THE SUPERSPORT SAGA
It is generally accepted that the supersport class was born in 1985 when Kawasaki released the GPZ600R. Before the GPZ, middleweight four-strokes were fairly crap commuters such as the GPz550 and if you wanted a race-rep, you bought a two-stroke Suzuki RG500 or Yamaha RD500. The GPZ600R arrived and changed all this…
Powered by a water-cooled 16-valve DOHC inline four, which was the first time such a design had been used on a middleweight. The GPZ’s 75bhp decimated its rival four-strokes and saw it hit a whopping 135mph. Add to this a box-section steel frame, anti-dive forks and matching 16in wheels and the GPZ’s combination of handling and reliability was a taste of things to come. Two years later Honda released the ‘jelly mould’ CBR600F, effectively killing off the unreliable and dirty big capacity two-strokes and giving birth to the reign of the supersport bike.
To understand why the supersport class exploded in popularity so quickly through the late 1980s and early 1990s you have to consider the bike market. While big capacity sportsbikes did exist in the form of the Yamaha FZR1000 EXUP, Suzuki GSX-R1100, Kawasaki ZZ-R1100 and Honda CBR1000F, their focus was on outright speed over handling and as a result they were big old buses. But as the newly formed WSB
