POWER ABOVE ALL

If the first motorcycle race happened just after the second motorcycle was built, this article is about the descendants of those machines.

Many believe a motorcycle should be two wheels, an engine, a seat and some footpegs. The ARR crew is a bit more diverse than that, with passions for race bikes, cruisers, adventure machines and lots more among the people who put the magazine together, but there’s definitely a shared passion for simple high performance.

Of course, we’ve come a long way from a powerful engine and a set of wheels — the poor-handling, difficult-to-ride and impossible-to-stop Superbikes of the 1970s meant development of sticky tyres, stiff chassis, effective suspension, powerful brakes and lightweight wheels brought handling and control to big road burners as we raced into the 21st century.

For a while manufacturers refused to build high-performance naked bikes for fear they would be uncontrollable at high speed, but times change. In the last couple of decades, manufacturers have made the bikes even more powerful, with outputs that would have scared the best racers of the past — except with that power has come control, first in a good spread of power across the