SUZUKI B-KING
RARITY High
UNUSUAL TECH Unique styling
NOSTALGIA Pretty high
Here’s our starter for ten, Suzuki’s mad B-King. Now on paper, it’s just a naked Hayabusa, brought out alongside the second generation Busa in 2008. But in reality, it was much more. The design came from an earlier concept bike, the Boost King, which married crazy Transformers styling with a supercharged Hayabusa engine. Woo! Sadly, Suzuki dumped the blower for production, but they stuck quite closely to the design cues, and the finished bike definitely looked the part. It was a decent ride – a bit on the heavy side, but massive fun and just the thing for ten-mile wheelie practice…
Sadly, the timing was pants. It came out around the time of the world financial crisis, and didn’t sell well at all. Turns out plenty of people gave it the big talk about buying a mad Transformers bike, but when it came down to it, they all bought ‘normal’ stuff instead.
And that’s why the B-King belongs here. There’s not a lot of them about (there’s about 650 left in the UK according to DVLA), they are very distinctive, and in the mid-2020s, we reckon they’ll come right back into vogue. Make sure you get one with all the stock exhaust gubbins – it was the mad starship rear end that really made it stand out, and that stuff often gets binned by folk fitting performance pipes. A neat supercharger install is also worth the effort, for the Boost King buzz…