Suzuki Gsf650 Bandit

The 656cc motor is a genuine step up from the old 600 — it pulls harder from 4,000 rpm and doesn't feel strangled below 6k like some fours do, which makes filtering and town work genuinely painless. On A-roads it's relentless fun: the chassis is composed, the steering neutral without being dull, and that motor hits its stride at exactly the speed you're doing on a good sweeper. The forks are a bit soft for aggressive riding — they dive under hard braking and the rebound damping is barely adjustable — and the seat goes hard after about two hours, which matters because this bike tempts you into longer trips than you planned. It's not exciting in the way a dedicated sportsbike is, but I've put 15,000 miles on one and can count the days I didn't enjoy it on one hand.

I put nearly 18,000 km on a 2009 GSF650S and the Gen 2 Bandit genuinely surprised me — that inline-four pulls cleanly from 3,000 rpm and only gets more interesting as you push past 8,000, which isn't something you can say about most middleweight nakeds. The revised suspension over the Gen 1 actually holds its composure through fast sweepers, though if you're above 85 kg and riding hard, the rear shock runs out of ideas pretty quickly and you'll be shopping for an aftermarket unit. Fuel injection on the later models cleaned up the cold-start stumble that plagued the carb versions, and the ergonomics — upright but slightly forward-leaning — work for a 300 km day without destroying your wrists. My main gripe is the mirror vibration above 100 km/h turns anything behind you into abstract art, and the stock exhaust sounds like it's apologizing for existing.