YAMAHA NIKEN

Questions, questions, questions. Yamaha’s Niken inspires much head scratching. John Westlake attempts to make sense of three wheels…

The future or bonkers wrong turn? Making sense of three wheels.

MELTWATER IS SPEWING across the road at every hairpin and 10 foot banks of snow loom from one side of the road to ensure you never forget it’s close to freezing. On the other side are vertiginous drops to the valley, 2000m below. It’s cold enough that every breath briefly mists my dark visor, obscuring distractingly beautiful views. In short this should be a nerve-racking ride – the kind of ride that makes your teeth as gritted as the corners, seizes-up your torso with tension and turns your riding into a clunky embarrassment. But that’s not happening, because this is Niken territory. On the ride up the mountain on dry roads there were reasons to question having two wheels up front, but in any situation where you might worry about front end grip, the Niken is astonishing. The feeling of confidence and security is phenomenal – far, far more than any bike I’ve tested in the last 25 years. After three hours on the bike I’m getting used to a new way of riding, one where you no longer worry about the front and instead relax and concentrate wholly on the rear. Roll confidently in to a freezing wet corner carrying at least 20% more speed than you would on a conventional bike, let the Niken carve a line with the bars loose in your hands, and then meter out as much throttle as you dare. Or grab more rorty three cylinder torque than is strictly necessary and provoke a cheeky slide – you’re concentrating purely on the rear, don’t forget. And if you muck up, the two-level traction control will keep you out of the armco. Clearly it’s possible to overwhelm the front grip, but you’d have to be going at least 50% faster than you normally would in the conditions, and that’s never going to happen to an experienced rider. Well, I say 50%, but no-one’s really sure – Yamaha don’t put a figure on the extra grip because it’s so difficult to calculate. For a start, each of the two contact patches are slightly smaller than a normal tyre because the Niken’s front wheels are 15 not 17in. Then there are the tyre pressures, which run lower than normal, but still won’t ‘smear’ as much as a normal tyre because the forces on each are halved. Until someone does a proper experiment we’ll have to guess how much grippier the Niken front is. Out on the Austrian hairpins at the launch it felt like there was at least as much front grip in the wet as you’d normally get in the dry. The upshot of all this is that after a couple of hours you learn that one of your most fundamental riding instincts – beware the

How do you say it? It’s nigh-ken, not nicken. It means ‘two samurai swords’ in Japanese, apparently.

front, because if that goes, ambulances beckon – no longer applies, opening up a new range of cornering experiences to ordinary riders. You can for example, brake hard mid corner and discover that the bike does not sit up at all. The first time this happens I’m charging round a dry, sweeping right hander when suddenly it tightens into a hairpin covered in meltwater. Progressively hauling on more front brake with the bike leant over as panic rises, I’m immediately aware that nothing untoward is happening except moderate fork dive and a startling reduction in velocity. It feels weirdly calm – like doing the same thing in a decent car. Of course, skilled racers can do this sort of thing on normal bikes, but most of us can’t, and if we manage it, it usually requires a lie down afterwards. How does it achieve this? When banked over on a normal bike, there’s a distance between the centreline and the tyre’s contact patch, because that’s now at the edge of the tyre. On a 120/70 tyre that might be 40mm. It’s a small lever, but if you brake hard midcorner it will be enough to twist the wheel slightly into the turn, just as if you were counter-steering by pulling on the inside bar (or pressing on the outside one). And in that situation the gyroscopic forces will try and right the bike, standing it up. The

big difference on the Niken is that there is a tyre 205mm either side of the centreline and due to clever geometry, that distance does not change as the bike leans. So no standing up. Once you know the Niken can pull off this trick, you become even more relaxed, safe in the knowledge you possess a nifty get out of jail card up front. Moderate riders can barrel safely down twisty roads in dodgy conditions at far greater speeds than they could manage on any conventional bike. In this sense the Niken works brilliantly and is as revolutionary as Yamaha claim. But it’s by no means a perfect system that renders conventional bikes redundant. Largely, that’s down to weight. The MT-09 – which supplies the swingarm, rear wheel, three-cylinder 847cc engine and electronics – has a wet weight of 193kg. The Niken comes in at 263kg – 4kg more than a fully loaded BMW R1200RT. Not only that, but the majority of the 70kg is high up, at the top of the forks in the form of all those beams and linkages. Yamaha were able to give the Niken the most aggressive rake and trail of any road bike ever (20º, 74mm, compared with an R1M at 24º and 102mm) because of its inherent stability, but that can’t make 11 stone vanish from the headstock. The Niken steers smoothly and feels spookily normal, but there’s a gentle, ponderous feel as you lever all that weight down into corners then back up again at the other side. On dry twisty roads a sports tourer or adventure bike (or indeed an MT-09) would be easier, give more feedback and be more fun to ride fast, especially when the going gets nadgery. The Niken handles sweetly and its road holding is otherworldly, but you never, ever flick it in, despite those wide adventure-style bars. Also, if you’re a kneedown merchant, you’ll use up the 45º of lean available fairly regularly. Go much further over than that and the outside front wheel will lever off the ground… To give the Niken a 50:50 front-rear weight distribution with a 75kg rider, Yamaha moved the riding position so you sit over the rear shock. From the saddle it feels very comfortable, like an adventure bike with footpegs a bit closer to your bum, but from the side you can see the bars are pulled way back from the forks. Yamaha say the riding position is 50mm further back than the MT-09’S but it looks at least double that. This has a knock-on effect if you press on: rear grip diminishes. Some riders might like this – rear slides out of corners have never been this easy on a big bike – but it’s unnerving to start with. If you crouch forward, or are going down hill, or on the brakes – anything that lifts weight off the rear – it has a dramatic effect. I gave up using the rear brake in the

mountains because the mildest use set the ABS off. And when I accelerated hard while tucked in on a damp motorway, the traction control was triggering over every white line and road imperfection no matter what setting I had it on (1=Low intervention, 2=A bit more). The rear tyre is a Bridgestone A41 which works well on adventure bikes, so it’s unlikely to be the fault of that. Perhaps this is why the screen is so small – the added wind pressure on a bolt-upright rider shoves more weight to the rear. If that’s the case – Yamaha engineers remained vague on the issue – then it’s a significant disadvantage, because to rack up motorway miles in comfort, I wanted more weather protection. The huge front end keeps your legs and lower torso out of the wind (and rain), but if you’re around 6ft, your lid is bobbling in the breeze and your neck soon aches. Also, your feet get plastered with spray from each of the front wheels, despite the long mudguards. After a day’s riding I’m still confused about the Niken – not about the technology, but what to do with it. The confidence it inspires in the front end is a revelation, reducing stress and fatigue to zero in dodgy conditions, while maintaining an all-beating cross-country pace. So it’s a sports bike? Certainly not – not fast enough, too slow steering, upright riding position. Tourer? No – saddle is comfy but there’s no luggage and a titchy screen (and no accessories to remedy that situation). Sports tourer? Close, but with 113bhp and 263kg, it feels much less sporty than pure sports tourers such as Kawasaki’s H2 SX and top adventure bikes like BMW’S R1200GS. The Niken is a brilliant technical achievement. Whether it succeeds in the UK depends on how many of us want to pay £13,499 for an extraordinary-looking bike that excels on road surfaces you’d rather avoid and is blisteringly fast in weather you’d rather not go out in.