Not worth the weight

Just got round to reading your adventure bike test in the August 2016 issue. What the hell is going on with the weight of these bikes? I remember back in the early ’90s I had several big litre-plus bikes, like the ZZ-R1100. It was great, my only niggle being it was a bit heavy. Cue the Fireblade in 1992, which seemed to usher in a new era of lighter bikes. And so it was, for a bit. Now bike weight has crept up and up, to point where something like the XT1200Z is heavier than the ZZ-R1100 and not far off the weight of my old Harley. The XT is just a couple of pounds lighter than a 1976 Gold Wing. How can that be? How can bikes with the benefit of 25 years of materials technology development, created with design tools that could only be dreamt of in 1990, with only two cylinders, be heavier than my old ZZ-R made of pig iron? To suggest they were created for off-road use is just laughable. What do they do – tell the design teams to deliberately make the ‘off-road’ bikes as porky as possible? In the same issue there’s a KTM 500 EXC-F weighing only 105kg. You could weld two of these together, hang a spare engine off the back and still get a 1000cc bike weighing less than these ‘adventure’ lard barges, with 124bhp at the rear wheel(s). Enough. Phil Tiernan, email