Five new bikes that upend motorcycle performance

November 12th, 2014

Just as the motoring universe has begun to assimilate the incredible performance of cars such as the Dodge Charger SRT Hellcat, Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and Nissan GT-R Nismo, it now must prepare for an emerging crop of incomprehensibly fast motorcycles.

Street-legal, two-wheeled hyper-speed is not new; the Kawasaki Ninja 900, Suzuki GSXR1100 and Honda Hurricane 1000 of the 1980s eradicated all prior performance benchmarks for street motorcycles. Such was their potency that a bill calling for their ban was introduced in US Congress. It failed.

Motorcycle performance has since crept incrementally upward, with horsepower for the fastest machines rising by a percentage point or two annually – that was, until 2014, when manufacturers engineered a leap reminiscent of the arrival of those ‘80s bikes.

First came the Kawasaki Ninja H2, launched at Germany’s Intermot show in September 2014. The Japanese manufacturer might have simply launched a rocket-propelled grenade, so thoroughly did the street-legal H2 and 300-horsepower, track-only H2R ignite the internet.

About that 300hp number, which can throttle the imagination like the Hellcat’s 707 figure. It comes courtesy of supercharging, a technology all but unheard of in two-wheeler circles.

It is as if Kawasaki engineers awoke one day to realise their parent, Kawasaki Heavy Industries, owned all sorts of subsidiaries, such as the Gas Turbine & Machinery Company and the Aerospace Company, which could be tapped to contribute know-how to a ludicrous sportbike with wind tunnel-developed aerodynamics that would impart the necessary high-speed stability.

The H2R is not a racing machine, just a bike built to be sold to everyday citizens who enjoy exercising their motorcycles at the racetrack. The street-going H2’s power has yet to be disclosed officially, but it too packs the supercharged 998cc engine and racing-specification transmission, so it will be plenty fast. How fast? This looks pretty fast.

Incidentally, the H2 is not Kawasaki’s first foray into forced induction, which feeds large quantities of air into the engine to optimise fuel combustion and boost power. That was the GPz750 Turbo of 1984-85, which caused a similar frothing 30 years ago. And while Kawasaki might have struck first in the hot-bike stakes in 2014, the brand is not alone at the outer limits.

Read more here!