AERODYNAMICS: GO WITH THE FLOW
Back when I was learning to ride, there was some properly mad stuff going on with aerodynamics. It was the late 1980s – bikes had only recently started having full fairings – and the bike firms were going crackers trying loads of different stuff. To be fair, they were trying just about anything back in those days – two-stroke engines, four-stroke engines, water-cooling, oil-cooling, 16in front wheels, anti-dive forks. It’s almost like they didn’t really know what would work, so just got busy trying everything they could…
And aerodynamics promised a lot in terms of performance. When even the biggest engines were only making about 100bhp, it seemed like a smart plan to make the most of what you had. And so covering the bike in slippery, smooth plastic panels that would slice through the air much easier became fashionable. Early designs like Kawasaki’s GPZ900R showed the way, and soon we had the likes of Honda’s CBR1000F and Suzuki’s GSX1100F – enormous, bulbous, plastic whales on two wheels.
SPACE AND ALL THAT
It was Kawasaki that hit the peaks of aerodynamic design back in the 1990s. The Japanese firm famously also make spaceships and aeroplanes, so were perfectly equipped with all the wind tunnels and supercomputers they needed to explore the bleeding edge of aero design. And in 1990, they launched the ZZ-R600 and ZZ-R1100, which were far more aerodynamic than anything else out there. From their huge front mudguards, which cut through the air then channelled it back onto the wide, smooth, curved flanks of the main fairing, back
