Vitpilen 401 (MY2024)

What impressed me most is what happens when the corner speed climbs. The faster I went, the more settled the bike got, with no wallowing and no doubt about where the front was pointed. A lot of that comes from how firmly it's sprung, and that firmness has a cost: catch a square-edged bump and you take the whole hit. The useful part is that both ends can be dialed in properly, so where that trade lands is partly up to you.

Ridden the way it asks to be ridden, this thing is more entertaining than its size suggests. Keep the revs high on a road with some shape to it and the engine finally hands over everything it has, and there's so little mass to argue with that the bike answers the moment you ask. That combination is where its character lives. It doesn't cover the ground a bigger machine does, but inside its own range it left me wanting nothing else.

This is the one place where the bike rides at its price point. Lever feel is good and I could meter pressure precisely, and braking into a corner never worried me, because the ABS stays with you at lean. Ask for a genuinely hard stop, though, and what comes back is ordinary. Everything else here punches above what the bike is, and the brakes simply do the job. After a fast run down a good road, they're the first thing I'd change.

Comfort on this bike comes down to how long you plan to stay out. The first hour gave me nothing to complain about. The padding is thin and stiff, though, and somewhere past the two-hour mark I was counting down to the next stop. The forward lean it puts you in doesn't bother me at all, because it buys something real: I could read the front end clearly and always knew what the tire was doing. What wore on me instead was the instrument display. In flat light it reads fine, but with the sun on it the whole panel fades, and the yellow shift light glares across the readouts I actually wanted. None of that stops a newcomer settling in quickly, since nothing in the controls needs interpreting. I'd ride it all morning happily and think twice about all day.

Practicality here is really about what you get for the money. A small single isn't supposed to show up with a rider-aid package this complete, and there's a USB socket to keep a phone alive on a long day, which is the sort of thing that usually gets cut at this end of the market. What counts more is that none of it is decoration. I leaned on all of it, and every piece did exactly what it's supposed to do.

Steady throttle doesn't produce steady drive here. Hold a fixed wrist and the delivery drifts around underneath you, never enough to upset anything, just enough that I noticed it more with every hour. The bigger limit is the shape of the power. There's little to lean on before the midrange, and the strong part of the band closes up again before the top, so the range you actually want is a narrow one.