, uh, Mr. EO, who was the project leader on the seven 50 and I asked
38:07 him what his first job at Suzuki was and he says, Oh, I designed brake levers, just brake
38:11 levers.
38:12 Just brake levers.
38:13 I was pretty cool that that guy had, you know, had gone through the ranks like that and is
38:17 now leading the GSXR 750.
38:20 So you go out by the tents on the front straight and there was like a little chicane that was,
38:25 uh, you know, left, right, as I recall.
38:28 And uh, you'd be in fifth gear and as soon as you dip it for the chicane, it would hit
38:33 the rev limiter cause you're reducing the diameter.
38:37 So you go and you get in and you click into fourth and you throw it into this right hander
38:43 and there was like a corner of a factory.
38:45 So there's like guardrail it seemed like.
38:48 And then the corner of the building like stuck out and they had some like old wrestling mats
38:52 like taped up on it.
38:54 It was just, it would be the end if you lost the front there, you know, you just had to
38:57 really have confidence to, to turn it in.
39:00 And uh, but the familiarity that they were reliable, the chassis was reliable.
39:07 You've got on it and you knew what you were dealing with.
39:10 And this was the era then because this is when things are really changing.
39:15 And they, we were thinking like maybe they're not going to make a 750 cause they had the
39:19 600 and a thousand and they're like, where does the 750 belong?
39:22 And I asked, you know, I asked all those guys, I said, well, you know, you're making a GSXR
39:27 750, you know, there's no race for it.
39:30 Yeah.
39:31 What's it for?
39:32 And they said, well, I said, you know, I thought sales would go down and he said, well, we
39:35 did predict that sales would go down and they did, but not nearly as much as we thought.
39:41 So there was a real, there was still a real market for the bike.
39:44 So they kept making it.
39:45 And in the earlier days it was like, oh, let's build the 750.
39:49 We need a 600 and, you know, saving costs and R and D, they would do a lot of that work.
39:54 And then they'd put the 600 motor essentially in sort of a 750 ish chassis.
39:58 And it was all very similar, some shared components and everything.
40:02 And then the development leader really became the 600 because that's what was, you know,
40:07 driving behind it.
40:08 Yeah.
40:09 And they, you know, they wanted the compactness and the lightness.
40:13 And so they, you know, built the 750 out of the 600 basically, to put it bluntly.
40:20 Yeah.
40:21 When I went to Rio, there were all those wind turbines, which always looked slightly menacing,
40:29 this moving so slowly.
40:32 What do they want?
40:34 They seem like strange beings, but those, I don't know where the motorcycle's going.
40:46 For a while, I was, I was fearful that the EPA would just say, oh, well, look at these
40:53 statistics.
40:54 You know, we're not going to allow anything like this.
40:57 But I think that with recent surprises, political surprises, they've got more respect for the
41:09 desires of ordinary folks.
41:13 There are people in Iowa who ride motorcycles.
41:18 And so I think the twins are progressive in the sense that they are a good performing
41:29 motorcycle that has a nice stiff chassis.
41:32 So they don't have a lot of steering delay.
41:34 You don't feel like I made a motion and now I'm going to check my watch and oh, now I'm
41:40 starting to steer.
41:42 So I think that the late model twins are some of the finest motorcycles that have ever been
41:49 built.
41:50 But we have nostalgia for Kevin Renzel in that back of his van with those carburetors
42:00 on his knees.
42:01 Those guys were GSXR gypsies.
42:05 They made their living by going from one club race to another and collecting Suzuki contingency.
42:12 It was a life.
42:13 No, amazing.
42:14 What an impact.
42:15 Yeah.
42:16 So, yeah, GSXR 750 and everything that grew out of it, very much feeling like the soul
42:23 of Suzuki.
42:24 Yes.
42:25 And, you know, we'll ask Suzuki to think about making a highly exotic upmarket version, low
42:34 production volume, handmade.
42:37 Yes.
42:39 Go ahead and make it a thousand.
42:40 I want that 800.
42:41 I do want a perfect inline four cylinder balanced 800 tons of power.
42:47 I know the market wouldn't want that as much as a thousand.
42:50 So you have my permission to make it a thousand.
42:53 But I would love to see Suzuki do basically, you know, there was the GSXR 750 and then
42:59 there was the limited and the limited had, you know, enhanced brakes and some other components.
43:05 And wouldn't it be cool to make a GSXR 1000 limited?
43:09 And evocation of the past.
43:12 Yeah.
43:13 And then, you know, get the race kit, get the compression knockup, get the accessory
43:20 race exhaust from the, you know, from the factory, from the dealer.
43:25 Man, get working on it team.
43:29 All right.
43:30 Well, that's it for today, folks.
43:34 The legendary GSXR model line 750, particularly standing out in my memory of testing everything.
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