GSX-S1000 (MY2025)

Nobody in our group was talking about the Suzuki before the test. Afterwards, everyone wanted another session on it, and "we're riding the Suzuki again" turned into the running line of the day. What earns that isn't one standout lap. It's the absence of stress across the entire session. The bike never created situations, never asked to be managed, never needed a plan for how you were going to handle it. It just responded, the same way, every time, and that consistency is rarer in this class than the output figure suggests. Sitting still it looks conventional, almost understated. Crack the throttle and actually mean it and you find out what it really is. The fun here doesn't have to be earned and you don't have to ride like a hero to get at it. It's waiting for you the moment you pull away.

Long, fast sweepers are where this chassis is most at home. Hold a line through a quick, sweeping bend and there's nothing to negotiate. It settles, stays exactly where you put it, and lets the engine get on with pulling. It's less nervous than several rivals I've ridden back to back with it, and at speed that composure is worth more than any amount of flickability. Turn-in is the other half of why I rate it. The bike goes where you look, willingly, without persuasion, and after a handful of corners I was threading my line on instinct rather than thinking my way through it. That kind of familiarity normally takes much longer to build. The caveat is damping. The factory settings are on the plush side, and while a few clicks front and rear bring it up to where it should be, I'd sort that in the paddock rather than find out about it mid-lap.

What I keep coming back to on this motor is the honesty of the throttle. Open the gas and there's nothing standing between the request and the answer. The response is immediate and direct, quick enough that your first few rides are mostly about recalibrating your wrist to it. Hard on it through the middle of the rev range it's raw and full of character, but it never bites back at an honest input. Ride it smoothly and it rewards you; get clumsy and it simply makes that obvious, without punishing you for trying. That's a different contract from most modern fours, where a layer of calibration quietly decides how much of your wrist actually reaches the rear tire. I never felt that layer here, and it's the single reason I enjoyed this bike as much as I did. The one thing that genuinely frustrated me is the gearing. First runs deep, deeper than it needs to be, and in a tight hairpin at walking pace you open the throttle into a dead zone and sit there waiting for the engine to climb back into its powerband. It breaks the rhythm in the slowest corners, and it's the only place in the whole drivetrain where the bike feels like it's working against you instead of with you. Everywhere else, the connection between your right hand and the rear tire is the best thing about riding it.

This is the part of the bike I'd fix first. On the road the brakes do everything asked of them and I never went looking for more. Take the same setup to lap pace and the ceiling arrives fast. The lever goes soft under hard use, with no firm bite to build confidence against, and the ABS is calibrated conservatively enough that stopping distances stretch out past where they should be. The bigger problem is what isn't in the system. With no lean-angle sensing, the ABS has no idea you're mid-corner, so it steps in on the brakes in a bend as readily as it would in a straight-line stop, at precisely the moments you'd want it to stay out of the way. On the street you'll never meet that limit. At track pace it stops being a safety net and becomes something you ride around.

Seat height is the good news. This isn't a low motorcycle, but it isn't the kind of tall that rules out riders of average height either, and that shows up exactly where confidence usually leaks away: rolling to a stop, turning around, putting a foot down on uneven ground. What costs it here is the padding. On a circuit all that compliance swallows the signal you actually need. You lose the contact through your hips, and with it the read on what the chassis is doing through the corner and what the rear tire has left when you're leaning on it. That's the trade Suzuki made, and for most owners on most days it's the right one. I only got handed the bill when I started pushing.

Three ride modes, and they genuinely are three. Each one covers its own part of the range, so you're not scrolling through near-identical maps hunting for the difference between them. The display reads at a glance, which is the only thing I ask of a dash while I'm moving. Short feature lists on machines like this usually reflect confidence rather than a gap in the spec sheet.