600/750/1000 what's most fun for road riding

[Az]

In your opinions, what's more fun for fast road riding?

A super sport 600, 750 or 1000 or anything else (maybe 250's and 400's?) and why?

[MCN]

This is not a joined up question.


Define 'Fun' in your own words.
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Disclaimer: The comments above may be predicted text and not necessarily the opinion of MCN.

[wr6133]

400 IL4, you can give it a good thrashing without hitting licence shredder speeds in the blink of an eye. I've got one of the crappier 400's I bought to fill an urgent need for cheap transport with the view of not keeping it long, over a year later and I'm still not tired of it.

Just my opinion but a litre superbike is more than needed for the road, even short shifting a GSXR1000 you are effortlessly in triple figures before you know it. Practical sometimes maybe but I don't think all that fun (I actually thought an old GSXR 1100k was more fun on the road).

[Rogerborg]

[MarJay]

250 two stroke. But out of those it's a 600.
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[Raffles]

Most fun that I have is when riding my IL4 250. It's not especially fast but the noise it makes at 17k is something else.
I spent part of the Sunday just gone tunnel blasting in Leeds and I've not stopped smiling yet
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[Az]

[staffo]

675 because daytona
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[C1REX]

Sport 600cc bikes are missing torque at lower revs. Naked 600 or sport 1000 will work better. MT-07 and street triple are brilliant on roads and under 100mph.

Some lighter, smaller bikes can be super fun on B roads (KTM 390).

It depends what speeds we are talking about.

For good acceleration you want high torque at low revs and low weight.
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[rubyhorse2]

top speed isnt that much fun anymore for me, i'd rather blast the country roads so torque and enough power is what i like.

Hence why i bought the bike i did.

[Polarbear]

For fun, other than 2 strokes my most fun bike was my Street Triple R. Wonderful on the twisties and no fairing so it felt you were going fast Whereas my Trophy can cruise at 100+ and it feels like you are sitting in an arm chair in the livingroom.

So for fun, out of those a 600.
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[Musketeer]

I'm old and lazy.. I prefer 1000cc bikes for the roads.

But I'd rather have a 600cc track bike than 1000cc one.

[Crumbso]

I personally favour a Mk.1 Bandit 1200. Slow but feels fast and wheelies well.

I'd love to have a 90's IL4/V4 400 or 250 though, very appealing.

Modern sportsbikes of any capacity generally seem to feel too unflustered at any reasonable speed to be involving to me. I'd rather push the bike than the bike push me.

[staffo]

[Teflon-Mike]

I don't find the stress of dodging myopic Auidi-Drivers, or trying to remember where the golf-club gate they might turn into is; trying to see past busses or being sprayed with silt out of the back of ballast trucks...... ad infinitum..... of riding on public roads to be all that conducive to 'Riding Fun' , personally.

Road-Riding? For 'Pleasure'... well, 'Sports-Bikes'.. clue is in the name, really; 'sport'.. and road riding ent one!

For that sort of 'fun', I took it to the track.. one way traffic, nice wide run-offs, soft tyre piles rather than lamp-posts and trees to bounce off, that sort of thing, and no damn gatso's to worry-about..... However, I soon got bored of going round and round and round in ever decreasing circles... and spending ever increasing amounts of money to spend ever less time at it!

So I went back to trials.... which, has managed to keep me very well entertained for almost four decades, without ever getting over a brisk jogging pace!

And so for pure riding 'fun', a new challenge or four every few yards, different scenery every section, it's the 'most' riding 'fun', I have ever had, and plenty of it...

Bikes don't need tax, test or insurance, event entries are about a fiver a time, and a 10bhp rock-hoppa burns less than half a gallon of pre-mix an hour.. if I sat on it.. would be the most saddle time per quid you can get, I reckon... didn't even need a crash hat when I started, let alone, 'approved' leathers and medicals and shit!

Road-Riding, for Pleasure.. so much out there to make road riding a chore, frustrating, uncomfortable, and generally NOT 'fun'.. I seriously question why ANY sane person would even dream to do it 'for fun'.. of course answer is in the question.... no 'sane' person would! We must all be MAD I say!

