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Wednesday, 08 September 2004 |
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The motor also has some inherent bomb proofing thoughout, with double overhead cams machined from chromoly steel billet and forged lightweight pistons to aid reliability and further enhance the bike's power-to-weight ratio.
A nice looking 6R/RR style ram air duct is centrally located at the front of the fairing, pressurizing the airbox at speed. An up-to-the-moment digital fuel injection assembly features electronically controlled sub throttles to smooth power delivery. All this rammed, flowed, mixed and ignited fuel exits through an ultra-lightweight (not just lightweight) titanium four-into-one exhaust system that incorporates an exhaust valve at the collector to improve the power curve. That oval muffler is a titanium core, but wrapped with a sheet of ultra-thin walled aluminum with a non-restrictive honeycomb cat' to keep Mr. EPA happy.
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The bike is liquid cooled, of course, however in addition to that "LC," the 10R also features a liquid-cooled oil cooler adjacent to the oil filter to reduce oil temperatures. The motor also has a very deep sump to reduce windage losses from the crank "swimming" in that oil, which further helps maintain low oil temperatures. Again, like the smaller sixes, the big ten has a wet clutch with a back torque limiter transferring power to the close-ratio gearbox optimized for track-day sorties.
That slipper clutch automatically disengages the clutch under hard braking and deceleration to prevent rear-wheel-hop during initial corner entry. Being a supermoto slacker this helps with premature downshifts, without that nasty chatter, oft experienced when you're a ham-fisted hooligan, like wot I am. Oh, and it's adjustable too. |
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Up front sees the usual upside down fully adjustable 43mm fork with some improvements. The internals are manufactured from aluminum, again for a lighter-is-better gain. The rear end features a natty looking gull-arm style swingarm connected to Kawasaki's very own UNI-TRAK® linkage. There's also a fully adjustable shock with adjustable ride height thrown in to really mess you up.
The wheels and brakes all look to be in the right places, the wheels being six-spoke (instead of three), cast-ally - for more feathery weight savings - yet stronger still. The brakes consist of dual 300mm front rotors that feature a fashionably funky wave style design. Those rotors are gripped by radially mounted four-piston calipers. The brakes are a first class example of race-ware filtering down to us lesser mortals. This setup makes the caliper more rigid for an improved brake feel; I loved those brakes on the sixes, so there shouldn't be any complaints from moi.
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| This bike, says Tome Orbe, Kawasaki's VP of marketing, is a sportbike worthy of Kawasaki's image. The bike incidentally also helps celebrate Kawi's 20th Anniversary of their first modern style superbike - Top Gun and Tom Cruise's very own GPZ900R. The Kawasaki engineers have finally come to the 21st century dinner table with a claimed 184BHP with ram air, how much of that figure is hot air, rammed or not? Let's go find oot... |
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