WAY BACK IN THE late 80s and early 90s, the big four Japanese factories all produced a 400cc version of their 750cc superbikes. Kawasaki’s ZXR400 of that time was the mirror image of its ZXR750 big brother, with a twin-spar alloy frame, cool paint job, funky air intake tubes, sports exhaust, flat slide carbs, the lot. The same went for Suzuki’s GSXR400, Yamaha’s YZF400RR and Honda’s uber-cool RVF400, which came complete with a single-sided swingarm and V4 engine. Pretty trick, with lots of fruit.
These bikes were shrunken versions of their full-sized namesakes and were epically popular in some parts of the world, particularly in Japan where registration laws made the bigger superbikes excessively expensive to own, if not impossible. The 400cc versions were fast enough, light, handled beautifully, made great noises and looked the part, so the Japanese loved them. Relatively few of them made it to Australian or New Zealand shores via the manufacturers, but they were popular as grey imports, second-hand bikes privately imported from Japan. Some dealers made lots of money from importing them.
Sadly, they all went the way of the Black Rhino, and by the mid-90s there wasn’t much around in terms of small-capacity sports bikes. It was a segment the manufacturers had almost abandoned in Australia, and probably rightly left to the seductively fast 2-strokes like Suzuki’s RGV250, Kawasaki’s relatively short-lived KR-1, and the stunning Aprilia RS250. They made the little 4 strokes look pedestrian, and the evolution of performance is unyielding, so the 4 strokes died.
So, you can imagine my trepidation when I headed to Queensland’s Morgan Park Raceway for the press launch of the ZX4R and ZX4RR. Would it be as good as I remember the 400s being back in the 90s? Or would it be another small 4-cylinder buzz-box that makes a lot of noise but can’t push its way out of a jelly wrestling competition at the local CWA? It is after all based on the ZX-25R platform, a 4-cylinder 250cc machine that doesn’t come to Australia, but, from experience, revs a lot without being in danger of pulling your arms out
