Braking performance is as you would expect, excellent. The bite is smooth, progressive and user friendly for riders of all skill levels. This enables even the inexperienced rider to take full advantage of the stoppers.

Four-piston calipers clamp on 310mm disc rotors up the front while a single 220mm disc handles the duties at the rear. Some riders would prefer perhaps a little more strength from the rear brake.

In summary, I found the CBR600RR to be a much finer all round package than I had expected. From the marketing hype and build-up to the release of this model, I was expecting some fire breathing monster with rock hard racetrack biased suspension that punched the kidneys over every bump.

I was pleasantly surprised to find that this bike is a far cry from that.

The new CBR600RR is more suited to the vast majority of supersport buyers than I had expected. Once again, Honda have not gone all out aggressive to ensure their machine can record the ultimate lap time on standard settings out of the box at the cost of road manners and any semblance of practicality.

Wisely, they have put together a finely balanced machine with plenty of user friendly features for the average road rider. And let's face it, the vast majority of people putting their hard earned down for one of these is never going to get near the limits of the machine.

And as for 'horn' factor, go and have a look at one as the pictures don't quite do it justice. It looks horn!

The price of admission is $15,190 plus the usual array of on road costs.  Below is the specification list while on the next page are some details on Shannon Johnson's Australian Supersport machine, which Castrol Honda kindly let us ride. Also some wallpapers and onboard video footage from the new machine.