According to Ride you can pick these up for as little as £800. Yeah right! Let me know if you can find one. The cheapest I’ve found over winter was about a grand with no MOT or Tax and 30+ thousand miles on the clock. The owners of these machines always seem to have dreams of grandeur, about how they can beat R6 pretenders while loaded up with panniers and a top box. Then they stop off at a track day and clean up in the advanced group.
The truth is that although these bikes ran the early ZX6R a close second in the 600 class when they came out and they had some of the best brakes in the business (R1 brakes before the R1 was invented), they were always to big and heavy to be any sort of contender on the track. They weigh more and are bigger than the FZR’s they replaced and aren’t really a match against more modern tackle. As a road bike they are as good as the older CBR600′s but don’t have the same build quality and reliability of the Honda’s. They certainly aren’t as capable on the twisties as any of the GSXR’s or ZX6R’s due to their size and weight. To compare one to the legendary R6 is a joke, just like naming it after a kids cartoon.
A bargain if you can find a cheap one, but with plenty of nice low mileage ZX6R’s, K1 and SRAD GSXR’s around for similar money they aren’t that much of a bargain, certainly not one that belongs in the top 10 best value bikes in Britain.
