The Suzuki GSX R750

The Suzuki GSX R750 was based on their endurance bike, the GS1000R XR41, which won the 1982 World Endurance Championship. In fact it was hard to tell the road going version from the endurance machine which copies the twin headlamp fairing and the 18 inch wheels.

This road going bike was designed to address the problem of power and weight prevalent at the time. Suzuki had decided to try and leap frog the competition by designing a Superbike that not only went well but also handled well. The GSX R750 had the design brief to be ultra-powerful and for the first time in a Superbike, to also be ultra-light.

 

The lightness was achieved in two ways. The first consisted of a radical new aluminium frame. Aluminium was already used for the frames of Suzuki's RG 250 lightweights, but this new frame was not only the first to be able to handle high horsepower, it also had some 60 less parts than a steel frame of that era.

 

Another stroke of genius by the Suzuki engineers was the use of oil cooling. One of the problems of engine cooling is that straight forward air cooled engines suffer a degradation in performance as they get hotter. Until then, the traditional remedy to this was to add water cooling, but the drawback with water cooling meant the fitment of additional parts and therefore increased weight, which went some way to reduce the performance increase achieved by the cooling itself.