I must admit when this monster of a motorcycle arrived at my door, I emitted a heavy sigh which had nothing to do with a freezing cold morning though. Oh no, I thought, another massive cumbersome bike in my life for a week. One quick trip up the road will suffice and then I’ll park it and wait for collection, or so I thought.

I’m from the UK, Nottingham to be precise, and the land where Robin Hood performed his ancient archery antics. ‘We’ tend to say something is a ‘cracker’ when it’s exceptionally good. I’m not so sure if ‘we’ use this terminology in South Africa but you might see where I’m coming from, and it couldn’t be a more appropriate term for this attractive Ninja. It most certainly is a ‘cracker’ in the world of motorcycling!

A few months ago I flew off to Cape Town to ride this new version of Suzuki’s Hayabusa, and came away very impressed. But one thing irritated me more than a thousand mosquitoes, and that was the claim that the new bike made less horsepower than the previous model. Oh yes, Suzuki says it makes a few horsepower less and more torque throughout the mid-range, from its (still), 1,340cc engine. Yes, I know it’s stuffed with new internals, but… Well there’s only one way to settle this and that was to get the bike again and take it to ‘our’ Noddy and his state-of-the-art Dynojet dyno (which is an industry benchmark around the world). We run all of our test/press bikes on this dyno to keep the figure equal and relative, so there’s no childish arguing with other dynos reading more, so there!