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Clothed in swoopy bodywork that polarised opinion almost instantly, the Hayabusa jumped to the top of the two-wheeled performance tree, with a 175 bhp fuel-injected 1298cc four cylinder engine set in an up-to-the-minute chassis whose true worth was proved when Wanganui’s Brian Bernard won the final round of the Suzuki Road Race Series at Manfeild last September.
And now Timaru’s John Hepburn has firmly established the Hayabusa’s speed credentials by establishing a New Zealand motorcycle speed record on one, with a two-way average of 307.447 km/h on Matai Road near Edendale in Southland on February 5.
When it was released, Suzuki claimed the GSX1300R Hayabusa was the most advanced motorcycle it had ever produced, as well as the world’s most powerful ever series production machine.
Neither Bernard or Hepburn would argue with that.
Although Suzuki’s engineers achieved a powerful result with the design of the Hayabusa’s engine, it is the company’s aerodynamicists who must take the credit for the striking looks of its wind-cheating bodywork, spending hours wind tunnel testing it with a rider in place.
Riding comfort was a big part of the equation, but the Suzuki designers also spent hours carefully studying critical details, like the profile of the fairing, the curve of the windscreen, the curve of the front mud-guard, the way cooling air flows around the fork legs and into the radiator and the way air flows under the engine and encounters the spinning rear wheel.
Every single detail of airflow around a motorcycle was studied by the Suzuki aerodynamics team. They even looked at the way hot air flows out of the fairing vents and meets air flowing past the sides of the fairing.
Even the headlight set-up on Hayabusa was arrived at through aerodynamics as none of the existing headlight shapes in use would provide the correct profile for the nose of the bike. So the Hayabusa has a headlight that combines a multi-reflector low beam light positioned above a 70 mm diameter projector high beam. This not only works brilliantly in aerodynamic terms, it provides an improved, wider, brighter light pattern in a more compact package – a case of function following form.
The result is a motorcycle that slips though the air with effortless ease, just like Japan’s indigenous falcon, the Hayabusa, from which it gets its name.
Propelling the Suzuki GSX1300R is a liquid-cooled 1298cc fuel-injected in-line four cylinder engine that has drawn on lessons Suzuki has learned from years of successfully contesting open class road races.
This is the most powerful engine Suzuki has ever produced for a series production motorcycle, but at the same time it’s designed to produce usable power right from idle. No highly strung racing engine, the Suzuki Hayabusa’s powerplant is supremely torquey with huge reserves of power.
Where other manufacturers would have been content to leave things there, Suzuki wanted to make the Hayabusa as nimble as possible for a big bike, opting for a rigid aluminium alloy twin spar frame similar to that fitted to the class-leading GSX-R750 Superbike to make the Hayabusa easy to live with on the winding roads.
And to enable it to cope with anything the road surface throws at it, Suzuki opted for a set of top-of-the-line inverted 43 mm forks with both adjustable spring pre-load and damping to control front wheel action while a linkage operated single shock at the rear also offers adjustable compression and rebound damping, along with adjustable spring pre-load, to keep the rear tyre firmly planted on the road.
Brian Bernard and John Hepburn have more than amply proved the Hayabusa more than lives up to its promise and, as a growing band of owners are discovering, its wind-cheating form makes touring absolutely effortless.
Yet even with the level of technology the Hayabusa offers, the Suzuki GSX1300R still retails for $22,995, significantly less than any comparable model available in New Zealand.
Contact an online Suzuki dealer for more information:
Red Baron
