2024 Suzuki GSX-S1000GX | Riding Review

Morning, my name's Simon. Welcome to Bennetts Bike Social. Welcome to Portugal and welcome to the launch of Suzuki's 2024 GSX-S 1000 GX. Welcome to the first few miles. Oh no, hang on. Sorry, welcome to day two on a two-day launch of Suzuki's 2024 GSX-S 1000 GX. It's a good job it's a two-day launch because there's two days worth of at least of information and technical information about this bike that we've all got to get our heads around. There's a lot going on with the GX as you might have read or seen because this bike has been pretty widely disseminated in the press and on video. There's a Bennetts YouTube video. We've had a bit of a deep dive on the technical aspects of the bike or the spec. It's been at the EICMA show in Milan where it's a bit of a hit and equally at Motorcycle Live at the NEC. So you may well know quite a lot of stuff already. Francesca, the lead rider, who's not on a GX. She's on the GSX-S 1000 GT in front of us and you know she just turned her indicator off. Good. So yes, so wow, what a bike to get our heads around and Suzuki have got a lot riding on the GX. Literally it's an international launch so everybody's coming from around the world to ride this bike. There are 17 Japanese engineers here from, well it's like downtown Hamamatsu, the hotel. So that's always an indication that the factory are obviously taking this bike with a great deal of seriousness. They want to know how it performs and yesterday was a bit of a strange day. I have to say there was a lot of stop start, a lot of photography, some of the roads that have been selected for the launch weren't the greatest. Suzuki are trying to show off the range of abilities of this bike but in doing so they took us on some roads that didn't really allow us to get under the skin of the bike, really get a good ride in. So let's start with the three things that are new about the bike. I guess it's riding position and it's dynamic because it is their first tall rounder. It is the semi-active suspension and then it's the wealth of electronics that have been added. So they're the three sort of main new topics but so let's get the bread and butter stuff out of the way first and I'll rattle through the sort of the base conventional spec and it is as you know, starting with the engine, it is the cut and pasted from the GSX-S1000GT. So it's the 999cc inline four, originally from the GSX-R1000K5. Have we said that often enough now? Can we stop saying that about this engine? Making 150bhp at 11,000rpm, 78lb-ft of torque at 9,250rpm and you don't come here looking for charismatic vibes and you know, good old lumpy throbbing. You come here for inline four performance and so you get a very linear exponential power curve with no dips or bumps in it. The engine character is super smooth, inline fours these days are incredibly smooth, all the secondary vibes are balanced out. It's a lovely unit to use, pretty well known. You know, some modern engines have got sort of like more excessive mid-range and maybe not as much top end as this bike. I'm thinking of the Tracer 9 for example with 117bhp. So 150bhp is a pretty healthy output, it's more than the Versys, that's down at I think about 118bhp which is a lot less than you sort of imagine it to be. There may well be a reason for that which we'll come to later on when we're talking about stability. But anyway, so that's the engine. Yep, familiar thing and we have Suzuki's marvellous up and down quickshifter which I think the action is slightly improved over the GT and also now it has the option to be used with cruise control without disengaging cruise, again in common with a couple of other manufacturers that are now doing that, should you feel the need. Francesca's pointing out something, I'm not sure what she's pointing out. Yeah, it's either a ship or a bird. Thank you for that. It's like having a tour guide, still very good. We need intercoms so they can talk to us. No, no, let's not do that. Anyway, so that's the engine, pretty established and again I'll talk about the character of it and how it feels towards the end of the video after I've ridden the bike a bit more. It's very pretty, nice little harbour. So anyway, where else were we? Frame, yes, again frame is cut and paste from the GT, twin aluminium, twin spar, the same swingarm. I think it has the same subframe, it might be tweaked slightly but it's a detachable tubular subframe as is Suzuki's MO these days and has the same 17-inch wheels as the GT, which of course is an important consideration as a tall rounder. It should have 17 or maybe 19, you can argue the point, inch front wheels and the same radial four pop radial callipers. And yeah, going back to suspension, obviously there is sort of one big difference with the GT is that we're on Showa semi-active but that's not the only difference. The wheel travel is the other, it's 150 mm which is obviously, you know, part of the consideration of it being a tall rounder and I'm sorry the riding's not very dynamic. Nice little buggy in front, I'm not sure what that is, a Twizy. Okay, cool, looks like it could be fun. Just going to sneak past you mate. So yes, 150 mm is kind of bang in between something like, say, an adventure bike like a V-Strom and the GT. The