Tuesday was spent testing the new Honda CBR 600 F4i at Victoria's magnificent Phillip Island circuit.

Honda's new SuperSport contender was a great mount for the task, very user friendly and SuperSport power meant the task of learning the circuit was made much easier than it might have been on an open class bike. 

I was daunted a little by the track at first but as I built up speed I began to love the circuit with it's fast corners and smooth surface. 

Adam 'Krusty' Fergusson was in attendance for his first sit on a bike since he broke his pelvis some 5 weeks ago during testing. Alex Gobert stood in for Krusty in round 1 of the World SuperSport Championship but Adam is confident of being back in the saddle for round 2 at Phillip Island. He moved about on the bike okay considering the short time since his fracture and found the going better than he had thought he would at this early stage of his recovery. But back to the bike....

Our normal full review will follow in a week or so but early indications are that the CBR 600 in it's new more sporting format is clearly a cut above it's predecessor in the track arena but is still not as much of a track bike in it's standard form as something like Suzuki's GSX-R 600.

That is not to say the CBR is slow as nothing could be further from the truth, I saw over 240kph on the digital speedo' down "Gardner Straight'. The brakes are outstanding and the engine performance is very good.  I did have a little trouble with bottoming the forks under SEVERE braking for 'Honda Corner' but only the most serious of track day fiends will find this a problem. 

As a road bike the CBR will excel with the good luggage hooks, very comfortable riding position and user friendly features such as the automatic fast idle system in the mornings that does away with fast idle levers etc. and takes care of the warm-up process itself.  For the every day biker I see these little
things as making life with a motorcycle just that little bit more pleasurable.

I estimate that I completed nearly 100 laps at Phillip Island during the course of the day, which works out to around 450 kilometres on the track! No wonder my arms feel sore but it must be said that I could not have physically coped with that amount of laps on a bike that was hard to punt around a track.  The CBR responds easily to your commands, not a huge amount of weighting pegs and body language is needed to get the bike turned where you want to which is why after all those laps I can still function.

Full review in due course.....