HONDA CB1000R HIGHLIGHTS
Body style : Sports Naked Bike
Model Year : 2009
Warranty : 12 months
Manufacture country : Japan
Displacement(cc) : 998
Engine Type : Liquid-cooled four-stroke, in line-four
Horsepower(bhp) : 123
VEHICLE REVIEW
2009 Honda CB1000R
Top end biking, and I genuinely mean top end bikes as we would the big rollers in the four-wheeler set a'la Bentley, Lamborghini, Porsche, etc, has made a determined entry into the mind scape of the Indian motorcyclist. More than just a place in the mind is the "legal" availability of bikes from Yamaha, Ducati, Suzuki and Honda with Kawasaki and KTM set to follow means that finally two-wheeled aficionados have an opportunity to pay silly or sensible money (you fathom that out depending on what your views are about performance bang for the buck) to get the bike of their dreams. Sure the dreams are limited to two models apiece from the three Japanese bike makers who have homologated machines like the R1 and the MT-01, the Hayabusa and the Intruder plus now the Fireblade and the Hornet from Yamaha, Suzuki and Honda respectively. Technically, any bike from Ducati's product range is available provided you have the money to splurge on them. I have personally ridden and tested all these machines and they each have their own charm which brings smiles on the face while also making your heart beat go past its rev limiter as the thrust kicks in and you have to hang on for dear life. Many of these bikes are irrelevant (in the Indian contest given their speed, performance and price) yet so very seductive for the pleasure they deliver just piloting them at sane speeds. It is not about power which you have but can't control totally, it is much to do with power being held in hand and using just the bare minimum to deliver the maximum kicks your biking fancy wants you to revel in.
Brings me now to the latest kid on the superbiking block and on first glance it comes across as a brash, yet stylishly mean looker which seems to ooze motion even at standstill. I am referring to the CB1000R by Honda, the alter ego to the firm's hellishly quick and fiery CBR1000RR Fireblade, probably one of the top ranked superbike's many mortals can afford to buy. However let me get you in on a small secret: don't buy the Fireblade even if you have the money, especially if you want to use your bike regularly! In our cut-throat traffic environ with its stop-start nature, the awesome power delivery of the Fireblade along with its extremely sporty riding position could just tire you straight off. Seems Honda has a cure or an antidote to everything they do. Best of both worlds has long been a very prudent mantra employed by the Big H and in India if you truly want your biking to be super, easy, quick and highly manoeuvreable yet safe then I suggest you go for the CB1000R over all the other bikes in the premium segment. Again I say this with the rider that you want to use your bike fairly regularly and not just for the one weekend in a month blast and in this application no bike comes close to this super naked roadster.
Great Compete Design, The New Honda CB1000R
Probably the one reason for its rakish good looks was that it wasn't styled in Japan! Hell hath no fury than the Japanese scorned but hey this is something which Honda genuinely needed to do given the fact that the super naked streetfighter category took off with two iconic European bikes in the guise of the Ducati Monster and the Triumph Speed Triple. Throw in the oh so sexy MV Agusta Brutale to this growing bunch and Honda knew that it had to have a reason to get into this category. Home town rivals Yamaha and Kawsaki already had their large litre-sized naked roadsters but these weren't in the same league stylistically as the Italians so it was natural that Honda Italia were brought into the project, given the brief and told to come up with a bike which had to be right up there on the emotional quotient while packing in traditional Honda virtues of great build, reliability, easy handling, good manoeuvrability and pride of ownership.
Engine and transmission
In a nutshell let me fill you in on what this bike is all about on the hardware front. Using an aluminium backbone chassis onto which is hung a tweaked for torque version of the very same 998cc inline four-cylinder liquid-cooled engine which powered the 2007 Fireblade. You can't crib that the bike doesn't have the pedigree or the poke given that this fuel injected 16-valve dohc mill punches out 123 bhp at 9600rpm and 100Nm of torque at 7200rpm, this is on par with some of the large saloons sold in India. For the record, the Suzuki SX4's 1.6-litre engine delivers 102bhp, the 2.0-litre Chevrolet Optra Magnum pumps out 120bhp, the Mitsubishi Lancer Cedia 2.0-litre makes 115bhp and Honda's very own 1.5-litre City iVTEC makes 118bhp. What should be impressive is not just this peak power figure but the overwhelmingly superior power-to-weight ratio which places the CB1000R in the league of not these saloons but right up there in the BMW 3 and 5 series shaming league!