GT is about 120 and 130 mm front and rear and that's kind of where Suzuki positioned it to be honest. That's just quite a neat summation of the philosophy of a tall rounder is that it's got all the riding position and the sort of domineering practicality, if you like, of an adventure bike with the sportiness of a sports tourer. For example, BMW put the S1000XR, it's listed under their sports bikes category rather than touring or travel or anything else. So yeah, 150 mm, it means the seat height unfortunately has to go up, the clue's in the name, it is a tall rounder so it's up to 845 mm over 815 for the GT and there is a low seat option available taking it down to 830 but that's still pretty tall and it is still pretty exclusive for some people. Some people would like all the technical aspects of this bike but in a sort of conventionally sized suspension but unfortunately that's not an option. So what else have we got? I'll just run through the other stuff. We have the same tank as the GT so it's 19 litres, a little bit thirstier this bike, possibly because of its aerodynamics, I'm not sure, but it's only marginal and so you're still going to be getting around about, it depends how you ride, it is very subjective, it's entirely dependent on how you ride, but you could get, you know, 140 miles is a worst case scenario until the reserve light starts to make you think about pulling over, up to, I don't know, 180 plus, again it depends if you ride around at 50 miles an hour, absolutely everywhere, you're probably getting on for 200 miles out of the tank and so yeah, same 19 litre tank, did the weight, so yeah, so that's kind of, I think, pretty much the spec as standard and then we get on to the sort of the good stuff or the interesting stuff or the new stuff and here everything gets a little bit more complicated and a little bit more nuanced. So Showa's semi-active suspension is sort of familiar, if you're used to the Kawasaki Versys 1000 SE, which has the same system, similar system, not quite the same, or Honda's Africa Twin also runs Showa semi-active suspension, so I'm sure the knowledge that Showa have gained in semi-active is transferred at some point across from manufacturer to manufacturer, not sure how that works, but it's a similar system, so they know what they're doing and really it's down to Suzuki's implementation of that strategy and of course they use the same Skyhook principle, but again can we stop saying Skyhook now as well, we've been saying it for 10 years since Ducati introduced it on the Multistrada, it's actually an automotive principle, I'm not sure who owns it, it might be Fiat actually, I think they came up with it, but the principle is fairly well understood and well trodden, it's where the chassis of the bike is suspended, the ECU kind of knows its spatial position and from that it can infer the point of keeping the bike stable and level while the suspension and the wheels bounce around underneath and it can adapt the suspension theoretically to try and keep the bike as unflustered as possible, now there's a lot of softness involved in that, I'm sure when it comes to programming that kind of system because bikes are strange things, riders kind of like them to be unstable a little bit because that's what feel is, that's what makes us feel what the bike is doing, so there has to be a degree of movement, I think a bike that hovered perfectly while you rode would actually be very very difficult to ride hard, so we've just bought over now and we've just stopped for something, I think we're waiting for people to catch up, as though we left people behind probably, yeah there we go, come on come on, oh dear someone lost, anyway so what was I saying, yes suspension, so we have showa semi-active and then yeah it's down to Suzuki's implementation of that system and this is where it starts to get really complex because we start talking about riding modes and everything else, so if I just stick to the suspension for the time being and be really try and be really quick, there are basically three standard modes and quite funnily they're called, this is medium, it's mad and there's sad which is soft and then there's hard which is had, shame it wasn't brittle or something because then it would be bad, because mad bad and sad would be much more interesting, but anyway so that's just three basic suspension modes and as you would expect they kind of give the the suspension ECU a kind of a target, oh it's the feds, yeah that's what it is, so they give the suspension a target to aim at, shadowed by the police, I wonder who they're after, mr food man or us, I think they're after us, anyway, hi guys, you good, hey, happy days, it all goes off on launches, it all happens, so yes, so three broad settings that sort of give you a range of damping within that, Suzuki then sort of add a little slight layer of adjustability, call it that if you want, or call it complication if you wish, because they then give you three extra steps of suspension adjustment either way if you choose to go into the settings and use them, so that is by my maths, if there's plus three and minus three plus the original setting that makes seven settings for each mode and there's three of them, so three sets of 28, 28 suspension variations