LIGHTER IS RIGHTER
Take away what isn’t necessary and you’re left with Yamaha’s year-2000 YZF-R1
MARK HOYER
I FELT LIKE HAMLET’S FATHER. MULTIPLE TIME zones, awake when I should be sleeping, sleeping when I should be awake, too much rioja on too many flights that lasted too long, fish eyeballs served on a cracker as an appetizer to a main course of “steak” that seemed more likely to have been a flambéed slice of Franco’s thigh, all whipped itself into a co*cktail of nondescript pain and low-grade suffering that conspired to make me feel like a victim. But even after all that and another night of troubled sleep, it was impossible to feel sorry for myself as I touched a footpeg feeler down through a third-gear left-hander on a new GP-spec race circuit near the eastern coast of Spain on a pleasantly sunny day, riding what is in simple terms the best mass-produced sportbike made. So despite the stench of death inside my helmet, I peeled through Tum 1 at Circuit Ricardo Tormo, near Valencia, and left the apex behind with an overriding sense of joy. It occurred to me that I could have gone a lot faster, but mostly that I was an ass for thinking I was anything but lucky to be doing what I was doing where I was doing it. Some victim! It’s been love from the beginning with Yamaha’s YZFRl. When the bike debuted in 1997, everyone was still busy genuflecting at the altar of the 916, a machine hailed as the Jesus of motorcycles, making evil comers good, madmen into heroes, no-talent hacks into artists, a bike that inspired religion and defied science by somehow turning inferior specs and individual performance num-
bers into superior performance: motorcycle manna.
Then came the Rl. No tricks here. Superior numbers equaled superior performance. What magnificence! And never mind its dynamic capability, when your eyes met those crisp, edgy lines the first time, the rest of the inlineFour Japanese Sportbike world was rendered irrelevant, bland. Style was revitalized, fresh again. And style hauled ass, which is all we’ve ever wanted in the first place.
Even after two years-a long time in Japanese sportbike years-the R1 has retained its performance and visual edge. There’s a fundamental rightness to the Rl ’s look that allows it to sit quite comfortably behind the velvet ropes with the likes of Ducati’s epic beauty, the 916, or
even the best-looking Bimotas. Except with the Rl, there’s an extra dimension to lovely: The degree to which you have to go into hock to park one behind your own velvet ropes in your own cluttered garage is a lot less than what you’d spend on those Italian exotics. Less exclusive maybe, but no less exciting. Yours for $10,299 (up $100 since our last published price, due to dollar/yen fluctuation, says Yamaha). And it only needs one valve adjustment every 26,000 miles. How very Japanese! It’s rather a good dollar-per-performance-unit value-perhaps the best there is.
All this makes the Rl the centerpiece of Yamaha’s impressive strength in recent years. A testament of that strength came at a strange place: Honda’s dealer meeting last September, when Big Red named names as it declared war on everybody in every market segment. Yamaha was one of those names. Why? One reason was that the Rl rendered the mighty, Open-class-defming CBR900RR tame, soft, a “nice” bike, and forced Honda’s hand with the ’00
CBR929RR, which, it turns out, is 10 pounds lighter, makes equal claimed horsepower and costs $300 less than the R1. Battles like these keep this job interesting and enrich our motorcycle world.
So, the R1 was good in the beginning and good now-why mess?
As per the usual, the PR backhoe was out and laden with the finest superlatives and reasonable reasons for laying on the heavy massage to a bike we all declared was nearly perfect in the first place.
Two days riding in Spain, one on the track, the other on the road, showed there is still absolutely no question that under the svelte, honed look of the Rl’s new, more pointed, aerodynamic bodywork (not interchangeable with the old stuff, unfortunately) the fundamental design of the R1 is correct, still the truest version of performance tmth on the market.
But so you know, Yamaha’s army of engineers spent its time chipping away at the details. In the end, 5 pounds was
knocked off the dry weight. Doesn’t seem like much, but the elegance of engineering is making parts light, yet strong enough to endure. It’s a fine line.
From the outside, it doesn’t seem that hard. But engineering answers that seem simple to us are often solutions to problems we don’t know about or fully understand. We might think to ourselves that “this, plus this, plus this, equals quick steering or good shifting or a
lot of horsepower.” In simple terms, it may be true. It’s truth to us, anyway. But there is a whole subtext to the coordinates of points that tells us an angle of a headstock, an amount of trail, or length of swingarm or of wheelbase, that we’ll never see. Toss in questions of what materials should be used to join these points, and what thickness and where it should be thicker or thinner, and complexity mounts. It’s one thing, for instance, to have a gearbox placed in front of you. But how much steel does it take to make a gear of sufficient
strength? What shape should the teeth be, where should the shafts go (should they be hollow or solid?), what type of bearings should be used? Really, what kind of gearbox would you make if all you had to start with was a blank piece of paper and a problem?
