YZF-R1 (RN22)

What I keep coming back to is the front end. In a comparison that pulled the suspension apart everywhere else, the feedback at corner entry and the stability at real speed stood out as genuine bright spots. You always know what the front contact patch is doing, and the electronic steering damper backs that up: several corner exits had bumps loading the front light and going nervous, and the damper settled every one of them without me second-guessing the tire. Snap down two or three gears into a slow corner and the slipper clutch keeps the rear settled, no fight. On a circuit I'd never seen, the bike looked after itself from the first session, which is worth a lot when you're still learning the place. Fit proper slicks and a matching setup and the same chassis turns surgical; the character holds, the precision just multiplies. The honest limits all live in the springs. The tune is soft for serious track work, and the rear is the worst of it: get on the gas early and hard and it won't load the tire with enough authority, so corner-exit traction turns unpredictable at this level. And for all the engineering in splitting compression and rebound between the fork legs, the dive under hard braking is no better than before. It reads like a cost decision, not a performance one.

The thing the crossplane crank actually fixed is throttle manners. It used to be that a sharp response and easy metering pulled against each other; you picked one. Here you get both at once. Crack it open and it answers immediately, but you can still feed the power in by the degree without catching the rear by surprise. And it builds in one smooth arc rather than stacking up and slamming in at the top, so the drive stays clean and readable the whole way up. There's a catch worth knowing, and it's a tradeoff rather than a flaw. The revised motor cured the overheating that turned up in early production, and the bill came due at the top of the rev range, where a little output went missing. It's the kind of thing that stays invisible on the road and only surfaces when you're chasing the quickest bikes on a circuit. My other gripe is the limiter. Neither the way the power builds nor the noise it makes gives you a clear warning when you're closing on redline, so you end up living on the tachometer instead of riding by ear. A small thing on the road, more of a nuisance when you're really wringing it out.

The brakes belong in the plus column. Push your entry point deep and the front answers cleanly, with progressive feedback that keeps building as you lean harder rather than grabbing at you. The one asterisk is initial bite: six-piston calipers on individual pads should feel like hitting a wall, and they don't quite. On a circuit that shortfall shows, and while sharper pads would likely close it, that's not a job you should inherit from stock.

This is where the R1's new personality cuts both ways. The old one punished mistakes and was genuinely unrideable for anyone without real racecraft. That bike is gone. This one is manageable and easygoing enough to live with on the road, which sounds like pure upside until you line it up wheel-to-wheel with the class on a closed circuit. There the street-biased setup becomes the defining trait: approachable where it used to be brutal, and on a racetrack that trade costs you. Ridden for what it is, though, the willingness at the limit is real. The fast, bumpy left-hander is where it shows itself, the rear working a street tire hard while you feel exactly where the grip runs out. In this company it draws the comfortable-and-easy label, and at the track that label wins you no points.

Ergonomically this is a supersport that plays it relaxed, and how you feel about that depends on where you're coming from. The former racers in the test spotted it right away: the geometry doesn't fold you into the aggressive tuck the hardest-edged bikes in the class use, and the smaller, track-focused riders in the group drifted toward machines with sharper ergonomics. If your reference point is a full race replica, that's a real compromise. It shows up under load, too. Through hard braking and long sweepers there's no clean way for a taller rider to lock the upper body in place, so the stock clip-on position leaves you working against the bike rather than settling into it. Rotating the clip-ons forward would likely sort it, but that isn't how it arrives from the factory.

The one piece of genuine everyday convenience here is the hydraulic rear preload adjuster. Loading a pillion and luggage and then going back to solo is the kind of job that normally means a hook spanner and scraped knuckles, and on this bike it's a quick twist with no tools at all. It's a small thing, but it's the sort of detail you appreciate every time your load changes, and it's rare enough at this end of the market to be worth calling out. For a machine this focused, that bit of real-world thinking is welcome.