within the semi-active which is good because you've got the adjustability, I'm not quite sure if hard minus three is one more than medium plus three, there might be some degree of overlap and I'm not sure how good you'd have to be as a rider to actually spit that difference, but let's stop here, good luck with that, so that's your sort of your broad suspension performance in terms of its spec and then of course that's bundled up with the sort of overall global settings, so we have three main drive modes A, B and C, A is active, B is basic, C is comfort, so they've made that easy for us at least, that's really the drive mode, encapsulates the suspension setting, encapsulates throttle response and it also encapsulates the traction control setting, now traction control is another thing that has some nuance to it because it is not just TC, that's the sort of the global name for it, but it actually has three elements, traction control is one, the other is anti-wheelie and the other is roll torque control, now traction control and anti-wheelie are pretty easy to understand what they do, roll torque control is again a little bit deeper to go into and remember this is all bundled under the sort of the traction control heading, roll torque control, forgive all the jargon I'm sorry, but you've got you either say this or you don't and you do need to know, so roll torque control is where the bike is measuring your lean angle all the time and if you're at a severe lean angle or any lean angle it will modulate the throttle response, the engine response as the bike is leaned over, so the practical application of that and it is noticeable is that if you're in a corner and you're lent over you open the throttle in the sort of the lesser modes you don't quite get the engine response you expect because it is moderating its throttle according to lean angle and then as the bike comes upright even though you haven't really opened the throttle anymore the bike will begin to produce more power and make more power output, now I think Suzuki claim this is a first but they have to be a little bit careful because I'm pretty sure BMW's S1000RR when it was launched at Portimao in 2009 had a similar sort of system, now it may not have been graduated it may just have been like a step change like a set angle but definitely I remember riding it around Portimao coming out of some of the slower corners and giggling to myself because I deliberately hold the bike lent over, open the throttle and then as the bike came upright the bike would begin to accelerate harder, the engine was almost like it was coming on cam, so there may be some sort of again nuance is another word that we use a lot with this bike, it might be sort of some nuance control that Suzuki can claim as a first but generally that principle I'm sure other manufacturers have used it as well and maybe just not mentioned it quite as significantly, Kawasaki do have, sorry Suzuki do have a little bit of previous for sort of mentioning old technology as if it's brand new but anyway so there we go so that's traction control yes now those three elements of traction control traction control anti-wheely and roll torque control are kind of bundled together under the TC heading so you can't adjust them separately but you can adjust them overall they're up to there are seven sort of different settings and there's an off as well so there's and those settings again are all bundled into the ride modes wow it's complicated but for example you can't have you can't dial back the traction control but still have anti-wheely it's all clumped together but that is that not enough complication for you it all comes under your different modes it's all customizable which again is slightly odd because the bike remembers what you've done at ignition off so for example if you're in I don't which is quite pleasant throttle response and you know standard to be honest it's kind of the middle it's like the middle of everything and for this kind of riding I guess that's what you want you can actually go in and tweak it to your preference and it'll remember it but there is also a user mode so there are four modes all together I can't really see the point of a user mode if you're if your actual main modes are also customizable but anyway never mind it's a small point there's one final thing actually to say about the suspension which I'd forgotten to mention these little fellas down here so in terms of preload manual preload at the front unfortunately you have to drag out your allen key or your hex key because it's at the bottom of the fork preload at the rear which is where it really matters when you're sticking a pillion and boxes on that is automatically adjustable you've got an auto setting where it detects the payload and adjusts for itself or if you wish again you can have a manual setting which is what I've done set it up for a rider with a pillion a little bit more preload as we know tips the bike a little bit on its nose and just gives it a bit more of a kind of front end feel suzuki's do tend to sit really flat and this one's no different actually if you just ride it on standard preload the front does tend to just sort of do have to force it to turn a little bit it does have a little bit of sort of is it understeer