Talk:Liter bike

Possible separate article on this subject
A liter-bike (less common spellings are literbike, litrebike and litre-bike) is simply a motorcycle with a nominal engine displacement of 1000 cc, while a 600 is a motorcycle of around 600 cc displacement, most often when speaking of sport bikes A number of questionable and often-debated assumptions are necessary when these terms are used. The terms are mainly a consequence of the Superbike racing and Supersport racing, and associated superbike and supersport production categories, generally being dominated in the last ten or twenty years by inline four-cylinder engines in the sizes 1000 cc and 600 cc, respectively.

Motorcycling magazine reviews, or "shootouts," generally follow these categories as well, often staging head to head comparisons between a group of motorcycles that fall into one of these two classes. The categories are generally stretched to include other engine configurations and sizes, for example 750 cc to 800 cc, or even 900 cc, v-twins are most often compared with 600s, because their size, weight, cost and performance are usually in the 600 class, while 1100 to 1300 cc twins are treated as liter-bikes, the same reason. Motorcycle racing rules, too, often have different size bounds for non-four cylinder engines. A great many bikes, past and present, do not comfortably fit into either category, but in the United States, the sheer sales numbers of sport bikes that fit these categories dwarf those that do not.Dbratland (talk) 00:31, 25 April 2009 (UTC)