Herself took Kawasaki’s 2006 litre-class sports flagship to work, 72km there and back of heavy traffic and tight corners, and found it surprisingly wieldy for a bike that’s supposedly even more racetrack-orientated than its predecessor.

Most of the changes to the engine have focused on making the power delivery more linear, with a revised cylinder head, inlet valves reduced 1mm to 30mm diameter, new pistons and fuel injectors and a revised crankshaft balance factor.

The power is still concentrated in the upper third of the rev-counter dial; the 998cc transverse four will pull strongly from 4000rpm but the Warp Factor point is still just before nine.

The difference is in the transition; the engine comes on cam a lot more smoothly, with less tendency to upset the chassis. It’s a smooth, effortless rush of power that seems unstoppable, firmly tilting the horizon and gobbling enormous amounts of road, especially in the higher gears, but without spinning the rear wheel.

In a word, the power is accessible, any time you have sufficient road room – and the feeling as the bike accelerates through the transition is addictive. 135kW on a machine weighing only 175kg translates to the kind of performance that used to be the preserve of fighter pilots.

In high-speed testing the bike went up to 260km/h very, very quickly and topped out after about 1200m at full bore with 298km/h showing on the digital speedo at 12 200rpm – a genuine 292km/h, allowing for speedo error.

In the lower gears the new engine is willing to pull smoothly past its power peak of 11 700rpm, all the way to the red line at 13 000, which is more important on the track than on the street, where it is rarely necessary to hold a gear to get the best drive out of a corner.

In normal road riding, however, the revised fuel-injection system practically eliminates the dreaded “spritzer snatch”; the ZX-10R can be ridden smoothly through slow traffic under perfect control. It’s an impressive performance, rather like a shark cruising through a shoal of sardines.

The light clutch with predictable take-up point helps, as does the revised six-speed gearbox. Kawasaki has always engineered a bit more lash than the industry norm into its transmissions to ensure consistently dependable shifts, at the expense of a slightly clunky and often noisy action.

Slicker box

The ZX-10R team has noticeably tightened the tolerances; the result is a slicker box with a shorter lever throw that still doesn’t miss shifts and lends itself admirably to seamless upshifts, even at full throttle.

The revised crankcases place the crankshaft 20mm higher in the frame, slightly raising the centre of effort and making the 2006 version turn in even quicker than its brutally quick-steering predecessor – but it takes a little more rider input to initiate the movement, making the bike feel more stable.

The steering head has been pushed 15mm further forward, the swing-arm is 4mm longer and the rear tyre profile has been increased from 50 to 55, all of which has shifted the weight bias rearwards.

An adjustable Öhlins steering damper is standard this year for the first time, almost ending the head shake that all short-coupled, extremely powerful, bikes are prone to on upshifts.

Composed

The new ZX-10R is, in a word, composed; it sweeps effortlessly through long bends and dives into tight corners on the brakes with equal ease, reads you chapter and verse on bumpy roads without ever getting out of shape thanks to surprisingly supple suspension and comes out of fast corners hard on the gas with the rear tyre scrabbling for grip, right on the brink of spinning up and doing a Noriyuki Haga impersonation.

And yet the sheer strength of its response to rider input is a constant reminder that you have to ride this bike with your head, not your right hand; it’ll bike you if you don’t.

The brakes, as before, are Tokico’s one-piece radial – mount callipers on 300mm petal discs; their response is absolutely linear – the more you squeeze, the more you stop, simple as that and very confidence-building.

The seating position is more compact, making the bike feel much smaller than its predecessor, although that’s mostly an illusion; the fairing is actually a little wider.

The forward seating position, low screen and my long spine combined to obscure the top third of the instrument panel with the edge of the screen; that can be a real nuisance at full tilt – if the bike were mine I’d fit a taller screen.

The real dial

The rev counter has a real needle this year instead of a circular bar-graph (there must have been a lot a complaints about that one for KHI to make such an about-face) but the needle is still too short and it’s still difficult to read in sunlight.

The instrument panel is very compact, very informative, utterly logical in layout and a huge improvement on the previous effort; Japan, Inc is finally beginning to realise that old-fashioned performance bikes (and cars) had big round dials with long, thick needles for a reason.

The bike is definitely not pretty from the front; the beady-eyed little projector headlights work fine but are out of proportion, over-emphasising the gaping maw of the ram air intake between them.

The smoother, more rounded new fairing works, though; the test ZX-10R returned a startling 6.4 litres/100km across the time we had it, including performance testing.

It’s a measure of how important this thing’s outright performance is to Kawasaki to realise that for once the stylists were forced to take a back seat to the airflow boffins.

Front-row performance

The 2006 Kawasaki ZX-10R, the first with fashionable underseat exhausts (well, almost – apparently the designers had heat dissipation issues), is a distinctly wieldier weapon than its older sister, easier to ride fast, on street and track.

With only the most basic of competition development it’s already delivering front-row performances in SA Superbike racing; it’s the complete packeage – not yer average commute scoot, as Herself put it.