Throughout the first half of the year the bodywork on the CBR has gotten progressively more broken. The first cracks have gotten bigger and nearly all the mounting points have now split and rendered useless.
So it was time to replace the worst of it and I decided to go for some racing fairings over new standard items.
Initially I wanted standard fairings so I could retain the original headlights for endurance racing and to keep it street-legal, as all the headlight mounting points are moulded into the bodywork.
In the end I opted for a front fairing set by CRC fairings. I’ve changed plans on keeping it street-legal and I will add some projector headlights for the endurance races.
The quality of the fairings is good and the shape is very close to the original ones, but a couple of the mounts didn’t line up properly; this wasn’t really an issue as the mounting holes needed to be drilled anyway. But the included Zeus clips are of good quality and work well.
I wasn’t expecting a big weight loss from going with race fairings but they feel substantially lighter. The front headlight unit is also very heavy, and on top of this I was also able to remove a few more items:
– Headlights
– Flasher for the indicators
– Horn
– Front small position light
The best thing is the improved simplicity of the whole system. What started out as 9 pieces are now 2 big easily removable fairings. The whole bodywork can come off in less than 5 minutes.
I reweighed the bike in curb weight condition at exactly 200.0 kg:
Front: 104.0 kg
Rear: 96.0 kg
52.0% front weight percentage
A 7 kg weight reduction over the last time I weighed it. This puts the theoretical dry weight at: 179.7 kg (including the battery).
I’m not quite sure how Honda claim a 179 kg dry weight in standard form.
Here’s the finished bodywork with some GW colours, which unfortunately don’t really go well with the Orange parts; will hopefully get around to replacing those too:
I had removed the frame crash bobbins when I went to Anneau du Rhin as I don’t really trust them. I was afraid that, as they utilised the upper engine mounting bolts, there was the chance of them being pulled out during a crash and potentially ripping the frame and engine mount with it.
Instead I decided to get some engine covers from R&G, which should help protect and absorb an impact and also aid the bike in sliding during a crash.