CL500 (MY2023)

What makes this thing easy to ride quickly is that nothing on it contradicts anything else. Turn-in, the feedback coming back through the front, the way it picks up drive on the way out of a corner: it all reads the same, so you are never compensating for one part of the bike misbehaving while another behaves. That internal agreement is worth more than any single chassis number. It is light with it, light enough that tipping into a bend costs almost nothing and holding a tight line is a matter of leaning on the bike rather than wrestling it. It answers right away and it stays where you put it, with no argument on the way in or the way out. The ceiling is ground clearance. The pegs are the first thing to touch down, long before the tires have anything to say about it, which is what the scrambler layout buys you.

What this bike does well is hand you its full range early. There is no settling-in period where you are feeling around for the edges, because it reports what it is doing while it is doing it. A newer rider gets confident on it quickly without being talked down to, and someone with real miles behind them still finds plenty to appreciate in how neatly the parts work together. Through a set of corners it carries more than the output figure would lead you to expect.

On the road the front brake does everything asked of it. It stops the bike without drama and I never once wanted more from it in normal riding. The qualifier only turns up on a closed course, where the lever does not give you the initial bite you need to brake late with any conviction. That is a mismatch of expectations more than a fault. Ridden the way this bike is meant to be ridden, the limit never comes up.

The chassis and the seat run out at different points, and that is really the story of comfort on this bike. Honda gives you preload adjustment at the rear, which is not a given in this part of the market, and the stock settings are sorted well enough that I never felt any reason to reach for it. It is there when you are carrying more weight or spending time on surfaces the standard setup was not tuned for. What I did feel was the saddle. The padding is honest for the first couple of hours, and after that I caught myself rearranging my weight more often than I wanted to. The other limit sits underneath you: on properly beaten-up pavement the damping stops absorbing and starts passing the hits along. Neither one spoils the kind of riding this bike is actually built for.

The throttle is the best thing about this motor. You can open it mid-corner, at any point in the rev range, and the power arrives clean. No step, no surge, no waiting for the engine to catch up with your wrist, just a linear rise that lets your attention stay on the line you picked. The parallel twin holds that same composure everywhere else. Rolling through a village at walking pace it is completely docile, and on a mountain road it pulls with the same evenness, with no flat spots and no sudden change of character in between. The honest limit is what sits above the mid-range. Take it somewhere that rewards outright power, a track day for instance, and you find the top of it earlier than you would like. Everything below that point is so usable that most riders will not spend much time up there anyway.

Day to day it asks very little of you. Threading through stopped traffic and slotting into a space that looked too small are non-events, because there is not enough weight here to fight. The gap is on the equipment list. There is no cruise control, and heated grips are an option you pay for rather than something that comes fitted, which I noticed after a few hours in the cold and wet.