Buying Guide

There’s an old story about asking directions from a village yokel who has little real idea of your intended destination. Lost motorist – “Can you tell me the way to Reading please?” Yokel – “Reading is it? Well, I wouldn’t be starting from here sir!” The same cack-handed logic might also be applied to this…

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MZ was a popular commuter for cash strapped motorcyclists It’s a common assumption that your enjoyment of motorcycling increases with the sophistication of your machines and the cash spent on them. But if ever there was proof that you only need a simple, low-cost and reliable machine to provide a passport to distant horizons and…

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MZ was a popular commuter for cash strapped motorcyclists It’s a common assumption that your enjoyment of motorcycling increases with the sophistication of your machines and the cash spent on them. But if ever there was proof that you only need a simple, low-cost and reliable machine to provide a passport to distant horizons and…

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Yamaha XJ1100 Maxim I was eyeing up my ride for the day and freely admit to feeling a little wary. Perched on a log, like an overgrown CE armoured pixie I’m thinking of an old schoolboy joke and with more than a touch of irony. What’s white and if it falls out of a tree…

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1974 Kawasaki Z1A Kawasaki's 903 Z1 is generally credited with inventing the superbike and introducing a new era of affordable, high performance, hi-tech bikes to usher in the heady days of the 70s. True, Honda’s original CB750 had gone before, heralding a sea-change in design and technology, but it was the 1972 Z1 which drew…

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Yamaha’s YR3 represents the third and final iteration of the company’s first full-on 350cc sports machine. Back in 1966 it was very evident that Yamaha was rapidly catching a cold when it came to machines over 250cc. Overboring the vertically split engined YDS series was only ever going to be a stopgap measure but for…

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It’s 1972 and the tin roof of the school bike shed is reverberating to a new vibe. The sixteener law has killed the elderly Brit and slightly shabby Jap 250s acquired via countless cold ‘n’ wet paper rounds in favour of mopeds. Naively HMG believes this new anti-youth dictat will condemn kids to an asthmatic,…

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Suzuki RF900 Like last month’s Kawasaki ZX-9R, the Suzuki RF900 was a stop-gap machine which had the right capacity to lure people away from the then-dominant CBR900RR FireBlade, but – alas like the Ninja – it didn’t really slice the old mustard. So what was wrong with it? Nothing if you read the launch reports…

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Kawasaki KE175B To misquote George Orwell’s Animal Farm “all trail bikes are equal but some are more equal than others”. If you’ve never ridden a KE175 against any of its peers you’ll probably wonder what on earth we’re on about. However, if you’ve played with 1970s trail irons you’ll already know that Kawasaki’s fairly rare…

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To Honda’s top brass it must have, at first, sounded like the craziest of ideas. Not only a six-cylinder motorcycle with the pots inline across the frame, but also one of more than 1000cc. It could be huge and unwieldy, more so than Benelli’s 750 Sei. But, with fabled engineer Shoichiro Irimajiri at the helm…

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