Drop in on any sportbike joint, from huge blowouts like Atlantic Bike Week in Myrtle Beach to the smallest sucker-free street races in Philadelphia, and you're pretty much guaranteed to see plenty of flash 'Busas. The big Suzuki has dominated the extreme street scene for going on nine years now and continues to sell so well that the folks from Hamamatsu have hardly bothered to change their flagship GSX-R since it was first released in late 1998-something virtually unheard of in today's "redesign-every-two-years" sportbike marketplace.
Such incredible popularity-and longevity-mean that there are an awful lot of Hayabusas rolling on the streets, and after a few years, even the coolest custom 'Busas start looking pretty damn mundane as new guys keep pushing the custom envelope. This reality was made clear to B.J. and Johnnie Basnett of Rick's Motorcycles in Plaistow, New Hampshire (the same guys who built the wild CBR900RR in our Jan. '06 issue, the one with more gold than Flava Flav's grille), when the shop recently reacquired a '00 'Busa that it had tweaked out for a customer a few years ago. It was a clean, mild custom with some nice touches-plenty of polished aluminum, a stretched swingarm from C&S Customs, a Yosh pipe and even some translucent powdercoating on the rims. It was a cool bike-by '03 standards-but it's '06 now, and if they expected to resell the bike for top dollar, they knew that they were going to have to come up with something significantly more radical that this.
Of course, B.J. and Johnnie were up to the challenge, and luckily, they invited us to follow along for the duration of the project, agreeing to share their tips and tweaks with us along the way. "It was obvious that some time and money were put into this bike, but when it comes to 'Busas, things change pretty fast," B.J. explained. "Every week there's more aftermarket accessories available for these bikes, so we wanted to do some serious performance upgrades and make it look sharper at the same time, to help whoever bought this bike to stay ahead of the curve."
The plan was simple: clean up and update the styling, dial in more bling, make room for the fattest rear tire they could find, and hey, who wouldn't want an extra 50 hp, too? But we're getting ahead of ourselves already...
The first step, of course, with any custom bike project should be to come up with a workable plan. The key to a successful project plan, the Basnetts tell us, is to be as realistic as possible with your expectations regarding the bike, your budget, and your mechanical abilities. Of course, with a duo like the Basnetts at the wrenches there was no question about ability, though bike and budget are always an issue-even for a high-profile shop like Rick's.
The first thing the brothers wanted to tackle was the powerplant, and almost immediately, hard decisions had to be made. Originally, the guys wanted to add a Velocity Racing Stage II turbo system, knowing for certain that the Barry Henson-designed unit would easily put the big Suzook well into the 300-plus hp neighborhood-especially since the donor bike had already been equipped with a Wiseco 1400cc big-bore kit. Nothing, after all, helps sell bikes better than a big number. Upon further reflection, though, the Basnetts decided to put together a milder motor combination for this bike, with the idea of being more realistic about the type of riding that this bike would most likely see in the real world.
"You can get all kinds of crazy horsepower with a big-bore motor, but it's really better suited for the track," B.J. said. "If you're going to ride it on the street and deal with stuff like getting stuck in traffic, a built motor is just more likely to give you overheating problems and other trouble," he explained. With this in mind, the bike was torn down completely, and the bored-out motor was yanked out, to be replaced with a stock-displacement, low-mile (3000) engine sourced from a salvaged '03 Hayabusa to insure a more reliable engine for the final product.