Martin Fitz-gibbons
Deputy editor
After spending a fair chunk of 2018 riding the Yamaha Tracer 900GT, I thought I knew it inside-out. Then I met Mark Coningsby, who’s done 45,000 miles on his Tracers in the past four years. What will he make of the GT? I can’t wait to read his verdict…
IT’S FAIR TO say that Yamaha’s MT-09 Tracer was a huge hit. Introduced in 2015, it combined the rorty exuberance of the MT-09 triple with the practicality and comfort of a touring bike. At just over £8000 on the road it’s not surprising it flew out of showrooms – more than 35,000 bikes have been sold in the last four years.
But it has not been without problems. Any user group shows a multitude of gripes: poor wind protection, dodgy fuelling and a ditch-finding, high-speed weave.
So with this in mind, Yamaha revamped the Tracer 900 for 2018. It introduced a 60mm-longer swingarm, made the suspension firmer and added a thicker seat and a redesigned front fairing. It even made the handlebars narrower, thinking the drag combined with the leverage and inertia of the wider bars contributed to the weave.
On top of this, it also introduced a new GT model, complete with cruise control, integrated panniers, a remote rear preload adjuster, more-adjustable forks, heated grips and a quickshifter. At £10,792, it’s £1400 more than a stock bike — especially as its digital display was also replaced by the classy iphone-esque TFT dash from an R1.
But while sales have been good, many existing Tracer owners are perfectly happy with their bikes, especially once they’ve given them a few tweaks. It seems Tracer owners are tinkerers and many had already inadvertently created their very own Tracer GT with savvy bolt-ons.
One such owner is Mark Conningsby. The 38-year-old is already on his second Tracer and uses it to get around the country as part of his recruitment job in the health industry. Mark also runs one of the biggest Tracer Facebook groups and his bike bears the hallmarks of smart tweaking: tell-tale MCT stickers on the fork lowers, a Nitron shock and a full Black Widow exhaust system. With some Givi panniers and his own mods to ease the pain of distance riding, could his two-year-old Tracer be a GT beater?