or oversteer I'm never quite sure whatever ah speaking of understeer oversteer wobbling free let's talk about stability because that is a big issue basically when you get 150 horsepower engine and you shove it on long suspension stability at high speed becomes an issue and then how you mitigate that instability is one of your engineering challenges so for example some manufacturers limit their bikes top speed so if we go to say i'm sure the africa twins are the same yamaha's tracer 9 and even triumphs tiger 1200 rally all limited to 100 around about 134 135 miles an hour now you might say that's completely irrelevant on modern roads I remember a time when we would have been up in arms if our bikes were restricted by that much I remember when we complained when they were limited inverted commas to 186 miles an hour but but 134 is all you get but with the suzuki you get 155 that's your lot so it is limited to 155 which is plenty but that is an indication they don't really want you to go much faster with uh with these big panniers on and I'll get to the I'll actually get to the equipment the trim spec in a minute the panniers aren't standard I'm sorry that you're looking at the back of a gt all the time you should be looking at the back of the gx but suzuki uh everybody likes to manage stuff so the route is prescribed by suzuki and they wanted a certain number of miles on this type of road and a certain number of miles on that type of road and they uh for some reason put all the guide riders on the uh on the gt and then probably hadn't assumed that we'd be filming them all but anyway um organizing these launches is a thankless task you can never get it right sorry lifting the curtain a bit there but uh but yes anyway what was i babbling on about now i've done preload haven't i yes stability that's right so let's talk about suzuki's strategies for keeping this bike stable at speed number one limit top speed to 155 number two when it gets above 120 miles an hour again you could say it's academic um the suspension automatically moves to a medium setting uh it's so it sort of defaults to what suzuki considered to be the safe setting and again that's probably just to make sure the bike remains stable so that's the second thing they do the third thing i guess you could say the roll torque control is another uh sort of stability feature and then they've got an interesting one now i'm sure i've heard of another manufacturer doing this i'm gonna have to go back and check my records i'm sure it's not the first time i've heard this but there is an anti-wobble mode so above 80 miles an hour the bike will if it detects an oscillation or a wobble it will roll off the throttle it doesn't actually break but it does slow the bike down if it detects it going a bit wobbly it might have been yamaha's tracer 9 you know you'll have to check i'll put it on screen if i can find out anyway so above 80 miles an hour it uh it backs off if it gets into a wobble now i said to the engineers how do you define a what what's a wobble and i made some motions with my hands and i said um so if i'm to get my hands off the bars here and i said so is a wobble is it this is it like that or is it uh more of this and they said yeah they got their hands and they said it's more like this it's more of that so it'll be interesting when we get the bike back in the uk on some really bumpy fen roads where we can cut loose a bit and find out exactly at what point the bike begins to you know say it's had enough and slow you down when you're over 80 miles an hour and you're getting a bit of a weave on because that does happen out in the fence occasionally so i'm told allegedly anyway so uh that's the sort of uh all the anti-wobble strategies and uh and you know keep it keep the bike stable uh oh god there is one more actually the bike doesn't come with a top box you can't buy an accessory top box because again presumably that pushes it into an area that uh of sort of brings the speed closer and again that is a familiar thing there are plenty of bikes that i've um that i've ridden before with top boxes and panniers that get a bit of a speed wobble on when you're when you're boogieing on so sorry i'm talking mate i'm talking oh oh it's come off oh well i've lost my toll thing what can you do um no that's a shame we're going to be going through toll booths and we're supposed to have a toll thing on our arms but it's gone thanks john cheers mate thank you right so another thing on launches here we go hey francesca my thing's come off so anyway yes right where was i so speed wobbles i think we better stop talking soon because things are getting a bit hectic around here um so where were we yes speed wobbles we've done that let's do the price and i can shut up and carry on uh carry on riding this bike price is now francesca's in the way of someone it's all kicking off price is fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety nine pounds which is pretty good but it's in a kind of a base spec obviously you get all the electronics for that what you don't get is uh heated grips and you don't get the panniers the panniers are a 1200 quid extra same price as they are on the gt that gets you the panniers color coding the locks and the little clips that hold them on um