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The magazine is still the most luxurious place to get to know new motorcycles. But there are other places where information, news and opinions reach you faster. So I’m not going to beat about the bush and will get straight to the point. The new Yamaha YZF-R15 is a stunning little piece of work. Yamaha have nailed it and finally we may have a motorcycle that lays a far more genuine, far more single-minded claim to being India’s first real, production sportsbike. May? Well, we haven’t tested it yet. Sportsbike? Oh yeah, you read that right. The genuine article.
Unfortunately for Yamaha, despite the fact that our market is maturing rapidly, informed motorcycle enthusiasts are lost in the crowd of laptop-ferriers, so grasping that statement is going take some work. You see, being starved of horsepower and awash in ever more lurid fuel economy claims has given us a complex, a complex that feeds on horsepower and is only quenched by it. All new motorcycles are judged solely on whether or not the horsepower claim breaches the current standard, woefully low as it may be.
On that scale, 16.8 bhp is no great shakes. That number does not single the R15 out as the most powerful motorcycle on the range. The 20 bhp Pulsar 220 retains its title. Then again, that’s the closest price-peer the R15 has. Look at displacement-peers and there are no motorcycles in the R15’s ball park. But as I started out saying, the R15 is not a one-act play at the drag strip. A sportsbike, by definition, is the ultimate in performance. And performance is not solely a function of horsepower. Horsepower helps performance. But there’s more to it.
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