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2005 Honda CBR600RR

Monday, 29 August 2005

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Substance abuse by Mike Emery ~ Photos by Dr. Kevin Wing MD

Some of my best nights out usually involve me waking up the next day with absolutely no recollection of the night before. The hazy recollection of the event is usually pieced together from various third parties telling me that I looked like I was having fun and filling me in with the relevant (and sometimes, irreverent) details of my drunken debauchery. If that statement holds true then the new 2005 Honda CBR600RR is the best middleweight I’ve ever tested... bar none.

I know so, 'cause Honda says so, (apparently they were there?) and I again learnt this on the subsequent street ride with them a few weeks later. I suppose this needs some explanation, so here goes...

After high-siding my brains out at LVMS on the Triumph 650 launch, I held myself together for the Honda intro (two days later) with the aid of some leftover drugs that I had “stashed” in Chester the race van (don’t try this at home, folks). This unfortunately left me in a somewhat hazy frame of mind, especially after sitting in the hotel Jacuzzi for three hours prior to the event and then accosting my feet with an industrial size ice bag until they were small enough to fit back into my boots. I had envisaged Al Ludington lifting my broken body onto the CBR (ala’ Miggy), me busting out a few fast laps, lifting the Press GP trophy and heading home happy. Unfortunately this wasn’t the case; Al didn’t show up, but I did manage to circulate the track with just a medium-to-light breeze blowing up my skirt.

The original CBR-RR was developed to win races, obviously this design sat well with Monsieur Duhamel, with a Formula Xtreme championship to further prove the point. This is Honda’s “bread and butter” street model too and the latest rendition addresses a couple of points raised by racer and street guy alike and a likely response to the other competitors within the class. What we all wanted to see was better suspension (read inverted-forks), less weight and the now class standard, radial brakes. So what we have here is a better suspended, lighter and quicker braking 2005 model. Nothing unexpected, shocking or radical, just the Honda style of refinement in-between model years, as per request.

Like the Yamaha R6 revisions, change forces change, what looks like the same frame is actually a completely new part that was cast with thinner walls but re-engineered to retain the previous rendition’s excellent rigidity. The frame alone makes up for 3.6lbs of an overall reduction of 9lbs, that’s a significant figure my diet happy two wheel freaks. Further weight savings were gained with the redesign of many other components including the subframe, swingarm, exhaust, axles, side stand, rear shock and the gull-wing top triple-clamp - in fact almost no part was overlooked in that 2005 Jenny Craig plan.

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