Engine and transmission
In a nutshell let me fill you in on what this bike is all about on the hardware front. Using an aluminium backbone chassis onto which is hung a tweaked for torque version of the very same 998cc inline four-cylinder liquid-cooled engine which powered the 2007 Fireblade. You can't crib that the bike doesn't have the pedigree or the poke given that this fuel injected 16-valve dohc mill punches out 123 bhp at 9600rpm and 100Nm of torque at 7200rpm, this is on par with some of the large saloons sold in India. For the record, the Suzuki SX4's 1.6-litre engine delivers 102bhp, the 2.0-litre Chevrolet Optra Magnum pumps out 120bhp, the Mitsubishi Lancer Cedia 2.0-litre makes 115bhp and Honda's very own 1.5-litre City iVTEC makes 118bhp. What should be impressive is not just this peak power figure but the overwhelmingly superior power-to-weight ratio which places the CB1000R in the league of not these saloons but right up there in the BMW 3 and 5 series shaming league!
The CB1000R comes with a slick shifting 6-speed gearbox and it has a hydraulic clutch with nicely weighted actuation to really heighten the riding pleasure. A bike endowed with mega performance capability also needs strong and sure anchors to help arrest forward thrust should the need arise and for that it comes equipped with twin 310mm dia 4-piston disc brakes on the front wheel coupled to a single 256mm dia disc on the rear wheel. The bike wears 17-inch Bridgestone Battlax BT015 tyres on both ends, the front being a 120/70 while the rear is a 180/55. Top quality upside down front forks and a pretty competent monoshock rear end make up the suspension.
Given that the mechanical and the cycles parts are first class, the styling is sharp, rakish and standout without truly being offensive. The Japanese firm's famous "You meet the best people on a Honda" slogan from the early 1960s runs seems to find resonance in the overall makeup of the bike. The overall minimality only comes through when you get astride the bike and even though there's a sliver of a pillion seat, I am sure that even femme fatales with a size zero figure wouldn't be comfortable on it. But then that's the very ethos of this bike - individualistic and saying that emphatically. The gorgeous details on the bike are truly out of this world - the single sided swingarm is one detail while the angry snout headlamp plus its crowning surround for the instrument panel is another. Take the instruments themselves, a three-part all LCD affair (large central tachometer flanked by a smallish digital speedo on the left and tell tales on the right) which ranks right up there in information delivery but which truly are meaningless when you are hitting ton up speeds quicker than you can blink! The four-spoke rear wheel has to rank as one of the most beautiful on any Japanese two-wheeler and the sharply creased tank with smart yet small bodywork to shroud the radiator sides present their own to give the bike its "don't mess with me" character.
Agile handling gives great control
Having whipped up huge amounts of expectation you sling your leg over the saddle - very well set to make it easy even for a 5 ft. seven inch her as yours truly and what gets you is the standard Honda refinement streaming through. Hit the starter button and the engine whirrs into life, you pull in the clutch level, tap the gear shifter down into first, release the clutch gently and with whatever amount of right hand treatment you chose to wield, the Hornet delights you in millions of ways. It can be the refined sportsman, all grace and polite manner to the fore or you could give it that hooligan stick and the front end rockets up and before you know it you are hurtling forward at a crazy pace. It should be frightening but to any decent rider out there, the Hornet only makes him more comfortable, gets him into a confident groove and then it is that great mid-range torque which manifests itself. The gearing on the top three cogs is a bit short making me search for another cog at the top end but in the cut and thurst of our city commute this bike can dance and weave and leave everyone for dead without in the least bit being termed rowdy. The throttle response is fantastic, not too much and daunting nor inadequate and dribbling. Credit this to the precise metering of the fuel injection system enabling the engine to pull way beyond its 10,000rpm peak. And speaking about torque one must state quite emphatically that this is a bike which can humble many a supercar with its 230km/h top whack and a zero to 100kmph time of - wait for it - 2.95 seconds! If you want thrills at the price of the CB1000R, nothing comes close! But wait, there's even more. Thanks to the thick torque streaming through, this bike can potter away in top cog at speeds as low as 45km/h without snatch or judder and it is truly an all rounder scoring the big hits without obvious fanfare. Keep on feeding it more throttle and things get serious but yet all in control for this bike doesn't lose its composure as the revs are dialed in with strong right hand treatment. By the time 8000rpm comes up the bike is hurtling at around the 180km/h mark and by the time you go just past the 200km/h mark you can see that the revs are yet rising and rising all the way past the 10,000rpm mark where peak power is developed.
