Yamaha’s been on a tear lately with really cool products within a somewhat affordable price. You got the FZ Or FC of course, you have the r1 and the r1m all of those are fantastic and really fun cool motorcycles. It’s no secret Yamaha has been missing out on the beginner bike market in U.S. that all changes.
Now with this the 2015 Yamaha Yzf r3 basically a bored-out version of the r-25 available in the Asian markets. It’s now coming to America and it’s about time so what we have here we have it all starts with the engine. It’s a 321 CC parallel twin so it’s bigger than the kawasaki ninja bigger than the CBR 250. Honda civic in the CBR 300 honda two quite significant margins.
So it’s kind of on this level playing field with the KTM rc390. I have not ridden that yet so it’s kind of hard to compare how the two stack up but focusing back on the Yamaha. They really focused on a beginner bike that’ll grow with the rider and it looks cool doesn’t look like.
A beginner bike I mean you have this r6 kind of esque front-end styling design up there that looks really cool. In my opinion, moving back towards the engine you have ford aluminium pistons offset solar. It’s just a really cool design that they’ve put in the Yamaha r3 motorbike that kind of borrows from other areas like the r1. A low seat height inches it’s a really narrow tank to seat junctions so shorter riders won’t feel.
Now a track ride but we really like to see how they are three performs in both situations on the street. It’s remarkably capable of you know handling itself really well. The smaller beginner bikes you’re kind of revving the crap out of them to really keep up with traffic with the r3 has a low first gear. So you can zip away from the line really quickly there’s plenty of power to keep up with other cars.
You’ll pass them we are doing 80 on the freeway and six gear with plenty of rest left over to overpass cars trucks. You name it it’s a really capable motorcycle for the street rider then we took it to the twisties. Again it’ll flick really well has cast aluminum wheels with suspension you know it’s kind of their bare-bones.
It works all right and as the beginner rider gets better in their skills. This kind of variable and suspension will help them learn the techniques that they need to go to a bigger bike. So just for a bit of fun, Yamaha took us here to the racetrack to really put the bike to its paces.
It’s incredibly you know capable of handling racetrack duty to those small-displacement race classes around the country. I think you better watch out cause we are through you might be a contender there’s plenty of power not to get bored you can easily do over 100 miles. An hour and with a bike like this that’s this small get a bunch to get 20 of them together doing that kind of speed.
It’s a riot with a bunch of your buddies on the same racetrack got stock Michelin tires on it. The street tires that we world on the street and now we took the track. You know they’re not track-focused tires but they handle. All right maybe one talking point is the single front brake disc. Personally, the brake lever field could have been better not quite.
As powerful as a Kawasaki setup but you know maybe with a change of pads. That’ll easily be fixed and Yamaha already has accessory stainless steel brake lines available to up the ante in the braking department. Overall it’s hard to fault the r3 at just under 370 pounds it’s in between. The Honda and the Kawasaki as far as weight goes and at four thousand nine hundred ninety dollars. It’s right there in the ballpark too it’s cheaper than the Cowie. Slightly more than the Honda so with a bigger engine more powerless weight than the Kawasaki and cheaper too. I think Yamaha has a home run with the r3.
