The Kawasaki GTR1400, Gran Turismo Racing

The Kawasaki GTR1400 will be a little high in saddle for those who insist on keeping their feet on the ground - 175cm I certainly couldn't get both my feet flat on the road. The trade-off for this is a good ground clearance - even fully loaded - without raising the pegs. I found the Kawasaki GTR1400 good for touring Thailand on all sorts of roads, but on the long rural motorways the bottom start to complain after riding for more than a few hours. The Kawasaki GTR1400 screen gives good protection and being electronically adjustable it can be moved around to alter the level of wind-flow.

The Kawasaki GTR1400 has the vast reserves of power and torque that one would expect from a four-cylinder machine of this this displacement. Fueling is flawless: pinpoint accurate and incremental. This makes for an entirely friendly giant and nonsense ride. The Kawasaki GTR1400 is a big motorcycle that barely notices an upward incline and simply storms through multi-vehicle overtakes in a most easiest manner.

The Kawasaki's 6-speed gearbox is a precise pleasure to use, with most out of town riding barely ever necessitating the use of the lower gears. Top gear is described by the instrumentation as an overdrive, but the engine is so strong that it can be used to cruise along back roads, pulling easily from about 2500 rpm and up. While cruising, 130km/h equates to about 4,000 rpm. The geometry of the immense shaft-drive and torque-arm give almost no reaction to a rapidly opened throttle, being as good in use as any shaft-drive system out there.

Front damping can be adjusted via fork-top knobs without recourse to a screwdriver and rear preload is likewise easily adjusted via a remote-knob system. Handling - especially at low speed - is impressive for such a large motorcycle. When going quickly over rough terrain, the rear shock sometimes struggles to control the weight of all the rear section, and pillion. But it's nothing to put the wind up and overall the Kawasaki GTR1400 is a model of easy-to-handle stability. In the wet few large motorcycles give such levels of confidence.

The huge, radially mounted front brakes give tremendous stopping power with superb sensitive and direct control. With the added reassurance of ABS, hard use can result in pillion helmet-bumping. The rear brake was, less useful, but acceptable.