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Naked ambition

Here’s a question. How much faster is a full-fat 1000cc super bike than one of these naked 750 street bikes? The answer is simple. Sort of. If you own a two mile runway or a racetrack then a typical litre sports bike is around 40mph quicker and a half dozen seconds a lap brisker round a track. But for road riding; A-to-B blasts on your favourite Tarmac, there’s naff-all in it.

Last week I rode this Kawasaki Z750R back home from Wales, in a rush, late (as usual). One of those great head down, focused blasts on a mixture of roads and traffic conditions. 150 miles in 140 minutes including a quick stop to release some spent adrenaline. Funnily enough, I’d done a similar trip the month before on a ZX-10R, which for all its extra 60bhp and 20kg less weight, fancy electronics and race-bred suspension took five minutes longer to do the same journey. The extra time was down to the fuel stop (the Z750 did the whole trip on one tank), time spent on the road was almost identical.

And that’s the thing about road bikes. Unless you are truly a psychotic lunatic asking to be locked up, they are all pretty much as fast as another from point to point. We all know this, it’s just that sometimes it’s nice to pretend otherwise... especially if you’ve just blown £13,000 on a new Yamaha YZF-R1.

Kawasaki Z750

You can’t judge Kawasakis like other bikes. Kawasaki doesn’t make things the same way as its rivals, doesn’t have the same philosophy about what makes a good handling bike and, as anyone who’s ridden any number of them from the last 30 years will tell you, has a suspension tester working in the factory who used to be a Sumo, still weighs at least 30 stone and has a collection of hardtail solid-framed choppers in the garage.

It’s an interesting idea. Despite the chatter that all Japanese bikes are the same, each manufacturer has a very distinct personality. Kawasakis all feel raw, always make the nicest noises, are usually the fastest and always have suspension with about as much give as a (thick) plank. Hondas feel supple, smooth, and cosseting, Yamaha builds bikes with an edge – that leap off the throttle, while Suzukis feel light – almost hollow – slick, with superb ride quality and are always easy to use.

Kawasaki’s 2007 Z750 was an interesting motorcycle mostly because it was such a significant step backwards from the outgoing bike. It was too heavy, too sluggish and had suspension with completely mismatched spring and damping rates. Too stiff springs and not enough damping made the Zed hop and skip with an imprecision not seen since Bambi discovered ice.

Four years on, Kawasaki has built us an ‘R’ version with revised suspension. A new alloy swingarm based on the Z1000 item saves unsprung weight and looks 10 times as cool as before. Front forks also come from the Z1000 and a new rear shock absorber has revised damping and spring rates plus a piggyback remote gas reservoir.

And the answer is... yes, the new Z750R does handle better than the old one. It’s still not perfect, but it is at least a lot better balanced front to back and more consistent. The ride quality on bumpy roads is still on the harsh side and in low speed corners the front end feels a little firm. But the biggest problem in those low speed turns is the tyres. The standard fit Dunlop D210s are a long way from the quality of the latest Dunlops and, on damp roads especially, never felt as confident as the combination of softer suspension and Bridgestone BT-016s on the Suzuki.

In faster corners the Zed handles really well though, helped by the fact that at these speeds the engine is now working properly at higher revs. Because the Z750’s other recent problems have always been about power delivery. Kawasaki’s response to increasingly stringent emissions regulations was to strangle the Z750’s power delivery at low revs. Don’t get me wrong, there’s plenty of power to get away and zip through the traffic, but once over 6000rpm there’s a lot more whizz when you wind on the throttle.

It doesn’t take long to get used to it. Magazine group tests are funny things. They highlight a bike’s shortcomings in a way that matters less if you actually buy one. Joe Public doesn’t continually swap between machines, he (she) buys their bike based on a range of criteria – budget, looks, practicality, or simply because their local Kawasaki dealer is superb and other ones are not. Real customers buy one and learn how to ride it, magazine road testers do not. And, like I said earlier, most bikes have their own characteristics; it took me a lot longer, for example, to work out how to get the best from Ducati’s 1098 than it did the Z750R and if you are regularly exceeding the limits of a bike like this, then maybe you bought the wrong type of machine.

And the Z750R is a much better bike than before. In many ways I preferred it to Suzuki’s GSR750. The engine feels stronger once it gets going and the brakes are stronger too. Unfortunately, in its new-found enthusiasm for the letter R Kawasaki forgot to add some C. And so the new Zed is every bit as uncomfortable as the old one, thanks to the same hard plank of a seat and zero protection from the windblast. Cruising at 80mph becomes uncomfy after just a few minutes, and your backside starts shuffling after as little as 60 miles. On the Suzuki you can go faster for longer. Oh, and while I’m whinging, the sidestand is still too long and leaves the Z750 a little too upright on a hilltop on a windy day... should you find yourself in such
a situation.

So, if you’re judging by performance, the Zed would still come last in my group test.

But if looks are what matters then in these colours at least the Kawasaki is head and shoulders above the rest. Every time I caught a glance I wanted one and I found myself excusing the performance – it’s not that bad, I could get used to it, think of the A-to-B times, not each individual corner.

