BIKETEST: KAWASAKI ZX-10R NINJA:The former ZX-10 was for those who like to jump at the afterlife; the new version is much smoother, writes GEOFF HILL
SOME BIKERS who tried out earlier versions of the ZX-10 were later led away muttering that it had scared them half to death.
But not me. No sirree. With me, it was closer to 99.99 per cent.
It was, I imagined, a bike favoured by those who liked to walk a tightrope between living on earth and the afterlife.
People like fighter pilots who didn’t get enough excitement from the day job. Or men whose wives had just left them for a bank manager, and who went out riding every Saturday not caring whether they lived or died.
You could see them on weekend afternoons standing outside pubs clutching a pint of vodka with ice: men with a wild look in their eyes and hair that suggested they had recently snogged a Van de Graaf generator.
For these were men who had lost touch with not only reality and their wives, but their barbers.
However, I have gleaned from learning to fly a microlight that if you do not conquer your fears, they will conquer you, so the other day I picked up the phone and called Phillip McCallen, the former race ace who now sells Kawasakis, Triumphs and KTMs.
“Phil, I hear the ZX-10 is a lot better than it used to be. What have they changed about it?” I said.
“Everything,” he said.
I put the phone down and went to get my leathers.
Half an hour later, I was standing beside a bike, in that fetching shade of green unique to Kawasaki which resembles Kermit’s liver after a hard night out with Miss Piggy, and which looked as lethal as ever.
This was, after all, a bike which did 100mph in first gear. A bike with 186bhp, or close to 200 if you boosted it with the Ram Air pressurised intake system. That was almost twice as much as my Mazda MX-5, for heaven’s sake, an absurd amount of power on a bike that weighed a mere 192kgs wet.
No wonder the last imes I rode it I spent most of the timethinking: “I’m going to die any second now, but what a way to go.”
Still, at least there was a nice Öhlins steering damper glittering in the sun which looked like it had a good chance of taming the twitchiness of the earlier ZX-10 I’d ridden. It greeted any rough road surfaces by leaping about like a demented ferret, which made you feel that unless you got your line and speed right in every single corner, you’d end up three fields away draped over a baffled cow.
Anyway, it was time to get back on the horse, or indeed all 186 of them. I started up, climbed aboard and sped off.
Rather handily, Kawasaki have stuck a nice wide green band on the tacho all the way from 6,000rpm to the red line at 13,000, and pretty soon you can see why, for although the in-line four is a bit lacking in torque at low revs, hit that magic band and it takes off like a bird and sings all the way to the horizon.
The 13,000rpm sounds like a chorus of angry wasps, cats on a hot tin roof and all the hounds of Hades. It’s not too often you get those lads in a room together, as my granny always said.
Mid-range acceleration is so breathtaking that it leaves you with an insane grin on your face of the sort that Jean-Luc Picard must have worn the very first time he got to say: “Warp speed. Make it so.”
Put it this way: for half an hour I had huge fun hurtling around decent roads in second gear, keeping the tacho in that green band and whipping past cars. But it is not in straight-line speed and acceleration that the ZX-10 now stands out from earlier versions, but in handling.
It still dances its way over rough road and tramlines, but like a ballerina rather than Iggy Pop on amphetamines, and in corners, is as stable and planted as a Fireblade.
The ultimate evolution of 25 years of Ninjas, it is now more than ever the biggest adrenalin rush you will get on two wheels.
Except this time without the uneasy feeling that the Grim Reaper is riding pillion.
Factfile Kawasaki ZX 10-R Ninja
Engine: 998cc, in-line four-cylinder fuel-injected 16-valve four-stroke, 186bhp @ 12,500rpm, 83lb ft of torque @ 8,700rpm
Transmission: six-speed gearbox, chain final drive
Top speed: 185mph
Suspension: front 43mm inverted fork with DLC coating, rebound and compression damping, spring preload adjustability and top-out springs; rear bottom-link Uni-Trak with gas-charged shock and top-out spring.
Price: Price in Republic has yet to be confirmed.
(Test bike £8,912 (€10,395) from Phillip McCallen of Lisburn, tel: 028-926 22 886, philipmccallen.com)