What’s it like on the road?

Before you get on, it looks big and tall. Cock a leg over, though, and suddenly it doesn’t seem so tall as the relatively soft suspension sinks a bit.

Hit the starter and there’s a rumbling, surprisingly mechanical commotion going on down there. It’s not the bag-of-spanners rattle of a Ducati, but it’s not the whispering hush of a Japanese four either. Pull away and you immediately get the impression of good low-speed balance - it’s easy to trickle along in traffic. That balance is upset quite a bit by adding luggage and/ or a pillion, but you can get most of it back with the easy-to use rear preload adjuster.

At normal road speeds it’s pretty taut and controlled - the XC is plusher but the XR’S basic, shorter travel suspension works well. Push harder

Avoid the temptation of fitting knobblies and you can corner hard on an XC and it starts to get a bit vague but that’s the price you pay for soft suspension and tyres with off-road pretensions - but if you want to nail your apexes racetrack-style then maybe this kind of bike isn’t for you anyway.

Hit the motorway and it’s a little buzzy, but nothing too bad. Cruise control on later models is easy to set and use, though there is a bit of a knack to getting it to disengage smoothly.

The brakes work and the ergonomics are good (though the seat’s a bit sparse). The heart of it all, though, is that engine. Enough low-down pull so you don’t need to dance all over the gear lever, clean overtaking power anywhere above about 6000rpm, then enough top-end power to keep life interesting. Nice.

“There’s good low-down pull and enough top-end too”