That’s what the army of unseen engineers is for, to question every nut, bolt, washer, gear and shaft so you end up with the 400 “changed” parts and 150 “reengineered” parts that the ’00 YZF-R1 sports over last year’s bike. All we do is write a check for the best set of answers the engineers can provide when their part of the project is due.
Thumbing through the press materials, the 5-pound weight loss looks hardwon-you know how hard it is to lose that last 5 pounds! Obvious light items are the titanium exhaust can and a pair of magnesium sidecovers, one for the shift shaft, the other for the pick-up coil. Exotic materials are the short, if sometimes expensive, way to light weight. But every other little thing counts. The tenth of a millimeter shaved off the fork-spring-wire diameter, for instance, or the reduced number of buttons (was 10, now 8) and thinner discs on the front brakes. Or the once-cast but now-forged (for lightness, of course!) rear shock body that also features a lighterweight spring. Or the lighter, thinner tach. Or the smaller rear brake master-cylinder reservoir. Or the smaller starter motor. Or the increased number of hollow bolts peppered about the bike. Or the five bolts that hold the gas cap in place of the seven used before. All this for 5 pounds? Not exactly. The net loss was actually 9 pounds, but the neces-
sary addition of an air-induction system to clean up exhaust emissions ate 4 of those. “Ouch!” said the army.
Changes that have a more direct effect on functionality are fewer than those executed in search of weight reduction. Internally, the engine features revised cam lubrication for closer tappet tolerances and quieter operation, while the gearbox received mods to improve shift quality. Principally, a taller first gear makes the ratio gap to second smaller, which usually equals a smoother shift because the speed differential of the gears isn’t as great.
Many of the gears are narrower, some by as much as 2mm, and the shift linkage and shift shaft (with added bearing) are altered for improved performance and lighter weight. The gearbox is less clunky than the old one in the bottom gears.
Carburetion was altered for improved bottom-end response, but our long-term ’98 Rl was never anything but civil, crisp and smooth, anyway.
Handling wasn’t exactly a sore point on the old bike, and Ed like to be able to tell you that the modified lower tripleclamp and altered damping in the fork were an improvement. But really, it’s the same brilliant package it was before. Same bike, same lovely personality, but sexier, and quicker maybe, too. Just how I like ’em.
It had been a long time since I’d had an Rl on a racetrack. All of my recent closed-course miles have come piloting a Suzuki Hayabusa. Both bikes are brutal performers in their own way, but the Hayabusa tends to distort reality in a manner that’s detrimental to hustling an Rl around a road course. All day, I found myself braking too early, tuming-in
too slowly and carrying too little comer speed. I’d like to blame the Hayabusa, anyway. What you find after a day at the track with the Yamaha is the same brilliant feedback, the same neutral steering and the same absolutely sizzling acceleration that sees the front end light or off the ground exiting most comers that the bike’s had all along. It’s a frantic, edgy and instantaneous acceleration that only comes from a very light motorcycle with a lot of horsepower. Yamaha likened this bike to its YZR500 GP racer for a reason: It’s so good, it almost disappears beneath you, leaving you to concentrate on riding the track, not the motorcycle.
Even more revealing was the 150-mile street ride the following day. For while there are few motorcycles at any price that work in anger the way the R1 does, even fewer make such a seamless transition to the real world of street riding. Leaving the track on day two, we headed northeast into the hills above Valencia on roads strikingly similar to the ones north of Los Angeles, just much smoother. And with more diesel spills.
All you need to do is relax and let the R1 do its work. Mountain roads at a street pace require almost no input on the handlebars, so light and quick is the steering. Altering your line mid-comer is a nanovolt blink of a brain cell away. All that horsepower and torque that warps even long racetrack straightaways allows you the luxury of choosing shiftlessness as you carve effortlessly through the hills. After a short blast up to an indicated 160 mph I can honestly say I didn’t really notice that the fuel tank had been reshaped and had its top dropped 5mm to let me get out of the wind better. The taller screen? Ditto. You notice the new shape when it’s parked, maybe, but not from the hotseat. It is still an angular, visually interesting shape, but the minimal wind protection is the same. And who among you cares about that?
In the end, if you want the ultimate expression of streetbike performance, you currently have no other choice. And while our rational mind tells us we don’t need and mostly can’t use what the R1 delivers, this bike is the clearly defined expression of modem performance: Shrink-wrapped horsepower, leaping frantically from comer to comer, as happy diving to the apex as launching off. Bmtal, yet manageable, not some unwieldy beast to ride, yet it performs like an absolute monster. It’s proof that there’s no such thing as too much performance.
The YZF-R1 is the spare, elegantly expressed engineering answer to what a sportbike should be. But all we really need to know is that it hauls ass and looks good doing it. And it’s not a bad cure for jet lag, either.
