HP2 Sport (MY2008)

Three things define how this bike works through a corner. The first is the front. Brake hard on the way in and the Telelever keeps the suspension doing its actual job instead of collapsing, so when you catch a bump mid-corner with the brakes still on, the chassis swallows it whole. On a normal fork you'd already be half-compressed, taking that hit on whatever grip the tire had left. The second is repeatability: tip it into a fast sweeper at full lean, hold the throttle pinned, and it parks itself on one line with the same exit marker every lap, no drift creeping in. The third is the rear. The shaft drives the back wheel down into the surface under power, steady and clean, so on good asphalt I trusted the grip and opened up early. The one real wall is clearance. The boxer's heads ground out before a narrow engine would, and you ride around that rather than cure it.

This is a race brake package with nothing softening it. No servo, no ABS dulling the lever, just a radial master cylinder feeding a radial-mount Brembo Monoblock. Squeeze and the answer comes straight back: you feel precisely what's happening where rubber meets road, no lag, no guessing. On a bike this quick that directness is the whole point. It lets you brake deep and stay confident, your fingers fully informed every foot of the way in.

Hand it to an everyday rider and the lap times still stack up against far bigger machines. The interesting part is what it does to people: riders who used to back off after the apex were getting on the gas sooner and leaning harder, not from new nerve but because the bike permitted it. The cockpit logs you too, reading back time at full throttle against time on the brakes, dumping to a laptop, with optional GPS and pit-lane timing on top. Treat a track day as training and it doubles as a coach.

The quickshifter is the standout. Ask for the next gear at any throttle, any rpm, and it drops straight in with one hard mechanical crack before the motor piles back on. Most factory units never get this right. The limit is up top. There's more over-rev than the old boxers gave, but the ceiling still arrives early, and through a long, fast bend I kept wanting to hold the gear and spin it higher rather than shift up and upset the bike's balance. On the right corner that costs real time.

What stands out on reliability is that nothing was cheapened to make a number. The triple clamp is machined, the pegs adjust, the wheels are forged, the bodywork carbon front and rear, and each choice is there to do a job, not to dress the bike up. Pick up any component and the quality is plain the moment it's in your hands, the way volume-built sportbikes never quite manage. That runs through the whole machine, not just the obvious parts, and a bike built like this tends to hold up over the long run.

You're not folded into a race tuck here. The knee angle stays open and your wrists sit neutral, so the bike doesn't grind you down over a session the way a hard riding position does. Even the older guys walked away loose instead of sore, which is rare at a circuit. The bigger surprise was adaptation: riders raised on chains and conventional forks used to need ages to gel with an old boxer, and here that learning curve is much shorter. It always feels distinct, but you quit fighting it fast.