MT-09 (RN29)

This is the trick Yamaha pulled that most of its rivals can't. The bike is put together with a clinical, almost sterile precision, free of the little personality flaws you'd forgive on something rawer, and yet the second you roll off the curb it turns feral. In traffic it reads as a harmless, compact supermoto. Then you point it at an on-ramp, pin the throttle, and the speedo is showing license-ending numbers before anything inside your helmet has caught up. There's no warning phase and no gradual build. It simply goes. What surprised me is how fast it gets under your skin: a few days in and I was revving it past any sensible point, hunting for on-ramps, leaning on corners harder than I'd planned. The urge never fades with familiarity, and that contrast between the showroom finish and the ferocity on the road is the entire point of the machine.

The chassis has a split personality, and I mean that as a compliment most of the time. In town and on tight, broken back roads it behaves like a supermoto that shed a decade off my riding age: quick, light, happy to dart from one line to the next with almost nothing asked of me. Where it gets honest about its limits is in wide, fast sweepers. Sitting so far forward over the front tire, I found myself feeding in short, corrective inputs at the bars instead of settling into one clean radius, and the front hunts a little until you commit to babysitting it. This is a bike that wants you working, not coasting. It rewards an active rider on the kind of roads it was built for and quietly punishes a lazy line through a long curve.

What I keep coming back to on this generation is the throttle. The original MT-09 left the crate too sharp off the bottom, and unless you happened to enjoy the on-off snap of a flat-slide carb, it was genuinely hard to meter in traffic. Yamaha's 2016 remap fixed exactly that. All the intensity is still there, but now it arrives through a clean, predictable pickup, and that single change rewrites the personality of the whole bike. The triple pulls hard down low and keeps piling it on as the needle climbs, so you get torque and top-end in the same breath. Ask it to and it turns into a willing wheelie machine. This is an engine with teeth at both ends, and the later mapping is what finally lets an ordinary rider use all of them without fighting the bike.

Build quality is where this Yamaha quietly shows its pedigree. Everywhere I looked and everything I put a hand on lined up the way it should, panel gaps included, and nothing developed a harmonic buzz at a particular rpm or worked loose rattling over broken pavement. This is Japanese manufacturing running at full capacity, and after real miles it still felt as tight as the day it left the floor.

Comfort is the price of admission here. The riding position tips you forward onto your wrists, the seat is small, and there's no touring softness built into any of it. I found short, aggressive blasts perfectly fine, but string together a couple of hours at highway pace and my body started filing complaints. The ergonomics are set up to attack, not to log distance, and they never let you forget it.

Be clear-eyed about what this is before you buy. Riders who step off a full-fairing sportbike chasing more livability and a calmer pace are shopping in the wrong aisle. The MT-09 is a hooligan wearing polished manners, not a relaxed do-everything machine. It'll cover your daily errands well enough, but its whole character pulls toward mischief, so treat it as a toy with plates rather than a sensible comfort upgrade.