#gsx-r

You all know the saying, “You get what you pay for.” It’s an important life lesson that rings true for many aspects of life. Like cheap tools, the pleasure we get for the minimal cost outlay quickly evaporates as soon as it breaks much sooner than it should. Shoulda bought the good one is what we inevitably say to ourselves every time.

I credit my early foundations in motorcycling to my beloved Suzuki SV650. Like with any sport, you need to learn the basics before you can progress to the more advanced stuff, and while my motorcycling career progressed on a number of different motorcycles over the years, my foundation was solidly built on my humble little SV.

Say, did we miss the Suzuki GSX-R’s 30th birthday party? Sorry about that – but you know how it is when you have so many children running around the house. You lose track. The GSX-R grew so ubiquitous over the years – if you weren’t tripping over one in the garage, you were backing over one in a parking lot or crashing one at Willow Springs. Lately, however, there seems to be a lot of interest in the motorcycle that led Suzuki directly to the GSX-R. That would be the GS1000R, better known now as XR69.

Ripping a 175 horsepower street bike down the street or around the track is one thing. Setting one up with metal spikes and knobbie dirt tires so it can be ridden off-road is quite another but that’s exactly what these guys did. Would you have the guts to take this crazy Suzuki GSX-R1000 for a ride down the trail?

By now you should know quite a bit about the new, 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000 (and, by extension, the GSX-R1000R), since we’ve written a lot about them lately. We’ve gone over technical details and riding impressions mainly, and while those are obviously the most timely and important things people want to know about the bike, we’ve got even more nuggets of information about the new GSX-R, learned from the recent U.S. press introduction of the standard model the Monday following the U.S. Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas. Factoids, if you will, these little bits of info didn’t really find a home in our First Ride reviews, but we had to share them with you somehow. So, herein are nine things you didn’t know about the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000.

Head Cheese Duke may have gotten a chance to ride the new Suzuki GSX-R1000R at Phillip Island – which is probably tied at the top of every moto-journo’s bucket list of tracks to ride alongside the Mugello track in Italy – but as far as consolation prizes go, getting to ride at the Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, is pretty darn good. My steed? Ironically enough, the 2017 Suzuki GSX-R1000. While my bike may be down one R to the one Kevin rode, to underestimate the single-R Gixxer would be a huge mistake. Let’s take a closer look to why.

It’s been eight long years since Suzuki last updated its GSX-R1000, and the time they spent creating the new one has been well worth it. Everything from the engine to the frame to the electronics and suspension has been given a ground-up redo, creating the best Gixxer Thou ever. Now boasting as much power as BMW’s ferocious S1000RR, Suzuki is ready to take the fight to the top rivals in the class.

We live in an age of specialization and performance. A few words written by one of MO’s finest the other day drove this home to me. He had muttered those magic words: “200 miles per hour.” That is a very impressive number indeed. There was a time when topping a “Ton” (100 mph) was the magic number to the porridge pot helmet crowd on their British cafe racers, today we can kick around the notion of 200 mph without being regarded as completely daft.*

This week’s video comes to us across The Pond from Britain’s Got Talent. Chloe Crawford, a magician from Portsmouth via Las Vegas tries to impress Simon Cowell and the other judges by making a Suzuki GSX-R disappear.

With 2014 just around the corner, it’s time to take a look back at the year that was and revisit the top news stories from the motorcycling world in 2013.