Suzuki GSXR-750 Sportbike Review

This is one of the shining examples of successful product planning. The change was afoot in the early-to-mid 1980s. Public taste was evolving. And Suzuki, as always, was strongly motivated to innovate because for them, ideas had to take the place of big budgets.

Honda, the industry Juggernaut, had a multiple personalities. One part was progressive, creating the water-cooled Interceptor Superbike of 1983. Another part was traditional, continuing to crank out elaborations of their conservative “iron bikes” of the 1970s –bikes whose distinctive styling vaguely evoked Honda’s Grand Prix successes of the 1960s, but which were heavy. Built in this way, a sporting 1000-cc four weighed 600 pounds.

While a 600-lb sportbike had no future, the nature of four-stroke motorcycles was changing as smaller, more agile machines – GSXR-750  and Secas – found favor with a public that wanted something beyond two-wheeled power stations with killer quarter-mile time and top speed. The giant sit-up liter-bikes that had made household words of the names Eddie Lawson, Freddie Spencer, and Wes Cooley had been exciting to watch, but extensive modifications had been necessary to make them survive even short 50-mile events.

Suzuki planners set themselves the task, not of just joining the new trend, but of leading it. Motorcyclists certainly wanted high performance, but now they wanted bikes with more than one dimension. Honda had built the Interceptor 750 as a homologation special, built in limited numbers to make a Superbike AMA-legal. But the public loved its new agility and all-around performance. Yet it too was an “iron bike”; American Honda fabricator Todd Schuster had said at the time,, “There’s only one chassis heavier than this one in the history of racing – the 1953 Hudson Hornet.”