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2005 Honda CBR600RR

Monday, 29 August 2005

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Further subtleties were applied toward the engine too. The 05' gets a revised dual stage fuel injection with new injectors injecting. The motor features reshaped ports with a narrower venturi section to accelerate cylinder fuel fill. New mapping caters to that and exhaust changes too and power is up, particularly in the midrange. A nice kick in the pants around 8-grand sees you well on the way to redline in short order. Keep the thing up in the rev range and real estate starts to look really blurry, with or without pharmaceutical help. By the way, it’s great to see Honda (and others) address the midrange issues on smaller displacement bikes because that will attract buyers quicker than free crack at the bus station.

Our venue for testing this bike was the West course at Buttonwillow and although fairly short it offers a variety of corners and blind rises to maintain your attention and interest. Handling-wise, the bike is similar to the last model. I thought the ‘03 bike was fairly “tippy” and this bike still needs a little more effort than perhaps an R6 on turn-in but the upside is rock hard stability whilst on its ear. The transition from left to right, especially at Buttons’ right-left-right-left part of the track, inspired confidence with only a minor wiggle that was dialed out for me after some input from Honda’s product evaluator (and ex World Endurance Champ), Doug Toland. I believe they just slowed the rear rebound down a tad to take care of my obvious hallucinations and fat boy style.

One thing I also noticed too, was the ability to run deeper into corners on minimal braking due to the fantastic stability of the new front end. I don’t remember any issues with last years bike, but this year’s just feels better. The new 41mm inverted forks are obviously smaller than last year's 45mm and offer a saving in unsprung weight. They feature Honda’s own HMAS cartridge internals and have the usual compression, damping and rebound. These bikes were optimized for us by fast Doug and bearing in mind my extra poundage in the bum, belly and head department, I couldn’t make them misbehave.

The new brakes too garnish praise from my good-self. These new Tokico radial-mounted calipers offer nice feel and were quite powerful too. Typical for radial calipers there’s something that’s hard to put the proverbial finger or two on. It seems such a minor change to the front brake set-up but the pay back is great. I’ve ridden bikes back to back with and without these type of brakes and you can feel the difference, from Supermoto to Supersport. These particular brakes were very progressive with not too much squeeze effort needed to work. With this combination of 310mm floating rotor, forks and brakes, deep trail braking into corners is a breeze and will quite obviously offer you a quicker way around your favorite race track.

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