It’s finally real! Yamaha have unveiled the **NEW** R7 - annoying many old purists, it steals the name from, but is nothing to do with, the original very exclusive and expensive 1999 homologation R7 (Think Noriyuki Haga in WSB and you'll know it). It is however everything to do with wrapping a sporty package around their peachy little 73bhp MT07 motor, which is a brilliant thing to do - with a slipper clutch, revised gearox ratios, fully adjustable suspension, Brembo M/C and a sportier chassis, it looks like a perfect middleweight weapon.

Already powering the XSR700, Tracer 700 and Ténéré 700, this motor has deserved a sporty incarnation for years. Up until now the problem with launching anything labelled “sportsbike” is that the sector is flatlining.Yamaha gave up with their R6 as a road registerable model last year, and not a moment too soon - developed almost exclusively for track success, riding any in-line 4 (IL4) cylinder Supersport 600 on the road was like trying to eat your dinner with a Samurai sword instead of a cutlery knife - a few people could probably manage it with a lot of practice, but it was never fun and was a bit on the aggressive side.

This shift in thinking to accept sub-100bhp, non IL4 sports bikes needs to happen. We've all been brow-beaten into thinking more power equals more fun. Honestly, for the average rider on the average road, it just doesn't. 

A motor that pulls you out of a 30mph countryside corner with a bit of intake noise, grunt and puts a smile on your face as it does so is way more relevant, and fun, than slipping a clutch and reaching skywards for a wafer thin power band that is gone as soon as it has arrived. If you’re a racer on a silky surfaced and sunny international racetrack with a bit of experience behind you, then a Supersport 600 makes sense; for Dave the plasterer, or Davina the teacher, weekend riding on the backroads of Dorset on the way to a bag of chips by the seaside, it really doesn’t. A modern middleweight engined road bike like the KTM790, an MT07 or a Street Triple, is NOT a slow motorcycle - it does however happen to be perfect for affordable, exciting, worry-free riding on the roads, and that's where this R7 fills an important R6-shaped middleweight sportsbike hole for Yamaha. Being a way more usable package it is arguably better (for the roads) than the bike it replaces.

The last few years of the Supersport 600 dominance in the middleweight sportsbike category were terrible - it was a long slow death, there were no gains, no new models, there was no progress. The R6 got a restyle in 2017, but aside from that, it was more or less the same bike that came out in 2005, much like Honda’s venerable CBR600. You can try and hide stagnation and irrelevancy but eventually it’ll be rumbled, and rumbled through falling sales. I spoke to a big Suzuki dealer in around 2015 and they couldn’t remember the last time they had sold a GSX-R600, which you’d have thought was a really important part of their flagship sportsbike range? That was amazing, but on reflection not surprising.

I’m really hopeful the emerging midweight sportsbikes like this new R7 and Aprilia’s RS660 stand a chance of doing something special; as well as pulling a few kids up the ladder from the even smaller sporties like the KTM390, R25, CBR250 and Ninja 400, I think older riders, like me, can get their Sunday kicks back on a proper sporty motorcycle that demands to be ridden rather than just “clung onto”. 

I get to ride modern, non-IL4 middleweights quite often, and I think they’re perfect for the road, the same things happen as on a bigger bike, except at way less speed, with much less outlay and many more smiles per mile - that’s got to be good, hasn’t it? The only downside is at the café you probably won’t look as cool when you get off something with an MT07 engine, as an R1, Fireblade or Panigale; But if you’re into getting your kicks from riding and not just posing, it doesn’t matter a bloody jot.

Middleweight sportsbikes remain something a lot of riders on the way up the ladder would like to experience, so shouldn’t we have exciting, stylish and most importantly, road-relevant, models to make that choice a good one? 

Up until now, the lingering death of the old in-line 4 supersport 600s means we may not have had relevant and progressive bikes to offer riders who wanted a middleweight sportster. That’s finally changing, I really hope this little R7 sets the world alight and sells in container-loads - and with an estimated rrp of around £8k, it may well just do that.