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Dorian Gray
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2005
Location: Paris, France
 
2006-06-19, 18:35

This got me interested enough to check the specs for the engine to discover how Suzuki got that sort of speed out of the engine. Turns out the specs are the most outrageous I've ever seen (I'm not really into bikes, much less replicas), starting with a ridiculously over-square cylinder with 70.0 mm bore x 48.7 mm stroke, which gives the room needed for four huge titanium valves driven by hollow double overhead camshafts. I couldn't find the valve-timing info (I presume it has variable valve timing?), but it must be extremely aggressive to work at 15000 RPM. The forged alloy pistons have very short skirts, there are large vents in the crankcase to lower the pressure, the double-barrelled throttle bodies are 50 mm in diameter, there is a dedicated balancer shaft to reduce vibration from the crankshaft across the wide RPM range, and the compression ratio is also pretty high at 12.5. The exhaust system is also tuned to improve the torque range. Looks like Suzuki have thrown just about every technology available at the engine. They even designed a ram-air intake system to increase power at speed and positioned the engine in the chassis in such a way as to reduce intake port length.

The grand result is something close to 200 hp/litre. Which is frankly insane. As I said, I'm no expert on motorbikes, but surely this amazing piece of engineering won't last more than a couple of summers before the engine blows?
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