Buying Guide

Kawasaki KX-7R Back then we rode 600s or 750s and dreamed of a big GSX-R, even though we couldn’t master what we had. 20 years on our dream machines are cheap as chips. Abused, neglected, saggy shadows of their former selves. Japanese engineering means that they’ll still do 150mph, of course – but the wobbles…

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Kawasaki Z650 When Ben Inamura and his team gave the world the Z1 it was a spectacular delivery. If you remember that period of the 70s, the very sight of a Z1 was like a punch between the eyes by George Foreman. The world of biking had changed overnight. Well it did if you were…

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Suzuki GSX-R750RR Honda’s CB900F was a bike built as the basis for an AMA super bike racer. And the CB1100R that followed in 1981 was so special that its runaway race success was boring. But it was the RC30 that changed everything. Honda built one bike to race in F1, World Superbikes and endurance. One street legal bike that could…

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Honda Gold Wing GL1000 Back in 1976 Maurice Keen was serving in the Royal Navy based at Portsmouth. He had owned a string of Triumph twins, but was now looking for a bike that would provide the effortless long distance touring capability he needed, and his head was turned by the new 1000cc Honda Gold…

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Suzuki TS125L trailbike Suzuki almost invented the concept of the trailbike with their radical TC120 Trail Cat, first imported into the UK in 1970. The bike was light and nimble for both on- and off-road use, and had a dual-purpose gearbox that allowed the rider to select a set of high- or low-ratio gears. The…

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BMW R90/S Every now and again a motorcycle comes along which sets completely new standards of performance, handling or sophistication and which proves to be, in time, a trend setter. The Honda Fireblade, Kawasaki GPZ900R, Kawasaki Z1… and the BMW R90/S. More than 25 years after its launch, most people have forgotten its initial impact.…

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Benelli 750 Think of six cylinders and you think Honda CBX – but Benelli got there first with its 750. Later came the 900 version but Neil Murray reckons the first was the real classic. I love the motorcycle engineering of the Seventies. The sheer diversity of engineering in that decade was incredible. Designers churned…

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BMW R65 I still quite haven’t figured out either why BMW built the R45/65 series, nor why they failed to develop it further. For my money, the design showed so much promise: smaller, neater, sweeter than the other aircooled boxers (airheads, they call ‘em now, to differentiate them from the current ‘oilheads’), but that promise…

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Honda CB750F This is nobody’s favourite Honda CB750. You only have to look at the prices of good clean F1s. At the same time, there’s quite a strong core of interest for F2s, and these are definitely worth a look. Right now, they’re cheap, but they have a historical significance in that they were the…

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Yamaha RD200 Before the 250cc learner ban, there were all sorts of bikes of around the 175-200cc mark and they were startlingly popular because they only gave a little away to their bigger brothers and were much cheaper to insure. Yamaha’s RD was probably the one with the longest pedigree. It started life as the…

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