Bandit Queen

With Suzuki having launched two more of its international models in India, the local biking scene is all set to hot up yet again. Adil Jal Darukhanawala 
gets astride the Suzuki Bandit and takes a quick spin

    When it comes to motorcycles which call the tarmac their home, there are undeniably two distinct camps which are as different as chalk and cheese and always at odds with each other. For those who get their kicks from adrenaline-pumping speed, there are the sportbikes — hundreds of cubic centimetres packed in (usually) four cylinders with monstrous acceleration and deft handling to boot. For the more laidback sort of riders, for whom ‘kilometres’ matter more than ‘kilometresper-hour’, it doesn’t get better than cruisers with their gigantic, lazyrevving V-twin engines and comfortable seating positions. But still, there are a whole lot of motorcycles which neatly fall between the two and more often than not go unnoticed. Call them standards, sport tourers, street bikes or nakeds; these bikes offer some of the comfort and practicality of cruisers with some of the speed thrills of the sportbikes. And, arguably, one of the most well known of these bikes is the Suzuki Bandit. 

    In fact, it was a yellow Suzuki Bandit that prominently featured in the movie Dhoom and pretty much introduced the Indian masses to the superbiking culture. And now, six years after its Bollywood debut, the Bandit has gone on sale in India. So just what is this bike all about? Well, in its current form, the Suzuki Bandit is a 1255-cc 4-cylinder motorcycle, which, at least in appearance, has all the makings of a highly capable sports tourer — a bike designed to munch many hundred miles quite quickly in great comfort with enough room to bolt on a couple of panniers as well. When you swing a leg over the saddle, thumb the starter and get going, it immediately becomes clear just how easy a bike this is to ride. Unlike other 4-cylinder sportbikes, there is no sudden surge of power when you hit the powerband; instead the Bandit’s power delivery is extremely smooth and consistent throughout its rev range. That having been said, it is physically impossible for a bike with one and a quarter litres of cubic capacity to ever 
feel timid when you twist your right wrist. So while it does have the acceleration to quicken your pulse a little, the only real word which can be used to satisfactorily describe it is ‘sweet’. 
    But the real beauty of the Bandit’s DOHC engine lies in its ability to deliver as much torque as its superbike sibling, the GSX-R1000, at just about one-third the rpm. This means that whenever you open the throttle, the bike will leap ahead with nearly the same gusto, regardless of whatever gear you’re in. And it is this very nature of the Bandit that has given it a bit of a hooligan image since the ’90s and remains a favourite amongst many stunt riders around the world. What the Bandit really is, is an extremely good all-round bike. Not only is it a great sports tourer, it’s also a hoot to ride on twisty mountain roads and city streets alike. Weighing 254 kg and with a long wheelbase of 1485 mm, it’s certainly not what you might call light and nimble. But the convenient seating position along with the well placed footpegs and tall, wide handlebars make it fairly easy to steer through corners or even rush-hour traffic for that matter. What’s more, even the seat height can be adjusted by 20 mm to ensure that riders of any will be instantly at home in the saddle. And nothing better epitomises the convenience of the Bandit than its centre-stand, which comes as standard. Commonplace on our Indian bikes, you might say, but on a high capacity international motorcycle such as this one, definitely a luxury. 
    It’s been a while now since quite a few international bikes with cubic capacities in excess of 1000 cc have been available in India. But the Suzuki Bandit 1250S really stands apart from the rest of them. It is a far less cumbersome machine on our streets as compared to the superbikes from the Honda and Yamaha stables. At the same time, it also offers aerodynamic benefits over the naked streetfighter bikes from the same companies, making it a better machine to do some long distance riding on. So it really offers the ‘best of both worlds’ approach that a lot of bikers really want from their machines. But the real coup d’état that Suzuki has pulled off with the Bandit is its pricing — Rs. 8.5 lakh ex-showroom Delhi. While it still does seem like a lot of money for a motorcycle for most of us, it also makes it the cheapest ‘big’ bike in India yet, and that too by a pretty large margin. So perfect ‘big’ bike for India, you ask? Well, this is as good as it gets, for now at least.


courtesy: times crest