If Cthulhu rode a motorcycle, this would be it.
Grainger took this photo.This is one of the weirdest motorcycles I have ever seen. Drive wheel sticking out on the left, that's fairly normal, but that huge blob of the front end, with the front wheel just poking out, that's just weird looking. I looked for another photo of the Suzuki Hyabusa, one that had an uncluttered background, and none of them looked like this. They were all taken at a different angle, so the massivity and the blobiness are not so apparent.
Shape dictated by the aerodynamics needed to get to 300+ kph.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, the peregrine falcon (Hayabusa in japanese) can stoop even faster (~320 kph). It kills blackbirds by doing so. So Suzuki used this name because their bike was designed to be superior to the Honda CB1100 Blackbird (~290 kph).
But that's not a fast rider, in corners at least. Look at the rear tire, it should be worn all the way to the edge, not leaving an inch unused ;-)
The tire wear pattern could be due to the rider, and being in America, land of the long straight highway, more than to the bike.
ReplyDeleteYup. That bikes looks came from the engineering department. The styling department got to pick the colors.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how much corner-carving I'd want to do on the "Number 1300 'Bus"; like my old lardy VF1000F, I'd imagine that I'd have pretty wide 'chicken strips' on a 'Busa, too.
@Tam,
ReplyDeleteI can recommend the Triumph Street Triple for agility thru the twisty bits. No chicken strips, and the feel-for-the-road-pegs are ground off the footrests on mine (I'll be 68 this year, so 50+ years of MC experience:-)