Road - All these bikes are excellent on the road.  The R1 is an excellent commuter; the engine can be left in any gear and just lugged about.  The GSX-R and Fireblade are also excellent around town but the extra mid-range of the Honda puts it in front of the Suzuki in the city.  For licence preservation reasons the lack of bottom end in the Suzuki can actually help, on the Fireblade or especially the R1 any little dip in the road has you fighting the urge to twist the throttle a little bit in order to get the front airborne. 

Out on country roads the stability of the GSX-R wins me over, how the GSX-R can be so light and flickable and still be so stable is incredible.  It does have a steering damper fitted, but unlike many other bikes that suffer in many other areas when fitted with a damper (such as Suzuki’s own TL1000R) the GSX-R does not.  I never felt its presence in extra low-speed steering effort at all but it must work extremely well because I could hardly ever provoke a sizeable twitch out of the Suzuki (the damper can be felt on the track but not really on the road). Given some of the goat tracks that we covered which were very bumpy and twisty with the front often in the air off the bumps on the exit of corners this is awesome.  The GSX-R may be the lightest (by a couple of kilos wet) but when set-up well it seems to be the most stable and useable of the bunch if the roads turn nasty!  Now that is a turn up for the books.  All bikes have a touring tank range of well over 200 kilometres, pushing reasonably hard that comes down to around 200kms dry and if going absolutely bonkers, well then you can nearly half that again.

Trev’s conclusions - The R1 engine is awesome.  If potential buyers were to take each of those bikes out for a quick run around the block from a bike shop I would bet that 90% of them would buy the R1 over the others.  Simply because they would have felt the engines awesome drive that is everywhere in the rev range.  A back road fang is what is needed to really appreciate the Fireblade and GSX-R.  The Fireblade has a much healthier bottom and middle than the GSX-R but is still no match for the R1 for outright grunt everywhere.  But even though the other two do not feel as though they are as powerful as the Yamaha, when it comes to dragging they are all fairly evenly matched for acceleration.  Over the quarter mile the GSX-R is fastest followed by the R1 and then the Fireblade.

The build quality of the Honda is high and if I was in the market for a long-term sportsbike purchase I think I would probably take the Fireblade home.  However if I was only buying a bike in the aim for keeping it for 18 months before trading up, I think the Suzuki would end up in my garage.

Trev scored the bikes out of a comparative ten in 10 different areas and asked Owun to do the same.  There was no collusion between the two when arriving at these scores.

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