BMW S1000RR Superbike - First Ride

by Charlie Steinman

Editor's note: Charlie Steinman has submitted several articles with a very unique point of view about his participation in motorcycle road racing to www.lonestarcycle.com. You can find them here. Charlie plans to take his new BMW S1000RR to Utah and put it through speed tests on the famous Bonneville Salt Flats.

So on Saturday morning I picked-up the BMW S1000RR from Lone Star BMW in the truck, carried it home, and couldn't resist taking the bike for a spin.

So I took the bike for a 120-mile loop out through the Hill Country. 1836 through Wimberley, 32 out to 473, to 281, and back the same route.

First a disclaimer: This is an expert rider's bike. Riders below expert should not ride this bike. (Editor's note: At this point, Charlie emphatically restates his opinion that the S1000RR should only be ridden by expert riders.)

Okay. That's out of the way. Now run, don't walk to your nearest BMW dealer and buy this bike.

Charlie Steinman tries on his new 2010 BMW S1000RR at Lone Star BMW while Roger Albert
of OnRoadOffRoad Cycles fine tunes the suspension to precisely match Charlie to the bike.

Photo © 2010 - Lone Star BMW

This is the finest bike I have ever ridden. It is not a bike to be used as a daily rider or for riding in urban traffic. It can be done, easily, but to use the bike for those reasons would be to dishonor the bike and to do yourself a disservice.

The bike is a purpose-built race bike. The bars are very close to the triple tree. The lock-to-lock turning ability of the bike is thereby limited. I would find it a challenge to ride this bike in Austin traffic or in a greasy HEB parking lot.

That said, riding the bike, there is no sense of the bike. No sense of an engine. It's like there is an infinite power unit between your legs and you are flying. Like in your dreams of flying.

Riding the bike is subtle beyond description. The slightest input happens right now. Think it, and it happens. The bike is steered using head and body movements, not really with the hands. Shift the head and a lttle weight to the inside, the bike turns. Swing a knee out, the bike turns. The bike is designed to be ridden and steered with the outside elbow and outside knee. The bike fits best in that posture. There are gripping surfaces on the tank sides to be gripped by the outside forearm.

The transmission is like a Swiss watch. The lightest of toe, the slighest of *snic*, a quarter-inch of movement, and the gear changes.

The brakes would stop a Mac truck. The term "one-finger brakes" is used a lot. I thought that was a myth, as I've never actually felt that. Until now. The lightest of touch with just the tip of one finger and the brakes engage like the Hand of God. The slightest of additional pressure with the fingertip and the Hand of God grips even tighter. The brakes just keep on getting stronger. There's absolutely zero brake fade. It would take a professional rider to get these brakes to fade, and even then I bet the bike would go end-over forward (with the ABS 'off').

The chassis is the most rock-solid I've ever felt. Because of my very real concerns about the bike's short wheelbase, I was afraid that the bike would be twitchy, especially on an uneven surface. Drifty on Bonneville's salt. So I sought a section of roadway that I knew had recently been ground-down by a re-surfacing machine. Those machines leave deep longitudial grooves that normally throw a bike around. But nothing happened. Nothing. Solid as a rock. Increased speed. Nothing. I know that this bike will surf over undulating salt with no excitement. The suspension and chassis are a tad too firm until about 80 mph. 80 mph is about the bottom-end of the bike's happy place. At speeds below that, the bike doesn't feel happy. Above 80, and the bike settles and becomes very comfortable. Hugely stable and responsive.

I've left the engine for last. How to describe what is essentially infinite power? There really isn't a sense of "engine" from the engine, say, in terms of a V-twin or a vertical twin. There is zero vibration. The mirrors stay crystal clear. The engine note is mostly like the hum of an air conditioning unit, until a shift or a throttle change brings on the loud, cat-like scream of an F1 car. Honestly, that scream raises the hair on the back of your neck. It's intoxicating. On a sport bike, normally my hands would go numb at about 30 miles. In 120 miles of riding the bike straight through, my hands never went numb.

What is infinite power? I kept the bike in "Rain Mode" which is a de-powered mode for riding in the rain. "Rain Mode" was scary enough.

So I'm cruising at about 85 and think about a little more speed. Just a slight bit of additional pressure on the throttle, didn't really move the throttle. The engine note rises by half a note. One-thousand-one. I look down and the speedo is sweeping through 105 and into 110. Literally in one second. And that was poking along at 6,500 or 7,000 rpm. The bike redlines at 14,000 rpm. I started making very unwise passes on the double-yellow with oncoming traffic. Think the pass and it happens. Flick the bike left, a touch of throttle, F1 hair-raising scream, the car just goes *whiff* to the rear, flick the bike back to the right. No fuss.

I dropped the throttle at 100 mph in sixth to see what happens. Normally a sport bike would, in that situation, slide or skip the rear wheel against engine compression. But on the S, the combination of slipper clutch and engine mapping actually controls the resistive force transmitted to the rear wheel. There was no jerk from the chain. Engine braking just started low and gently, and in a half-second ramped-up in a delicious and most-satisfactory way.

So I'm guessing on my little ride, which was quite brisk once I started to grow into sync with the bike, that I may have tapped into maybe 20% of this bike's potential, which would have been 80% of the Thruxton's potential. On a track, after a year of practice, I could probably get the S to give me 50% of its potential.

I bet that there aren't 200 riders in the world, mostly professional racers, who could ride this bike the way it was designed to be ridden.

So you see why only experts should ride the bike. And why every expert should ride the bike.

It's riding to the third power.

Charlie

This feature originally appeared in February 2010 - Updated: 02/28/10