Having whipped up huge amounts of expectation you sling your leg over the saddle - very well set to make it easy even for a 5 ft. seven inch her as yours truly and what gets you is the standard Honda refinement streaming through. Hit the starter button and the engine whirrs into life, you pull in the clutch level, tap the gear shifter down into first, release the clutch gently and with whatever amount of right hand treatment you chose to wield, the Hornet delights you in millions of ways. It can be the refined sportsman, all grace and polite manner to the fore or you could give it that hooligan stick and the front end rockets up and before you know it you are hurtling forward at a crazy pace. It should be frightening but to any decent rider out there, the Hornet only makes him more comfortable, gets him into a confident groove and then it is that great mid-range torque which manifests itself. The gearing on the top three cogs is a bit short making me search for another cog at the top end but in the cut and thurst of our city commute this bike can dance and weave and leave everyone for dead without in the least bit being termed rowdy. The throttle response is fantastic, not too much and daunting nor inadequate and dribbling. Credit this to the precise metering of the fuel injection system enabling the engine to pull way beyond its 10,000rpm peak. And speaking about torque one must state quite emphatically that this is a bike which can humble many a supercar with its 230km/h top whack and a zero to 100kmph time of - wait for it - 2.95 seconds! If you want thrills at the price of the CB1000R, nothing comes close! But wait, there's even more. Thanks to the thick torque streaming through, this bike can potter away in top cog at speeds as low as 45km/h without snatch or judder and it is truly an all rounder scoring the big hits without obvious fanfare. Keep on feeding it more throttle and things get serious but yet all in control for this bike doesn't lose its composure as the revs are dialed in with strong right hand treatment. By the time 8000rpm comes up the bike is hurtling at around the 180km/h mark and by the time you go just past the 200km/h mark you can see that the revs are yet rising and rising all the way past the 10,000rpm mark where peak power is developed.
Taking Pirelli's "power is nothing without control" punchline, all this performance punching is possible thanks to the fine manners the Hornet has been endowed with. Starting with its strong frame and the low mass centralization which many miss out but is key to the nimble handling and leech like stability of the machine, this bike makes you believe you are corner carving on a Bajaj Pulsar with ten times the power! If you are serious about your bike riding then you will quickly understand what I have outlined. This is a bike which is so neutral in its handling yet so nimble in its directional changes that even your grandma could ride it if she was so inclined to show the young hotshots a thing or two! The riding position is yet another delight, the ideal relationship between seat height, flat handlebars and perfectly positioned foot pegs deliver you a stance with which you can do the business against the more illustrious of superbikes on sale in India and feel like giant killer Rossi in the process. The suspension is perfect for our roads and also our traffic but the overall dynamic ability whether accelerating hard or scrubbing off velocity is both rock steady and stable. In fact in the course of our testing our rear tyre picked up a slow puncture and even while braking from high speeds, the bike showed an amazing tendency to grip and stop in a straight line without any crazy opposite lock slides.
OVERVIEW SPECIFICATIONS
ENGINE
Engine type : In-line four
Stroke : 4
Displacement : 998.00 ccm (60.90 cubic inches)
Power : 123.37 HP (90.1 kW)) @ 10000 RPM
Torque : 100.00 Nm (10.2 kgf-m or 73.8 ft.lbs) @ 8000 RPM
Compression : 11.2:1
Bore x stroke : 75.0 x 56.5 mm (3.0 x 2.2 inches)
Fuel system : Injection. PGM-FI electronic fuel injection
Valves per cylinder : 4
Fuel control : DOHC
Ignition : Computer-controlled digital transistorised with electronic advance
Starter : Electric
Cooling system : Liquid
TRANSMISSION
Gearbox : 6-speed
Transmission type final drive : Chain
CHASSIS & SUSPENSION
Front suspension : 43mm inverted HMAS cartridge-type telescopic fork with stepless preload, compression and rebound adjustment, 120mm cushion stroke
Rear suspension : Monoshock with gas-charged HMAS damper featuring 10-step preload and stepless rebound damping adjustment, 128mm axle travel
BRAKES
Front brakes : Double disc
Front brakes diameter : 310 mm (12.2 inches)
Rear brakes : Single disc
Rear brakes diameter : 256 mm (10.1 inches)
TYRES
Front tyre dimensions : 120/70-ZR17
Rear tyre dimensions : 180/55-ZR17
FUEL CAPACITY
Fuel capacity(l) : 17.00
Fuel capacity(gal) : 4.49
COLOURS
Olive
Gray
Black
White
DIMENSIONS
Dry weight : 217.0 kg (478.4 pounds)
Seat height : 825 mm (32.5 inches) If adjustable, lowest setting.
Overall height : 2,105 mm (82.9 inches)
Overall length : 2,105 mm (82.9 inches)
Ground clearance : 130 mm (5.1 inches)
Wheelbase : 1,445 mm (56.9 inches)
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