Readers who want to be endowed with maximum info will want to first check out our 600 Street shootout. You get bonus marks for reading our ZX-6R First Ride and our 2008 Supersport Shootout.
It’s a reasonable thing for most enthusiasts visiting this illustrious webzine to expect our reviews of motorcycles to be conclusive. After all, when we factor in the talents of our current crew of “volunteer staff,” our collective experiences span nearly a century of riding and getting to know just about every make and model of bike available for the past 30 years. So plucking out the best should be as easy as getting out of bed, right?
Oh, if only it were so easy. Sometimes even the pros are left scratching their noggins like a small party of confused chimps. Such is the case with the 2009 crop of Japanese Supersports.
We recently tasked ourselves with putting the racy 600cc weapons from Honda, Kawasaki, Suzuki and Yamaha through the wringer in everyday environs – streets, freeways, canyons, parking lots… places where most race-bred middleweights will spend the majority of their life after exiting dealer showrooms. At the end of this real-world exercise we rested confidently in our choice of the all-new 2009 Kawasaki ZX-6R as the new King of Supersport. The new Ninja’s best-in-class power and a much sharper chassis than previous gave it the nod in our street-biased shootout. Though time on the dyno provided scientific proof that the revamped Ninja had indeed shed its softish powerband from the previous iteration, we didn’t really need dyno results to tell us what we were already feeling.
“Its engine reminds me a lot of the old 636,” Mark Gardiner rightly said of the new Ninja.
The Ninja pumped out nearly 108 rear-wheel ponies on the Area P dyno, 5 horsies up on the next-best Gixxer and 10 more than the CBR. The R6 also had some top-end horsepower stolen in 2009 because of noise regulations. For the full story, scroll down to the sidebar on this page.
Not only is the ZX’s engine revised and retuned to make the most power, the chassis received numerous updates to make it lighter steering and better responding, it lost upwards of 20 pounds, and it retained its best-in-class brakes. The Ninja went from almost last in 2008 to top of the class this year after our street ride.
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