Riding the Motopower Firehawk

I am sat at the lights. They’re on red and everyone’s getting twitchy. I slip the Honda into first, holding the revs at 7000rpm. Red and amber then green and I’m feeding out the clutch, the front wheel swinging left and right, pulling just inches from the ground.

The revs climb, the quickshifter allows me to snick up to second without backing off and I’m charging for the first corner, Laser full exhaust system barking its intent. The Land Rover Discovery turbo diesel is history…

It’s easy to get all carried away on the Motopower Firehawk and turn every bend into a save-a-second-a-lap opportunity and every roundabout into a race to exit faster than your rivals – dusting up anything in your way in the process.

Perhaps it’s not surprising as the bike is the nearest thing you can get to a British Superbike-spec machine for the road. This one is based on the FireBlades being run by Motopower Honda and ridden by Gary Mason and Matt Llewellyn.

Gas-flowing, upping the compression ratio and changes to valve timing and valves are fair game in BSB on the 1000cc fours. Add in airbox mods, ram-air (on the Blades) and a full race exhaust system and you’re getting near 180bhp, we estimate.

Imagine all that in a road bike. You don’t have to. Russell Savory, boss of RS Performance and the Motopower Honda BSB team, has made it reality.

Savory’s been a tuner since Alvin Stardust was coo-ca-chooing and 16-year-olds dreamt of go-faster FS1-Es. He has built plenty of limited edition, big-money specials, including the Evo Blade. The Motopower Firehawk is his latest.

You can define how far you want to go with the bike’s spec, but for the one we rode you’d be looking at the best part of £13,400. You also get a BSB season pass plus full hospitality with the team thrown in.

The new Blade looks fantastic, all jagged lines and black beam frame strutting out of the bodywork. And surrounded by the real BSB bikes with the team hard at work putting them together for the Donington Park round, the Hawk looks as sexy as the real racers and puts the standard bike to shame.

It’s got the same bodywork as a standard Blade sprayed up in Motopower’s colours, with the added extra of a single seat unit. At the front there’s new ram-air tubes feeding into an airbox developed by RS Performance. The Blade doesn’t have ram-air as standard. It gives the bike a more purposeful look, along with the race sticker kit and that high-level Laser carbon exhaust can.

The gold anodised OZ Racing wheels and jagged lines of the Dunlop D208GP tyres really finish the bike off. Not only do they look fantastic, they also weigh 1.7kg (3.7lb) less than standard which helps to quicken the steering. And then there’s the brakes, a pair of tiny discs fitted both sides of the front wheel, assisted by Goodridge hoses.

The calipers feature an extra brake pad between the discs to give more pad area than conventional brakes, improving stopping power. The small discs improve the bike’s ability to steer sharply at high speed. Because there is less spinning mass, less force is required to change the direction of the wheel.

The suspension on this bike features a WP rear shock with standard forks using stiffer springs and RS fork bottoms to enable the fitting of the Beringer discs and calipers.

As to exactly what’s in the motor, Savory isn’t saying, he just likes to say this one’s been breathed on and is aimed at making the bike’s power totally linear and usable. The rev limit has been upped from the standard bike’s 12,200rpm to 13,500rpm. Savory says it can go higher. Though why you’d need to on the road beats me. And on a track you’re going to struggle to use the revs as it makes so much power low-down.

Cutting through endless sleepy lanes and villages the bike behaves as well as a standard one. In fact, better. A new chip changes the fuel-injection mapping and makes the bike less snatchy at low-speeds than a stocker.

But apart from the noise of the pipe and the fact your feet sit higher and further back on the adjustable rearsets, it could be a standard Blade.

Standard until you arrive at the white sign with the black stripe and give it the what for. This certainly ain’t standard. Standard Blades don’t wheelie at 100mph under the sheer force of acceleration without the help of a crest and deft throttle work. This does.

The drive from the motor is exactly as Savory explained it: Totally linear. Drive it hard in first gear and you’ll be eating the top yokes, do the same in second and you’ll be praying that WP steering damper works as the front wheel lands.

Everything’s just where you expect it to be – this is a Blade after all. The clocks are standard but there’s a few more numbers etched on to the rev-counter. The standard bike’s red zone stops at 13,000rpm this one carries on to 15,000rpm. Drive it from 4000rpm and instead of the standard bike’s dull zhing, the ram-air grunts and the pipe howls. By 7000rpm things start getting more interesting and there’s a clean stepless power curve all the way as far as you dare until the Hawk is screaming at 13,500rpm.

The handlebars go very, very light in the first three gears but the acceleration doesn’t drop off. Hit fourth and it just keeps coming. But what makes it even more fun is the quick-shifter which you can turn on or off via a switch under the clocks. Most quickshifters on road bikes are a nightmare of snatchiness and hypersensitivity, leading to gear changes when you don’t want them. But not this one. The Translogic shifter features a compensator which instead of cutting all four cylinders electronically as your foot taps the lever, it just cuts two cylinders, making the change much smoother in road use.

With this kind of bhp and drive, any road becomes a speed blur. Yet you always feel like you’re the boss. Dial in as much throttle as you need on the way out of a bend and there are no surprises, just bags of drive and a digital speedo going mental.

Get it too hot and there’s help at hand, the Beringers having more than enough stopping power, though they don’t quite have the feel of the standard brakes. On a trackday or under real hard riding, however, the brakes would come into their own.

Under braking there’s a lot less pitch and dive from the forks and rear shock than standard, which makes the ride more settled. Not that the Blade is bad under braking.

Generally the ride is firmer but a lot better balanced and set-up so it rides bumps well and you barely need the steering damper even though the Firehawk comes on Dunlop D208GPs. It’s a race compound tyre with a very pointy profile, which can make some bikes unstable on the road.

You can crack it over on your knee, feel the rear shock damping out all it needs to and taking the strain under power without any danger of the rear tyre breaking loose. Which all together makes the Motopower Firehawk a devastating road bike.

Many owners will buy them for trackdays only. But this is much more than a race bike for the road.

As we said in MCN when we first reported on the bike, you could take it down the shops and it would sit there without boiling over, ticking over all politely.

Just don’t expect your shopping to be in one piece when you get home.