Motorcycle News - Church of MO: 2009 Supersport Racetrack Shootout
https://ift.tt/39nKXsU Ten years ago, it is written, the 600 Supersport class was still hotly contested, bitterly fought over, super-important to the Big Four, etc… Then something happened. The Great Recession, the Boomer Regression, the ADV Expansion? The street portion of 2009’s de rigueur 600 Shootout! has lost the illumination from its manuscript; luckily we unearthed the video, and the Willow Springs racetrack portion of the smackdown. However current sales figures may be, all four of these motorcycles are still available as new models – and the winner of this little comparo retails for a mere $200 more than it did ten years ago. Let us praise and give thanks to Duke, Brissette and Gardiner – and also to the freelance apostle Andrea for some nice photos for a change. Amen, and Happy New Year. 2009 Supersport Racetrack ShootoutThe 600s take the battle to the track
By Pete Brissette & Kevin Duke Mar. 06, 2009
Photography by Andrea Wilson
Readers who want to be endowed with maximum info will want to first check out our 600 Street shootout. You get bonus marks for reading our ZX-6R First Ride and our 2008 Supersport Shootout.It’s a reasonable thing for most enthusiasts visiting this illustrious webzine to expect our reviews of motorcycles to be conclusive. After all, when we factor in the talents of our current crew of “volunteer staff,” our collective experiences span nearly a century of riding and getting to know just about every make and model of bike available for the past 30 years. So plucking out the best should be as easy as getting out of bed, right?
Oh, if only it were so easy. Sometimes even the pros are left scratching their noggins like a small party of confused chimps. Such is the case with the 2009 crop of Japanese Supersports.
We recently tasked ourselves with putting the racy 600cc weapons from Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha through the wringer in everyday environs – streets, freeways, canyons, parking lots… places where most race-bred middleweights will spend the majority of their life after exiting dealer showrooms.
Is the Ninja’s celebratory wheelie at the track premature gloating, or will all the things we liked about it on the street be enough to crown the Ninja overall Supersport King?
At the end of this real-world exercise we rested confidently in our choice of the all-new 2009 Kawasaki ZX-6R as the new King of Supersport. The new Ninja’s best-in-class power and a much sharper chassis than previous gave it the nod in our street-biased shootout. Though time on the dyno provided scientific proof that the revamped Ninja had indeed shed its softish powerband from the previous iteration, we didn’t really need dyno results to tell us what we were already feeling. “Its engine reminds me a lot of the old 636,” Mark Gardiner rightly said of the new Ninja. The Ninja pumped out nearly 108 rear-wheel ponies on the Area P dyno, 5 horsies up on the next-best Gixxer and 10 more than the CBR. The R6 also had some top-end horsepower stolen in 2009 because of noise regulations. For the full story, scroll down to the sidebar on this page. Not only is the ZX’s engine revised and retuned to make the most power, the chassis received numerous updates to make it lighter steering and better responding, it lost upwards of 20 pounds, and it retained its best-in-class brakes. The Ninja went from almost last in 2008 to top of the class this year after our street ride. Round Two Riding a bike closer to the edge of its performance envelope – especially in this group of race-developed steeds – will make known things about a bike’s character that street riding simply cannot expose. Thus it’s time to for us to move on to the second half our evaluation in our annual Supersport Shootout. Would the opportunity to stretch throttle cables, slam shifters, and crush brake levers reveal a new pecking order? Will the GSX-R600 remain our second most fave? Can the CBR regain ground lost in the street ride? Does the racy R6 have a trick up its intake to usurp them all in its most flattering environment?
We took this quartet up into the lush Mojave Desert to the Streets of Willow racetrack to find the answers we needed. We spent a day with the friendly folks at Hypercycle for one of their track days, screaming around on identical track rubber, Michelin’s new Power One (look for a review in the coming weeks). You’ll forgive us for skipping the preliminaries and getting directly to our impressions.
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