ULTIMATE SPORTSBIKE 2020
After months of planning it’s finally here; the biggest, best and most comprehensive sportsbike test on the planet. It’s Fast Bikes magazine’s Ultimate Sportsbike 2020.
You don’t get any bigger, or better, than Ultimate Sportsbike. It’s Fast Bikes mag’s flagship sportsbike test and this year, it’s better than ever. We’ve taken nine of the very best sportsbikes and clocked a serious amount of miles, spun a serious amount of laps and wolfed down way more Big Macs than is advisable to establish the best sportsbike of 2020.
On the road, each bike has been ranked in terms of its comfort and usability, as well as its brakes, the effectiveness of its tech and its overall character, after taking each of the bikes on every kind of road possible, from smooth fast B-roads, to bumpy farm tracks, to motorways, to high streets.
On track, Dangerous Bruce has analysed all of the bikes’ drive, agility, stability, feel, tech and brakes, because we know that these bikes are exactly the type of thing that you are going to take on track, be it at a trackday or race meeting. And not only have we had all the bikes on the dyno and the scales, but Frodo had a date with a data logger, collating 0-100mph acceleration times and 100-0mph deceleration times, to throw some actual scientific data into the pot.
The contenders include last year’s Ultimate Sportsbike Champion, the unchanged BMW S 1000 RR M Sport, as well as second and third place finishers, the Aprilia RSV4 1100 Factory and the Ducati Panigale V4S, both slightly updated for 2020.
The Yamaha YZF-R1M has also been tweaked for this year but two of the most exciting additions to the 2020 line-up have to be Honda’s all-new CBR1000RR-R Fireblade, and Triumph’s also all-new Daytona Moto2 765. We’ve already banged on about how good they are, but we couldn’t wait to find out how they’d fare against the rest of the pack. And because it’s new, and Frodo waxed lyrical about how much he loved it on its launch earlier on this year (so much so that he actually went out and bought one), we invited a Ducati Panigale V2 along to the party, too.
A couple of superbike stalwarts that remain unchanged for this season, but still deserve a place in USB, are the Suzuki GSX-R1000R and Kawasaki ZX-10RR – both cracking road bikes in their own right, even if they aren’t quite as cutting edge as the competition.
If a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right, which is why we’ve gone to the lengths we have to put this mammoth superbike test together. It’s the ultimate test of the ultimate bikes on the road, on the track, on the dyno, and even on the scales. We’ve left no stone unturned in our quest to find the very best sportsbike money can buy in 2020, and it’s all here for you to take in…
From a safe social distance, the baby Panigale doesn’t look like a baby at all, and you’d be forgiven for thinking it was a full-on fire-breathing, 200bhp superbike. It gets some serious points in the aesthetics department with its bold Ducati red, its stubby underslung exhaust and its single-sided swingarm; it’s unmistakably
Italian and it's likely to give Ducatisti the world over a raging stiffy.
to And muster if the a lazy looks one, alone then are the only sound trick of enough the 955cc L-Twin Superquadro engine is sure to have the blood rushing south to finish the job. The twin-cylinder boom is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear when I fire a Duke up, and it takes me back to the good old days before they started bolting an extra two cylinders on the back of things. All it needed was the rattle of a dry clutch and I’d have been 10 years old again, staring at my dad’s mate’s 916.
In recent years, middleweight Dukes have felt slightly peculiar to me; almost like naked
bikes with some fairings slapped on them – high handlebars, low pegs, that kind of thing. Not the V2. As soon as you mount up, you’re treated to a sporty riding position on a bike that feels small and nimble, yet not too cramped. It was comfortable and I liked it.
I liked the dash too, which was a TFT jobby, like the one you’ll find on the flagship Panigale V4. The modes and settings are fairly easy to navigate through, even if the switchgear buttons are a bit naff and cheap looking. And the switchgear buttons continued to annoy me due to the fact that the ‘mode’ button is the indicator switch, so when you thumb the indicator switch just to double c c your n rs aren go ng, you en up getting all sorts of weird and wonderful messages from the dash. One to get used to.
Initial set-off on the V2 can be slightly jerky, but once you get rolling, the engine is pretty smooth. At the very bottom of the rev range, the Duke could get a bit chuggy, but from about 4000rpm onwards the torque doles itself out beautifully and progressively. It made it a very easy, forgiving bike to ride on the road, and whatever gear I was in, when I opened the taps, there was always adequate punch to make me go forward.
While the punch was adequate, it wasn’t mind-warpingly fast. Despite now being Euro5 compliant, this year’s bike has got more power and torque than the 959 that it replaces (thanks to new injectors and inlet ducts) and after reading of the bike’s claimed 155bhp, I was expecting something a little bit more manic – but manic it certainly wasn’t. Its performance on the dyno may go some way to explain why that was- the V2 made a measly 136bhp, underperforming compared with its claimed figure by a whopping 19bhp. Scandalous.
Our test also uncovered another dirty little secret about the V2; little red is carrying some timber. The ‘middleweight’ tipped the scales at 206kg, so in actual fact was one of the heftiest weapons on the test – and it made itself known on our road ride. It didn’t make the bike hard work to ride; on the contrary, it was very pleasant to ride, but it didn’t have that super agility that you expect from a middleweight sportsbike. It was
planted and surefooted at all times, but it didn’t handle like the super-sportsbike that I (half) expected it to.
And wheelies weren’t really the V2’s friend. I thought the torque and the bike’s ‘m to cause the odd cheeky wheelie to inadvertently happen, but they didn’t. Pulling them was a massive effort on the V2, even in first gear, which upset me tremendously.
Tech-wise, things are very positive for the little Duke with a six-axis IMU enabled electronics package, doing its best to keep you safe and help you go fast. It’s got all the same stuff as the V4, except lauch control , and works in a very similar way – not that you’re ever going to give the wheelie-control system much of a hard time. The shifter/
IT’S LIKELY TO GIVE DUCATISTI THE WORLD OVER A RAGING STIFFY
blipper combo was a very welcome addition to the party and worked perfectly 95% of the time, but every now and then on the upshift and downshift, the disengagement seemed to be ever so slightly delayed. I don’t know if it was something I was doing – perhaps at a certain revs, in a certain gear, that’s what it does, and it wasn’t a problem, but I did find it a little inconsistent.
After doing a fair few miles on the baby Pani I soon discovered that it suffers from the same leg toasting syndrome that its bigger brother does, and although probably not to the same extent as the V4, on a particularly hot day (which our V2 road test was not) I can imagine the extra hot engine being a serious nuisance.
On a positive note, the Brembo brakes, although not top-spec Stylema calipers, did a fantastic job of getting things hauled up with plenty of bite and plenty of strength. ABS can be binned off on the rear, and in ABS mode 1, it is almost unnoticeable at the front – so much so that you can have the thing stood on its nose without much effort at all.
The middle-of-the-road suspension (Showa forks, Sachs shock) did avery respect able job of keeping things sensible when the roads got a bit bumpy and even though the V2 is
DESPITE NOW BEING EURO5 COMPLIANT, THIS YEAR’S BIKE HAS GOT MORE POWER AND TORQUE THAN THE 959 THAT IT REPLACES
packing a few pounds, at normal road riding pace there were never any major dramas in the cornering department. A slightly stiffer setup would have probably aided things in the agility department but to the detriment of comfort.
The V2 is a very good road bike, there is no denying that, but £14,995 does seem like a lot of money for what it is. In this company, if you have only got 136bhp, you need to make up for it in plenty of other ways; you need to be really special. Unfortunately, the V2 just isn’t special enough.