What’s it like on the road?

Big, heavy, soft, pretty lazy. It’s a reminder that progress doesn’t always go forwards. Fuel injection and lots of electronic intervention can be great - very good for getting through tough emissions and noise tests, and tempering the effects of a careless right hand on a highly tuned sports engine, for example. But nobody has yet made a fuel-injected bike that offers the smooth pickup of a set of CV carbs on a big, grunty four-cylinder motor. And this one is definitely big and grunty, with a pleasing amount of shove low down, followed by a wallop of top end if you need it. The sort of power characteristics that let you plobble around taking it easy in top gear (treat it gently and you can get over 50mpg), while reserving the option to go bananas every now and then (watch fuel economy plummet towards the low 30s.) The chassis is happier plobbling; the suspension’s pretty soft and while it offers good ride quality, it struggles a bit once you up the pace, especially on bumpy roads. The brakes, too, aren’t really up for repeated hard use. That’s a surprise given the specs but the six-pots were never as good as they promised. So long as you’re not expecting sportsbike sharpness, the package is pretty good and well suited to real-word