Thread: Modern Yamaha YZF-R15

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 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 horse power 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 oneact 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.



Performance, in the sportsbike world, is an all-encompassing term. It covers the whole thing, every single aspect of it. A sportsbike must go, must turn, must stop and most crucially of all, it must thrill. That kind of all-round proficiency never comes cheap, so the sportsbike, in most cases, also turns out expensive. Trawl the two-wheeled web and you will come up with numerous displacement-based comparisons, where the sportsbikes lead the price list wildly from the top.

I'm leaned over as far as I dare and there are others out here who are braver than me by miles - in the long sweeper that joins the two undulating sides of the circuit at Irungattukottai. The corner is mildly off-camber and open enough to go really, really quickly. Two contact patches are holding an engaging conversation in a language I can understand. I'm expected only to listen in, take confidence, lean it further and roll the throttle open a little more. Here, ladies and gentlemen, is the most responsive, most talkative chassis in India.

The contact patch's voice is clear. Not in the sense of every edge of the stone buried in the tar it's not a rock hard racebike, but in the sense of the clarity that will allow you to run embarrassing rings around that rider on the mountain road with the bigger, more powerful machine. The feedback you need to pass him around the outside and raise him a one-handed cheeky good bye. It's there. Spot a half-good rider on a twisty road on one of these, and you might as well look for a place to stop for a cuppa tea. No point embarrassing yourself on a bigger machine, is there?

And it isn't that sweeper alone. Even in the tight corners, where you are down to second gear, speeds are low, lean angles are transient but deep, the chassis remains an eloquent, encouraging voice. It says, over and over, 'Try harder, I've got your back.' The same character goes for the brakes too. Discs front and rear may be considered normal. but the way they work is far beyond that appearance. Power is there, of course, but there is feedback and the chassis is intensely stable on the brakes, which means that running it deep into corners and trailing the brakes into the apex (yeah, I left it too late more than once) all produce good braking and a non scary satisfaction. On the brakes when leaned over, the R15 is light enough to not sit up and yes, I again must say these are some of best brakes overall on an Indian motorcycle.