It's still hard to get my head around the fact that here we are on the cusp of another season of long sunny days and dry tarmac, and for the first time since 1986, there isn't a high capacity GSX-R in Suzuki's range. The GSX-R 1000 which took over from the 1100cc behemoth as the company's range topping ‘Halo' sportsbike in the year 2000, is no more. It's become the latest victim of increasingly tough emissions regulations and falling sales in the sector.
I've been lucky enough to have ridden every single version of the GSX-R1000; from the bombastic K1/K2 to the much better K3/ K4, the game changing K5/K6 and then the ones that most people forget about… right up to the final version with the variable valve timing and full electronics pack – the ‘L7' which was introduced in 2017 and which we say goodbye to in 2023.
Rather than go over every model and pay a worthy tribute to each of them, I wanted to focus on the final version for a couple of reasons. The first is that, by being the final version, the L7 is by definition the one that had all the learning and development from all the other GSX-Rs that came before poured into it. The other reason is that when it came along in 2017, in terms of spec and headlines, the GSX-R L7 was already obsolete. BMW was on its third generation S1000RR which simply has more of everything, the Yamaha R1 and R1M had a major update in 2017, and even though Ducati's Panigale V4 was still a year away, its predecessor the 1299 was better than the GSX-R in every measurable way. In the superbike class, spec sheets matter, and compared to its rivals, especially the BMW which was a similar price, the poor old GSX-R L7 never really captured the hearts and therefore minds of
