Lightweight Bikes: Light On The Pocket Big On Fun

Bigger is better. Speed is everything. Fast is sexy. Only a top-of-the-range bike can generate envy; only the best is desirable.

- Harry Fisher

Or is the opposite true; that greatness can come in small packages? There is an unhealthy obsession with size and power in motorcycling, whether it be adventure bikes or superbikes or whatever; the idea that a small bike can offer as much as a 1000+cc monster is widely dismissed.

But what about those among us for whom a big bike is not an option? Maybe we have no need for something with so much power or size. Maybe we have no need to be able to ride from one end of the country to another in a single day. Maybe we have no need to break the lap record at a track day. Maybe all we need to do is get to work and back. Maybe we’ve just started to ride and need to ease our way into it. Maybe all we can afford is a small bike.

That’s fine but does it also mean that the bikes we ride have to be dull and uninteresting? Not in my book and, on the evidence of this month’s riding, also not in the books of many of the manufacturers.

We are very quick to convince ourselves that we really need the biggest and fastest we can afford; that should we turn up on a ‘small’ bike, we’ll be ridiculed; that we do actually have the talent to tame and control 100bhp or (much) more. Maybe some of us do but in reality, those with the real talent could easily be just as fast around track with 80bhp and light weight as someone on a 200bhp ‘heavyweight’.