All true, and if it were mine I’d be used to it within a month and would just get on and enjoy it.

But the truth is, I wouldn’t buy one yet. Last time I ran a group test involving the Z750 in 2007, the testers wanted to give it fifth place out of four just to hammer home how bad the old bike was. This time it would be fourth on performance, first or second on looks. Which has got to be progress.

Suzuki GSR750

Some bikes leave a huge impression on you because of what they are and how they feel. Others make less of an impact but simply remind you of just how flipping wonderful motorcycling is. They do nothing particularly well or badly, nothing especially memorable or noteworthy. The riding experience is anonymous, but the rides are amazing.

Triumph is good at this, building efficient, easy to ride bikes with no surprises and then styling them to look radical. Suzuki is a past master too, especially in its 600 and 750cc ranges.

One of the reasons the original Bandit 600 sold by the boatload was because it was so easy to ride. Comfy, quick, nimble, but stable too. Brakes that were good enough, but not so sharp as to ever lock the front, suspension that soaked up the bumps and did what it needed to do in corners.

The new GSR750 is a similar experience. I can’t remember the last time I made as few notes on a road test. There was, quite simply nothing much to say. A few comments about smooth fuelling and a better spread of power with slightly sharper throttle response than the Kawasaki. A note about how much better the standard Bridgestones were than the Z750’s Dunlops, a mention of the brakes – not as bad as a couple of other riders had said they were – and the slight lack of steering lock when turning it round in the road.

Handling was good in both fast and slow turns – the bars wagged a bit accelerating hard out of bumpy corners, but not enough to need a steering damper, while the riding position felt a little odd after riding other bikes. The low, flat bars make it feel like you’re steering it with the indicators.

The clocks were good – easier to read and more informative than the Kawasaki’s – the styling a little overdone for my taste (but I’m a 47-year-old drummer who gets
given hand-me-up trendy clothes by my 20-year-old stepson, so my opinion on style is probably on a par with Ann Widdecombe’s) and at 50mpg, the fuel consumption was just about acceptable.

It reminds me a lot of that early Bandit because I enjoyed every ride and would happily have done another few hundred miles every time I got on it. Motorcycling is brilliant and the GSR does nothing to dispel that feeling. But I was struggling for that big moment, that flash of inspiration about this bike.

And then a couple of things happened. Firstly, I lent the bike to a mate who’s at the other end of motorcycling to me. Dave passed his test a couple years back and currently owns a Yamaha XJ6. He thinks the GSR is the best bike ever. As someone on the way up the motorcycling ladder, he was blown away by the midrange and top end power (35bhp up on his Yamaha) from the retuned GSX-R750 engine, impressed by the quality of the suspension and surprised how easy to ride the Suzuki was.

Now Dave is a much more likely customer for the GSR than I am (he also loved the Kawasaki for all the same reasons, although didn’t use it long enough to comment on the seat), and so most of you should probably take his comments more seriously than mine.

So should we be dismissing the GSR as a bike for new(ish) riders? No, definitely not. Those of us at the other end might not be as surprised by the GSR’s performance, but believe me, there’s more than enough of it to keep you interested.

Just because you don’t notice something doesn’t mean it isn’t any good – ask any nervous flyer (or pillion for that matter). And the second revelation backed that up. Bruce, our staff writer, has been racing for 10 years and is just as at home sliding a 225bhp super bike as he is leaping 40 feet in the air on a motocross bike. He’s the quickest journo in the UK bike press by some measure. He’s also a blank canvas – lacking the insight (or hindsight, or some might say subconscious prejudice) that comes with road testing every significant motorcycle of the last 50 years. And he loved the GSR too because as he pushed it further and harder than I’d been doing he discovered something very interesting. “The suspension feels a bit budget at first, but when you really push it and get towards the limits of its travel you realise that this is a well set-up bike with quality suspension fitted. It’s not as flash or adjustable as the Kawasaki’s set-up but as a package, the GSR will run rings round the Z750.”

Nicely put Bruce. I’d noticed that the Suzuki handled better but without his experience of set-up and ability to analyse what was going on in a corner I’d been struggling to explain it. And to ram home the point, Bruce nicked the keys for the Suzuki and buggered off with it for the weekend. On Monday morning he was still raving about it, gushing about how he’d had some of the best rides of the summer, of how easy it was to ride and how he’d spent half of Sunday chasing sports bikes through Lincolnshire. “What we need is an addition to the biker wave,” he said. “Something that says, “Sorry mate did I just overtake you on a bike costing half as much as yours?”

Which goes back to what I was saying before. Some bikes just remind you of how flipping wonderful motorcycling is. And this is definitely one of them.

What’s the verdict? The GSR750 is the best bike to ride, but the Z750R (in green at least) wins the styling battle. The GSR is quick, smooth, easy to ride and comfy over distance. Kawasaki has improved the Zed massively over the old model, but it’s still not quite good enough. Throttle response at low-mid revs needs to be cleaner and that seat is still a nightmare. Both bikes are well priced by 2011 standards, but late summer dealer discounts are about now.

Words: Steve Rose
Pics: Joe Dick