This could be the maddest use of a superbike engine ever!
A superbike engine is suited perfectly well to, well, a superbike, but how about something a bit… different?
The BMW S1000RR is out of date by now. No one’s interested, because why buy one of those when you can buy an M1000RR instead? Well, a European hillclimb racer might have found just the perfect use for the German superbike.
Okay, that might be a stretch, but it’s fair to say that Jovan Perunovic has made quite good use of the S1000RR’s engine.
Credit: Hillclimb Monsters/YouTube.
Rather than simply turning the anti-wheelie and the traction control down to get his 1000cc inline-four kicks, Perunovic has taken the S1000RR, removed its motor, and stuck it in the back of an old Fiat.
In its magnificent, original, 1959 spec, the Fiat 600 produced a whopping 22bhp, making even the soon-to-be-old 411cc Royal Enfield Himalayan look fruity. By 1968, that had ramped up to a positively banzai 26bhp, but Perunovic felt this wasn’t enough for his ambitions of running his 600 up a Croatian hillclimb.
This is where the BMW comes in, as Perunovic threw away the 600’s old 633cc inline-four, and replaced it with the S1000RR’s one-litre unit. 212 of Bavaria’s finest horses are now on tap.
With the car tipping the scales at 580kg, the 600 gives those horses a bit more to pull around than the BMW, but the result is still an agreeable 366bhp-per-tonne, with power sent to the rear wheels via a sequential gearbox complete with quickshifter!
Such performance requires some grip, so the 600 is widened such that a 1992 Group A Lancia Delta HF Integrale is made to look like a narrow-body. And, of course, there is the aero. If Gigi Dall’Igna saw the kit on this, he’d have an identity crisis. Everything is huge, from the arches to fit that widened track to the massive rear wing and the gaping diffuser.
On his run up the hillclimb, Perunovic was clocked at 112mph, which might not sound like a great deal when the S1000RR itself can push towards 200mph, but that’s only about 6mph shy of the top speed of a modern, 500bhp Rally1 car, achieved in something whose base was produced 64 years ago.
It turns out that the Croatian hillclimb scene is awash with bike-swapped cars, with one guy even using the 1,199cc unit from Kawasaki’s ZX-12R!
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Alex has been working in the motorcycle industry for as long as he has been at Visordown, which has been since March 2022 so we'll let you work it out from there. He's the new guy. He'd be fetching us all coffee 'round the clock if he wasn't based in the arse end of nowhere.