you do get the quick shifter sent the stand is extra i'm going to talk about the rivals at the end of the day partly because uh oh there's a big bridge over there very pretty um i wonder where my thing went oh i know when it fell off when i was doing the wobbly arm thing oh there we go so yeah um fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety nine pounds it's not a bad price that but like i say i'll talk about his spec versus its rivals later on when we finish this ride for now i've talked for long enough and i'm sure you're thoroughly bored so i shall uh i shall be quiet and get on with the rest of this ride and come back to you later on that has been a fascinating two days riding suzuki's 2024 gsx s 1000 gx um it's actually getting pretty late now i don't know if you can tell on the video but it's starting to get a bit dark here so i'm going to rattle through this as quick as i can and i'll try and make as much sense as i can as i said while i was riding along this morning rattling through the spec i'm not going to go through specs again now i'm going to try and restrict myself just to how this thing feels to ride and what my views are and it is slightly ambivalent normally at this point i'll be frothing and fizzing and bubbling about the fantastic ride i'm glad we've had two days because it's taken me two days to really try and figure this bike out so for example on the first day we did a lot of stop start riding a lot of photo shoots didn't really get under the skin of the bike didn't really understand it my head was spinning full of the electronics and the suspension trying to work out how it felt and balance everything together now i didn't really get a good vibe for it um today i've been riding on the motorway we've done nearly 160 miles i think we've done motorway miles we've done some twisty coastal roads still haven't completely pulled the pin so we haven't gone loopy on it i don't think i've been over eight or nine thousand rpm we haven't had the space we haven't had there's been too much traffic and frankly we haven't been riding that fast that's just the way it has been so in terms of it's kind of like i suppose you could say it's a good thing because normally on one of these launches you'd be absolutely pinned for a lot of the time and that does tell you some characteristics about the bike but there are some stuff that you don't find out because you do spend a lot of time full throttle and concentrating on riding anyway having said all of that all my excuses let's get into the things that you can't tell by looking at the spec first thing is the riding position didn't even mention that this morning so i better go through that really quickly okay so it's a tall rounder which means you haven't quite got the same sort of leg room that you do with say an adventure bike you haven't got the width of the bars that you do with an adventure bike some of those are like rowing a canoe this thing it's a much more sporty much more compact riding position it is however more spacious and more upright than your sports tours and your sports bikes so it's not hard to imagine if that's your adventure bike set up right here and that's your sports bike over here this is pretty much in the middle at the sporty end bmw quote their s1000xr as a sports bike where they put it in their sports category so it kind of gives you some indication of where the manufacturers think these things sit um so yeah sorry riding position where were we so today i've been riding with the optional aftermarket seat the comfort seat i think they call it it's got some nice embroidery on it and some little pin striping here it's made up of two types of foam but it is the same kind of shape i think as the standard seat yesterday riding the standard seat didn't get all day on it because we were on and off the bike so much didn't intuitively feel particularly comfortable it feels quite narrow and it feels quite spongy it's like a spring with no damping it just sort of bounces around a bit it's not the best this is much nicer because it's two layers of foam one hard one soft and it does feel firmer which is actually quite a good thing i think but it is still quite narrow so wasn't aching today but it reaches a point where you go yeah i know i'm sitting on a bike and then it kind of holds it at that level it doesn't get any worse a softer seat will actually after a long you know after an extended period be agony so seat is worth getting not sure about the size of the pillion seat doesn't look very practical to me but then i don't often sit pillion so um but i definitely uh definitely check out that if you take a pillion frequently uh let's quickly talk about screens because i've got the feeling that manufacturers got to the point now where they don't really care what the screen is because it's a bit like they used to do with the exhaust cans because everybody takes them off and throws them away they don't bother designing them too nicely and with screens now they're almost like yeah we'll put a screen on it we know you're going to put a pooch screen on it or an mra lift flip up or a pyramid plastic screen or a powerbron screen with this we're adjustable in three positions using an allen key so it's not a really it's a roadside job or your