No Empty Boast

A perfect combination of lively performance, sweet handling and competitive price is necessary for a low-budget fun bike. Yamaha have hit the nail on the head with the new MT-03. We rode it in Spain

- Roland Brown

EVEN WHEN glimpsed from the seat of a fast-moving MT-03 in the nearby hills, Benidorm’s mass of concrete skyscrapers is a depressing sight. Evidence of what happens when the Spanish coast’s perfect combination of sand, sea and sun is sacrificed in a scramble to provide low-budget pleasure with minimal thought for design.

Thankfully, Yamaha’s search for low- budget fun has been much better thought out. When you’re designing an entry-level motorbike, the perfect combination is lively performance, sweet handling and a competitive price. Up here on the twisty, smooth-surfaced roads of southern Spain the MT-03 is working well enough to suggest that the first two, at least, have been comprehensively nailed.

This was not exactly a suprise, given that the MT-03 is closely related to the YZF-R3 sportster that has earned plenty of praise and sales since its launch last year. It’s not often that a naked bike can truly be described as a sports machine with its fairing removed, but that’s almost literally the case with Yamaha’s duo although, inevitably, in this age of platform engineering, they were designed together and released independently for marketing reasons.

There’s absolutely no change in the 321-cc, parallel-twin engine, which is shared with the R3 even down to its fuel- injection system and exhaust. The DOHC, eight-valve unit has offset cylinders, over-square dimensions of 68 x 44.1 millimetres, and a balancer shaft to control the vibration as it revs to its 13,500- RPM limit, passing the power peak of 42 PS at 10,750 revs on the way.