Making a quick motorcycle is quite easy: you give it a light chassis, a powerful engine, big brakes, and sticky tires. Then you send it out into the world and watch people lust after it. However, this kind of performance motorcycle generally tends to be temperamental, and even if they are reliable, they aren’t practical enough to be used often by the owner.
The more difficult task is to make a performance motorcycle whose keys the owner can reach for every day. By that we mean every day — rain, shine, weekday, weekend, commute, joyride… whatever the intent. It takes a special kind of motorcycle that will goad you on when you’re in the mood for tomfoolery, and yet calm down and make things smooth when you’re riding to the office. Yamaha has been making special motorcycles for a long time, and here is yet another example of the prowess.
Yamaha’s Multi-Talented Motorcycles Are Usually Underappreciated
Yamaha isn’t the biggest or the flashiest manufacturer. It hasn’t had any big updates for its products in a while, with the last big range update coming around the time COVID hit. Since then, it has been awfully quiet, but that doesn’t mean that its products aren’t worth your attention today. Its products are so good, one of them managed to be our favorite Japanese motorcycle just a couple of years ago, and its middleweight touring machine is always at the head of the line when we have to recommend a fun touring motorcycle that is reliable as well. There is no doubt that Yamaha is capable of great things, but it prefers to find its greatness in the mundane things, like being quietly great over the years rather than wowing riders on the first ride, and then having the ownership experience go downhill from there.
The Yamaha MT-09 Combines Real-World Speed With Everyday Usability
It isn’t easy to pick a Yamaha that fits the bill of a product that combines real-world speed with everyday usability, but the MT-09 is that product. It introduced the awesome CP3 engine to the world, and there’s a premium version with electronic suspension. Plus, the engine is so good at everything; it has spawned a whole generation of copycats with odd firing orders. This is to our benefit, because motorcycles with these strange new cranks offer a great combination of torque and horsepower.
It Is Priced Like A Premium Product
The MT-09 is an old product, but Yamaha has kept refreshing it periodically, with the last significant updates coming in 2021 and 2024. 2021 was a big overhaul, but 2024 also brought smaller but still significant changes to it. This is now priced at $10,899, which is quite a premium price in the segment. In its defense, though, it needs no accessories at all. It is a complete product as is.
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CP3 Engine Is The Star Of The Show
We can’t help but marvel at the longevity of the CP3 crossplane inline three engine. It is well over a decade since it launched, but in the featherweight MT-09, it can be either fun or frightening. It demands respect, even though the output figures don’t seem like much: 890 cc, three cylinders, a compression ratio of 11.5:1, and 117 horsepower at 10,000 RPM and 68.6 pound-feet at 7,000 RPM. Like all middleweight nakeds, it runs all its fun through a six-speed gearbox with a slip and assist clutch and chain final drive. The two-way quickshifter is standard and is the latest-gen one.
Chassis Has Some Very Interesting Elements
The MT-09 has a die-cast aluminum twin-spar chassis, and it uses the engine as a stressed member. This is standard fare for naked bikes. What isn’t standard is the fact that the chassis comprises the left and right halves, and they are bolted to each other. The bolt-on subframe and box-section swingarm are aluminum units as well. It seems counterintuitive, but it somehow works incredibly well, even in the Tracer 9 touring bike.
The suspension is more conventional, with a 41 mm inverted fork and a monoshock at the rear. There is adjustment for preload, compression, and rebound at the front, and preload and rebound damping at the rear. Travel available is 5.1 inches and 4.6 inches at the front and rear, respectively.
Its light weight means that it doesn’t need full-size brakes, making do instead with twin 298 mm front discs with radial four-piston fixed calipers, and a 245 mm rear disc with a single-piston caliper. The 2021 update gave it the radial front calipers as well as a Brembo radial front master cylinder. The spinforged aluminum wheels are a standard size for the segment: 17 inches, and are shod with sticky tubeless tires for maximum fun.
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The MT-09 Is Light, And Fun-Sized
This is a fun-size machine. It is just over 82 inches long and 32 inches wide, and has a wheelbase of 56.3 inches. Ground clearance is standard at 5.5 inches. Like the front brakes, the fuel tank is also a little small, at 3.7 gallons. But with its light weight and a claimed 48 MPG, you should get over 150 miles to a tank fairly easily. Now, to the figure we’ve been alluding to all this time: it weighs just 425 pounds wet, which is excellent for this segment. This makes it lighter than even some parallel twin-equipped competition!
A Complete Feature Set Is Present
The MT-09’s updates have kept it current, and its feature set makes it a complete product. It has a 5-inch TFT display with Bluetooth and navigation. The navigation is via the Garmin StreetCross app. The handlebars and footpegs can be adjusted to two different positions, there is a USB-C charging port, the lighting is all-LED, and the turn signals are self-canceling and have a lane-change feature.
The by-wire throttle and six-axis IMU make this an exceptional motorcycle when it comes to performance. It has many parameters that can be adjusted by the rider as well. They include cornering traction control, cornering ABS, cornering back slip regulator, adjustable slide control, and adjustable wheelie control. Cruise control is standard and can be set when going at least 25 MPH in third gear or higher.
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Great Competition, But The MT Holds Its Own
There are some truly impressive names to consider if you’re eyeing the MT-09. Let us get the KTM 990 Duke ($12,499) and Suzuki GSX-S1000 ($11,989) out of the way first, because they are a little too expensive to be considered seriously as competitors to the MT-09. The Honda CB1000 Hornet SP ($10,999) deserves a shoutout at the price and for the cracking suspension it offers, but the detuned engine for the US market is a dealbreaker when you’re looking at something as fun as an MT-09.
That is a similar reason to discard the extremely good Kawasaki Z900 ($9,999). It is a great product and offers that coveted I4 smoothness, but it focuses on torque and is a little too serious. The Triumph Trident 800 ($9,995) is a great addition to the British manufacturer’s lineup and makes all the right noises (literally – it is a triple, too!), but it still feels a little less premium than the Yam thanks to its strange analog/TFT instrument cluster.
The BMW F 900 R is priced incredibly well, at $9,595. It makes decent power as well, but it is, despite the parallel-twin engine, incredibly, a few pounds heavier than the MT-09! You do get a really long accessories list that you can go crazy with, but all of this only goes to show that if you want a combination of practicality and swivel-eyed madness, there is only one answer, and it is available in blue.
Source: Yamaha USA