Honda’s CBR900RR FireBlade was the archetypal sports-bike of the 1990s and boy did Britain love sports-bikes in the 1990s…
Most of the best sellers of the decade were machines of a sporting bent – with the odd budget naked (such as Suzuki’s excellent Bandit family) thrown in for good measure. And if you wanted a sports machine – and most of us did – you had plenty to choose from whatever your experience or even the type of licence you had.
The fledgling riders had the 125cc two-strokes, often thrashed and crashed and bedecked with an L-plate, but once you passed your test, the motorcycling world was your oyster. You could choose from two-stroke race-replica 250cc bikes, or their four-stroke 400cc equivalents – many of these brought into the UK as grey imports as they often weren’t officially brought in by the manufacturers for long. The four-cylinder 600cc ‘supersports’ class often offered the best mix of power, performance, and price; the 750cc ‘superbike’ class had similar inline or V4 machines to the ones we would see racing at weekends, while the litre class would consist either of monsters like Suzuki’s GSX-R1100, rapid sports-tourers like Kawasaki’s ZZ-R1100, or the more agile Yamaha FZR1000 Genesis and EXUPs. Course, if you were loaded you’d have a Bimota or maybe a swanky Ducati V-twin…
Whatever bike you had