So, looking for what fun might be had in the pursuit? Act of actually 'riding' being damped so much by the situation; look for the 'Fun' in the 'journey'... at a track, after the first lap, you've seen it all before.. one thing public roads can offer is about 1/4 of a million miles of them, in the UK....spread over almost 1000 miles of country, with scenery varying from the almost Mediterranean deep-south, to the Scandinavian North; hills, plains, rivers, mountains, cities, villages, and wide open more-land, we have SO much to look at... why race through it making t all a blurr, with your arse in the air, your head on your hands and cramps in your wrists, hoping desperately not to get back home to find a NIP on the door-step?

'Riding' fun is still to be found, IF you look for it... and I get almost the same glee, doing a feet-up U-Turn on a narrow, dead-end gravel strewn mountain road, two-up, as I do getting a 'clear' on a competition trials section.. or after lining up half a dozen sweeping bends on a nice bit of A-Road, finding the 'flow' and not having anything brake my rhythm.. or merely negotiating a busy round-about, plottig and predicting what's going to happen, and navigating through the chaos without 'Drama'...

And THAT is probably the operator here.... 'Drama'.. the high amplitude 'tension' and 'excitement' of going quick, hard acceleration, sudden braking, and surviving all the 'near misses' on pure reflex; and surviving the 'unexpected'.....

THAT is so much of what a lot of riders find 'fun', in road-riding....

And back to the 'sanity' question.... so much of the 'thrill' is found from the unexpected, the 'Who Dunnit" Drama of a cheap paper-back.... But ACTUALLY, is it REALLY all that 'unexpected'?

I mean.. get on a powerful motorbike, open throttle wide and rush at the world.. is it all THAT surprising when you have to slam on the anchors 'cos some idiot backs off a drive, or decides to do an e-stop to pull into a golf-course driveway?

Or is that 'Thrill' derived of pure delusion? Our own 'madness', and self sustaining? MAKING these situations that ought be bludy obvious, not 'unexpected', convincing ourselves they ARE unexpected, and more, having dealt with them, THAT is why we are so 'great' a rider, and that is WHY we have to have this techno-wonder bit of kit that has duel-carbon-wavy-the brakes, and tripple injected electronic wiffle-valves......

Potting it then, TO ME, most of the 'fun I find in riding public roads, is actually, conciousness and deliberately avoiding and definitely NOT, 'manufacturing' the 'Thrills' so many riding for pleasure go looking for!

And I can do that, and 'find the fun', on pretty much anything from a C50 to a Super-Black-Bird.... though I will confess, given a GL1500 to play with, it was a bit more tricky.. maybe it should have pt a Stephen King talking book on the CD Auto-Changer in the boot
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[JP7]

[WD Forte]

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[Slacker24seve...]

675.
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[J.M.]

I had my most fun on my tatty diversion 600 in Spain. Everything on it was terrible, including the suspension, which was insanely soft. The acceleration wasn't great.

It meant that to go fast around the mountains in Spain I really had to work the bike.

I love my r1, but the speed is effortless. Slow speeds are also effortless. It's great to ride around, but I'm not sure it's the bike I'd pick for a road trip. I think I'd pick something a lot less capable to give myself the fun of pushing the bike to its limits rather than having the bike massively out perform any speed I can handle, let alone safely on the roads.
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[G]

Something without too much peak power (35-75hp say) and missing low down power (or 'torques' for the JC fans ).
I prefer to work a bike - otherwise might as well be a passenger on a train or something ... so high peak power and loads of midrange I tend to find less involving.

[The Tot]

600cc and below in my opinion. Litre bikes have caused me to ride in a very lazy point and squirt fashion, but hasn't stopped me riding them continuously over the past 7 years! Considering most litre sportsbikes have tall first gears, you're pretty much using them as twist and gos in town. And in the twisties, it's not so much fun going into and out of bends on a neutral throttle. It's all a bit "meh".

Most fun I had was on my ZXR250C, because 250cc IL4 and 40bhp on a bike that was 160kg wet was giggle-inducing in the twisties. Always in the powerband. I'd imagine the 400CC boys would probably say the same thing.

Granted, most 600's these days are approaching the sizes of those early nineties 400's.
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[Val]

[G]

[Alex A]

1000cc class for me, but it has to be a V-twin, V4 or CP4 engine. Probably a Ducati would be top of the list, or a 1290 Superduke for maximum helmet giggles. Generally, I find bikes that aren't actually well suited to the road the most fun and rewarding to ride (e.g. RC30, SP1/2, 1198, 1299, '15 R1).

[Diggs]

I had more laughs on my AP50 than any bike, so I'd vote for 600....
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