‘Don’t let new colours leave you feeling blue’

Colour matters. There have been some dreadful colour choices in the two and fourwheeled world and it can affect residuals. For example, would you want a brown bike or car? Nobody has since the 1970s, the decade that taste forgot, when British Leyland, Honda, Kawasaki and BMW used it, but now Renault and Nissan seem to think it’s cool. It isn’t.

Beyond the obvious (if it’s lime green, it’ll be a Kawasaki; orange, a KTM; red or yellow, a Ducati; something dull, a BMW tourer), there are some pitfalls.

Take the Triumph Street Triple. Most are in black because, like many other bikes, it looks good in black. But Triumph also made it in a vivid green and an eye-watering purple which only needed a Keep on Truckin’ sticker and some metal-flake to put it in 1974. Now they’ve got a sort of burnt matt orange which, as well as looking odd, is next to impossible to touch up if it gets scratched. White is an odd colour choice. It’s been said that if a bike looks good in white, then it’ll look good in any colour, as it exposes the true shape of a bike. That’s true, but what it also means is it’ll probably look better in any other colour. How many white Panigales do you see? It only appeals to those clowns who wear ‘POLITE’ yellow jackets, because it makes them look even more like bike cops. The best case if you’re trying to sell a bike in an unpopular colour is that it will be slightly hard to sell. The worst case is that you’ll get less money for it than if it was in a popular colour.