Really, these tires are garbage, there’s no grip and no feel. To top it off, the stock D204s sapped any confidence I might have otherwise had. The stock exhaust weighed as much as an entire R6. The stock forks were too heavily sprung and too lightly damped, meaning they failed to deliver good feedback and struggled to keep the front wheel in contact with the road over bumps. It didn’t take too many passes on the Snake to find all the stock bike’s shortcomings. Roll off and you’ll smash your nuts on the tank. Roll on the throttle and that’s not a huge problem. It does help the bike accelerate more instantaneously, but the delivery is just too abrupt to be of much use. A-mode sharpens throttle response in the low and mid range. I didn’t feel it delivered Yamaha’s claim of “optimum overall performance, but it was the smoothest of the three modes. Standard Mode is supposed to be just that. It sort of makes the R1 feel like a 600, which I find handy when breaking in new DOT rubber on the street during LA winters. B-mode is suggested for times when you need sensitive throttle input. That first time out, I wanted to see how different the new D-modes delivered by the ride-by-wire system really were. My first ride on the R1 was on a road I know all too well.
I was confident I could get that power back easily and that’s all it took to open my wallet.
Instead, I did my homework and found out the source of the power restriction. Thank god I don’t believe all the hype I read in those shootouts. The mags were impressed with the new motor’s tractable delivery, but it was getting beat down every single straight! The biggest problem was apparently a lack of top end power on North American bikes, a restriction put in place to meet stringent EPA regs. But, for some reason US reviews were the exact opposite, putting the new Yamaha in damn near last place. European liter bike shootouts had the R1 either on top or within the top three.
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