garage job to be honest um and in its low position which is how i had it yesterday uh the buffeting sort of hits you here not in the head which is good but it is quite noisy so it's quite a sporty screen with the screen up today on the motorway definitely lifts that buffeting up to around about the helmet so you can hear it you do get a bit more buffeting it's not dramatic at the kind of speeds we were doing when i dipped my head by about three or four inches it got really good the noise went away so if i was three or four inches shorter i'm six foot then maybe that would be just what you need because your eye line is just over the top of it however if i was three or four inches shorter i probably wouldn't be able to fit on this 845mm seat so swings and roundabouts which kind of brings me on to another thing it's like you can't build a riding position that suits everybody there isn't such a thing as a one size fits all because we're all different shapes it's the same story when you get down to bike electronics and engine management and semi-active suspension settings because the idea i think of semi-active suspension is to try and isolate the bike and make it hover over ripples and bumps but at the same time offer support under weight transfer when you're braking or accelerating which is fine in principle the trouble is a roads vary okay we'll give you three different maps then we'll give you three different types three modes of semi-active suspension setting okay that's fair enough but then you get into the position where actually riders have different preferences too and this is particularly true not so much as semi-active but when it comes to rider modes and engine and power delivery and the way it manages its engine riders do so many different things i ride in ways that would make your hair curl probably but it works for me because i'm still here 30 years on and it's working you've probably got your own particular riding style so there's things that you do that i would think were crazy they're perfectly legitimate the trouble is you poor blokes at the factories trying to design design engine software they've got to try and make something that works when you're riding it and the works when i'm riding it good luck to them for that so anyway um we'll come back to that let's talk about it now actually so so basically you have these three broad areas of electronics on this bike you have kind of the the throttle response and the the main riding mode i prefer a which stands for active i think or you could call it aggressive because it is quite snappy which i'm not all that keen on but it does give you the full fat of the engine which is kind of what i want most of the time so i tend to have it on a mode great so we've sorted that bit out suspension wise i found that medium was best for me because if i put it on hard setting it was too choppy now hard is supposed to be choppy suspension or harder suspension more damping but better machine control i found on the sporty riding on the coast road we did start to open up and go for it a little bit paddling into the corners i did the suspension was too hard it was chattering so i could feel it and it was putting me off it was too much feedback might be the tires these dunlops are not the best tires in the world why manufacturers launch bikes on tires that aren't absolutely mint i've got no idea because they put all the effort into building this and then they go ruin it by putting on some fairly ordinary tires but anyway that's how it is so anyway on hard setting not my favorite so on soft setting it's okay but you know you do get the feeling that it is a little bit of a hinge in it sometimes so medium setting is where i put it that is where i would leave it all the time that could be true of anybody else's semi-active suspension so okay that's the damping part of it the engine control part of it i also have a bit of an issue with so you have these three kind of little bundles as i explained earlier you have traction control well that's fine i want my traction control at about level three that's where i think i've got a bit but i haven't got too much it's not going to slow me down so kind of that's pretty cool unfortunately that means i've also got wheelie control at level three well fair enough i'm not going to too old to go around pulling wheelies these days so i'm not aware of that is that's fine but then you get the roll torque control and that's also set to level three and now we start to have a bit of a problem because the one thing we really want and i think we all want this whatever our riding style we want it to be the same every time we get on the bike give me consistency when i open the throttle i want the same stuff to happen and when you get into roll torque control and you're a particular lean angle you open the throttle depending on the preciseness of that lean angle which can vary you will get a different throttle response you get a different engine delivery and that's not always a good thing in fact it's never really a good thing now i'm not saying it's dangerous i'm not saying it's a problem all i'm saying is you don't really you really want consistency you want to know what you're getting every time you open the gas and you go to a certain point i'm not