| | | | Road test: Suzuki GSR 600, Bandit replacement with no name |  Written: 24/04/2006 : 11:06. Read 18490 times (25/day). | | The integrality of this filed article is for Premium Members. | As I struggled to find the correct headline for this article, I also struggled to see where the new Suzuki naked would fit in the model range. GSR 600 is the perfect answer to Honda Hornet, Yamaha FZ6 and even Kawasaki Z750. However in Suzuki’s own model range there’s a GSF 650 and SV650 already and that would seem to be enough middleweights for any manufacturer. It is therefore expected that GSR 600 is the Bandit 650 replacement, but Suzuki just forgot to remove the long serving Bandit from its model range.
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GSR 600 feels nimble and light with a soundtrack slightly better than the K5 GSX-R600, at least when standing still. Before the fuel injection started to annoy me, I noticed how brilliant the handling is on this new middleweight from Suzuki. The swing-arm is based on that of the new GSX-R 600. However it is built specially for the GSR as it’s got a cut out where the exhaust tubes are heading up beneath the pillion seat. It’s still really rigid and far superior to that offered by the Japanese competition. GSR 600 really handles so well that it surprised me as being the most entertaining bike this year on my usual route home. Certainly more entertaining than Yamaha’s new R6 that I rode on these very roads only two weeks before.
With the 98bhp engine it is never going to generate any top speeds remotely close to a full on supersport. But everywhere else the performance is perfectly suited for the roads you’d spend most of the time on. The engine still needs plenty of revs, but less than a supersport. Just around 10,000 rpm is where the engine is at its most lively and also where the power and torque peaks within 1,000 rpm from each other. This is where you want to be when going fast for good drive out of the corners. As soon as you let the revs settle down too much that fuel injection starts annoying with a jerk that is just too much to forgive easily. Particularly for town riding, filtering and generally where you want to use the smooth lower end of the power band it is a problem. Not a problem bigger than a dash of clutch can’t fix, but still annoying. For this reason I preferred to use the engine a bit more on high revs than I at first intended. Since the GSR handles so well this was not a problem and I was happy tackling the tightest hair-bend corners quicker than anything else this year. The very steady and grippy Bridgestone BT014’s helps a lot-particularly as the suspension is in perfect tune with the tyres and balanced chassis.
The styling and mass centralisation has dictated how the bike looks at the front end with a wide front part of the petrol tank where the blinkers are integrated nicely. This gives t ...
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