Significant Others
Best Sportbike: Yamaha YZF-R6
What can you say about a bike that rushed to the top of the hotly competitive middleweight supersport category and fended off the charge of the revamped Kawasaki ZX-6R-all in its sophomore year? For that matter, how can you criticize a bike that eats its classmates for lunch at the racetrack (in stock form) and fails to have any major shortcomings as an everyday motorcycle? Well, we say it's the best sportbike of 2000. You might argue in favor of a 929 or GSX-R750 (the Suzuki would have taken this category had it not walked off with the MOTY honors), but middleweights are some of the best sporting tools around, with the added bonus of giving equal opportunities to hardened back-road chargers and newbies alike.
Best Cruiser: Harley-Davidson Softail Deuce
Plug the new Twin Cam 88B engine into the most popular chassis Harley's ever built, slather it in cool, out-of-the-lines bodywork, and you get what we think is a breakthrough Hog. For the first time, the Softail goes as well as it looks and that's no small achievement given the constraints of its standard-Harley architecture. The millions of dollars poured into the company's Product Development Center are finally showing some return on the investment.
Best Naked Bike: Kawasaki ZRX1100
Is it a naked bike? A retrobike? A musclebike? All of those, actually. Kawasaki unwittingly tapped into a huge well of sentiment for the universal Japanese motorcycle of the '70s and '80s with the ZRX1100. Maybe it took the lime-green, Eddie Lawson-Replica paint or the only mildly detuned ZX-11 engine to do it, but the ZRX was the first of its kind to really capture the hearts of aged enthusiasts. (Remember the Zephyr? Kawasaki would rather not.) What sets the ZRX apart, of course, is that it really performs; building an ELR-replica with a wheezy motor and floppy suspension would surely have doomed the model. Instead, the ZRX turns, stops and goes like a modern motorcycle, which is as it should be.
Best Fantasy Bike: MV Agusta F4S
Run your hand along the fairing. Brush lightly against the semiperforated-plastic body accents (a direct thumb-in-the-eye to the carbon-fiber craze sweeping Italobikedom) and get a whiff of the sweet, castor-oil smell trailing behind the tidy radial-four-valve engine. Gently polish the wicked, four-outlet, underseat exhaust. Ah, yes, a feast for the senses. There is no motorcycle this side of a factory World Superbike contestant that seems as trick or as casually outlandish as the MV Agusta F4S. For every wide-eyed sportbike rider who wins the lottery, upon this is undisputedly where the first dollop of cash would be spent.
Best Tourer: BMW R1100RT
Touring bikes are big, like Gold Wings and Ventures, and carry everything you ever thought you needed from the house and garage. They're slathered in chrome and festooned with doodads, right? Not in our book. Our predilection toward finding sinuous roads between points A and B leads us to one of the only rational touring bikes we know-the BMW R1100RT. It's considerably more comfortable and tour-ready than the R1100RS or R1100S yet agile enough to make BMW's big lug, the K1200LT, feel like it's rolling on flat tires. For most of us, this is as big and creature-feature-laden a bike as we'll ever need (though Honda's ST1100 is a close second here). Rumors suggest that BMW will update the RT with the S/GS-spec six-speed transmission and some additional displacement for 2001 or 2002.
Best GT: Suzuki GSX1300R Hayabusa
In the speed wars that never seemed to get out of the barracks this year, the Suzuki Hayabusa held the rear guard as the fastest production motorcycle we've tested. But that's not why we love it. No...it's because this bike transcends the missile-on-wheels category with uncommon comfort and flexibility to go with its mind-bending acceleration. It is not, by any means, a single-focus machine, nor does it pay the penalty for shouldering a big gun of an engine; get the thing above walking speed and it magically sheds weight and gains incredible poise.
By Kevin Wing
Enjoyed this Post? Subscribe to our RSS Feed, or use your favorite social media to recommend us to friends and colleagues!