entirely convinced that you get that from this so i'd quite like to take the roll torque control and maybe turn it off and see what it feels like with it off but still have me traction control still have me anti-wheelie haven't got that option and that's what i mean about the one size fits all we all ride differently we all have different ideas i'm not entirely convinced that uh that it's perfect but anyway i've rabbited on enough now because it is getting properly dark and i'm probably disappearing and going all fuzzy it's probably a good thing so i'm going to sum up real quick fourteen thousand pound fourteen thousand four hundred and ninety nine pounds it's kind of in a sweet spot because it makes 150 horsepower but also in its marketplace that's comparatively well priced the versus is a thousand over a same spec versus not sporty as this 118 horsepower much larger longer it feels heavier it feels like a more substantial bike it doesn't feel as energetic as the suzuki does um then there's the xr which makes more power than this um but also costs a ton more as well a little bit complicated to compare because the base xr comes with some sort of basic esa electronic suspension um it doesn't come with cruise control and i think it only comes with an up shifter not an up and down shifter if you want to spec those into the bmw then you start getting to seventeen thousand over seventeen and a half thousand pounds with your quick shifter pro and your dynamic esa pro and your cruise control and that is that's like a couple of grand more than the this bike so that's if you want this sort of power in this kind of bike the suzuki really is where you've got to go for that price point the big fly in the ointment is yamaha's tracer 9 gt plus which you know i'm a massive fan of and i'm trying to put that to one side that engine comment i made about this thing being very linear and very kind of old school in the sense that it's a old sports bikes engine so it has its performance balanced the tracer is one of those engines that has a lot of its performance wedged down at the front end because of its design um and it is fun to ride in a way that this is it's fun in a different way to this this is fun in a slightly more serious way because you have to be building up a bit speed before you start to smile on the tracer you just grin when it goes the tracer also feels more agile it feels lighter but those are kind of my subjective opinions the thing you can't argue about which is inarguable is the tracer comes with panniers it comes with a center stand it comes with heated grips and it comes with a radar up its nose so it's got a lot of kit that this thing hasn't got that you have to pay extra for and it's only 500 quid more than this so around about five maybe a bit more maybe 600 quid so that's a bit of a problem um yeah i think the yamaha would be its biggest rival in terms of its performance and its spec but anyway as usual i've rabbited on for far too long um you know if you want me to say something like would i buy one well i'd be happy to ride one to scotland you bet i would i'd ride it anywhere it would be great i mean you know 160 170 miles in the tank actually quite a bit more actually today we were um i think we're on for about 180 miles out of this if we'd kept going the fuel consumption was around about 46 miles per gallon um as an average so it's not noticeably different from the gt anyway i'd ride it all over the place it's not a problem it's perfectly comfortable it's great you know there's no there's nothing that sort of stands out and sticks out as as being awkward or unpleasant um do i personally do i prefer it to a versus yes i do um because i do find the versus is just a little bit kind of too long and too big and you know if i really wanted to take it easy fine but uh but not for me bmw is a fantastic bike i've got a sneaky feeling that the sort of post euro 5 uh s 1000 xr isn't quite as gutsy as the original it does seem to me to my head to have a bit more of a hole in the mid-range but you know uh i think so i'd probably go for the suzuki to be perfectly honest um versus the tracer yeah that's a tough one after riding back to back to see i think i know which way i go i think you probably know which way i go as well anyway i've talked enough so it's getting really dark now i hope you can still see me please like and subscribe please leave a comment i'll be around for a couple of weeks answering your questions down below i'm sorry i've forgotten to look up the service intervals and loads of other information um but i have got it all in there somewhere um please like and subscribe yeah i've said that already please if you're in the uk get your insurance from bennett's please become a bike social member take advantage of all their offers there are tons of them it is worth doing if you ever go to british superbike racing just become a bike social member it makes things so much more exciting um good right that's it uh no there's one more thing to say thank you very much for putting up with me from the gsxs 1000 gt and you can see our our lead rider has got uh oh dear here we go there's already drama going on and we can see the lead rider has it's on the gt it's honestly it's like going on a launch with a five-year-old