Welcome to my website, above is one of my many interests, slightly unusual and not the run of the mill. A Yamaha GTS1000 appears initially overcomplicated, overweight, overpriced to most and was actually too early in its delivery to the market place to generate the sales it needed to survive, and truthfully, it’s probably not a bike I would have chosen to own except for the fact I borrowed one in 2004, and I came to the conclusion, a Yamaha GTS1000 is a great bike, a truly underrated classic.
What’s it like? Odd to steer and surprisingly top heavy at low speed, but strangely, once on the move it’s well composed & supremely stable at much higher speeds, more so than anything I have ridden so far, and yet it can still out corner & out brake more modern similar capacity machines. All of which makes the GTS1000 an attractive machine to own, plus you're unlikely to see another one outside rallies.
A GTS1000 is interesting technically, hugely different at the front end, and a snapshot of late 80s design & early 90s production values, so it’s not surprisingly flawed and compromised when revisited today. You have to remember when it was launched in 1993, the large capacity motorcycle market was being challenged for excessive horsepower and speeds by some lobby groups in Europe, so it was never going to have the performance of its FZR1000 cousin. Fortunately that was close on twenty years ago, and now you can shift the compromises and update this bike if you want to, which is the reason why this motorcycle appeals to the designer that still exists in me, despite the latter being a half life ago. There is nothing like modding something and immersing yourself in the experience.
In fact we can all learn something from the past, and I liken the process to living in an old house with a coal fire blazing with the lights off, and although you might have a 1940s track on CD, if you had a gramophone and 78 of the same, you’d be experiencing the same sounds & sensations as somebody did many years ago, and so it’d be like travelling back in time. Driving old cars & bikes, is like winding up a gramophone and listening by firelight, owning an old Teasmade and making a cuppa, or taking a photo with a Kodak Instamatic, but ever so much more involving.
