BRAINS BEHIND THE BLADE – YUZURU ISHIKAWA

Having built Honda’s RCV and RC213V-S, you can rest assured that he was the right man to develop the latest Blade. Here’s what he had to tell us… Why has it taken so long to build this bike?

With development, there’s often a lot of prioritising which models get worked on first. When a bike is being evolved rather than revolutionised, the process to produce a new machine is much quicker. But the thing with the new Fireblade is it is a ground-up motorcycle. The electronics are on another level, the frame is revolutionary and the philosophy on the whole package is very different to any Fireblade that’s come before. To build a bike this special, this competent, it takes a whole lot of time, learning and development. People were expecting us to bring them something special, and now here it is. It’s maybe taken us more time than people would have hoped, but we’re very sure they’ll find the wait has been worth it. Track first, road second; what prompted this switch of thinking?

It was quite a simple one, really. We had a good, hard look at our customer demographics and we saw that more and more sportsbike buyers were using their bike on track, so we wanted to build a motorcycle that delivered for their needs. Of course, we’ve always been proud of building Fireblades that are great on the road, and can be made great on the track, but the time had finally come to swing the balance. It was a tough call to make, because it meant we’d maybe have to compromise in certain areas, such as easy town handling, in favour of high speed stability and agility. To achieve these new goals, we had to start from scratch. How closely linked is the Blade to the RC213V-S?

We transferred a lot of the mentality and thinking from the RCV into the new Fireblade. The main implementations were the mirroring the centre of gravity (which is now higher) and matching the RCV’s levels of inertia. The frame was largely influenced by the RC213V-S too, as well as the design of the RCV MotoGP machine; some areas of the Fireblade’s frame actually mirror the prototype machine’s profiles and dynamics. Another borrowed element was the engine’s six-point mounting system, which allowed us to fine tune the flex of the chassis. Why wasn’t it a V4?

The back-to-front size and height of a V4 motor really restricts you in terms of layout, which meant it could have held us back a little with the new Fireblade. Obviously there are a lot of great virtues to V4 motors, as used in our GP machine and RC213V-S, including the ability to rev an engine very high and produce lots of power, but to make those gains a reality you also have to look at switching to pneumatically operated valves, which adds cost and complexity. Fundamentally, we were able to build a whole new engine that achieved the goals we wanted for it, so there was no need to pursue the V4 direction. Did you consider V-Tec?

If you’re using a device to enhance performance, in a sense, you become dependent on that device. So we thought the best approach was to build the motor as organically as possible, to make it as strong and powerful as possible without needing to resort to additional technology, and we’re very happy with what we’ve achieved. We’re not saying that we will never look to devices to improve the Fireblade’s motor, but right now we don’t need them.