Sport-Touring Motorcycles

Suzuki announced a new "plus" variant to the DR-Z4SM supermoto, plus the return of the GSX-S1000GX+ for the 2026 model year, along with a range of returning ATV models.

Norton Motorcycles has laid out its next chapter at EICMA 2025, marking what it calls the brand’s “Resurgence.” Backed by major investment and industrial muscle from parent company TVS Motor, Norton’s rebirth is less about nostalgia and more about building a sustainable, forward-looking British motorcycle brand.

Despite being the world’s largest motorcycle manufacturer and having a diverse catalog of motorcycles, Honda had been lacking in sport-touring options since it discontinued the ST1300 in 2013, and the VFR1200 in 2017. That started to change in recent years, first with the introduction of the NT1100, and now, the addition of the Honda CB1000GT.

The Dual Clutch Transmission, or DCT, is changing how some riders experience motorcycling—and even helping to attract new riders.

Hollywood knows what to do with a hit: you follow it up with a sequel. Iconic science-fiction horror film “Alien” paved the way for its decidedly more action-packed successor “Aliens,” where we saw Ellen Ripley continue to kick extraterrestrial ass in new and exciting ways. Even Woody from the “Toy Story” franchise has made five silver screen appearances, spinning yarns about the power of friendship, adventure, and other wholesome themes. A good sequel brings fresh elements to the table because seeing the same heroes cover the same ground won’t put butts in theater seats, and that’s a fact that doesn’t escape motorcycle manufacturers either. The Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 Special liter-class ADV platform garnered praise in 2021, surprising even the brand’s harshest critics. Yet, there are more threads to be pulled, as the 2025 Harley-Davidson Pan America 1250 ST focuses on a road-going audience, diving into the ADV-sport-touring category.

Last November, at EICMA, KTM announced a number of new street models based on its 1390 and 990 platforms. Not long afterwards, KTM announced it was entering into self-administration under the weight of its growing debt. Production was halted, which means those new models planned for the 2025 model year have been pushed back to 2026.

Three years ago, those of us with our feet planted on North American soil began counting down what turned from days into months and eventually years before it would be our turn to frolic on Honda's new 17-inch-wheeled sport-tourer. Amongst a sea of ADV and ADV-adjacent offerings, there is a Stateside sect of riders who opine for a roadgoing all-arounder – those doe-eyed hopefuls wave a hearty checklist in hand: sporting ability, touring necessities, and affordability neatly assembled in this carefully balanced package. Well, my tarmac-affectionate friends, consider your yearnful cries answered because the 2025 Honda NT1100 DCT has arrived – huzzah!

Wet, cool, low visibility. What other conditions could I possibly ask for when getting to test BMW’s carbon fiber-laden, $30.5 grand 200+-horsepower M tourer? Our half day onboard the BMW M 1000 XR started out of Malaga, Spain, and wound up into hills fully socked in with the morning’s marine layer. Water began to bead up on my visor as I attempted to keep the lead rider’s taillight in view on the highway. Fantastic.

New motorcycle model introductions follow a well-worn path: travel to the event location, eat nice meals, get briefed on the bike of the moment, ride a route designed to highlight the bike’s strengths, take photos/video, eat more good food, return home, and write up a review. After 27 years in this industry, I still get a cheap thrill about throwing a leg over a new motorcycle before it is available to the general public. However, what really gets me going is when I have a chance to log more than just the couple of hundred miles typically covered in an intro and spend some real time on the road with said bike.

Astute readers are probably wondering why Motorcycle.com is publishing a First Ride of a bike that’s not coming to the States this model year. Our reasoning is that, thanks to the sleuthing of Dennis Chung, we suspect the Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ will be coming to the U.S. in 2024. (Read about it here.) So, we thought our fellow MOrons might be as interested as we are in how well the new technology incorporated into the GT+ performs. We hope you enjoy this taste of what it has to offer. –EB

KTM confirmed it will reveal a new 890 SMT model, adding a new supermoto-inspired middleweight sport-tourer to its 2023 lineup. Spy photos of a prototype popped up last October and again in January, and we now know the new SMT will be revealed on April 24.

Not sure how Kawasaki is calling this a “new model press release,” since the only thing new on our favorite surface-to-surface cruise missile is its Auto Hi-Beam (AHB) headlight. But in the hopes they’ll loan us one for a while, we’ll play along.

1990 Honda ST1100 begat 2003 Honda ST1300, which begat 2014 Honda CTX1300… which at some point in the last few years seems to have gone, mercifully, the way of all flesh. Now if it’s a Honda sport tourer you crave, it’s the Gold Wing or, well, that’s about it. Anyway, the big 1261cc V-four ST1300 was quite the long-distance mile muncher 20 years ago. But I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen one in the wild. The good news is Yamaha is still manufacturing the motorcycle that showed the ST the exit – the FJR1300ES. Survival of the fittest, I suppose.

My apologies for returning so quickly to ZXForums, when we were just here two weeks ago. But this one knocked my socks off. The Kawasaki ZX-11 may have had more impact on some of our formative years than any other motorcycle. And this 1998 D model for sale in northern Arkansas (there’re a couple of nice roads there) appears to have been preserved in amber, right down to its shiny stock dual exhausts.

Like we said, forums are an excellent place to search for a new-to-you used motorcycle. Or car. Or whatever. Very generally speaking, people who care enough to join a forum care enough to take good care of their love object, and putting the thing up for sale on the forum may be a way of ensuring it goes to a good home. If you’re lucky. Some fora (that’s plural) even make you jump through a hoop or two to join. Ducati.MS, for instance, insists you’re a member for 15 days, and must make five posts before you can access its Marketplace. Like a cooling-off period I guess? Keeps out the riff-raff… but I kept after it and here we are.

For 2023, Yamaha has gone crazy with the new Tracer 9 GT+ and thrown every bit of technology it could think of at the bike. Now sitting atop Yamaha’s sport-touring mountain as the flagship for the brand – taking the place of the dearly departed FJR1300, which has been out of production for a few years – the Tracer 9 GT+, with its multitude of electronic rider aids, will help make the sport-touring experience as stress-free as possible.

This just in from Yamaha Europe, whether this applies Stateside remains to be seen:

While magazine editors and track riders may wax poetic about the leaps in performance of the latest super-grippy sport and track tires, the vast majority of sport-focused street riders spend their money on sport-touring rubber. Why? Well, two reasons, actually. First, once you look beyond the arid Southwest where the bulk of the U.S. motorcycle industry resides, riders have to deal with rain, making the way tires handle in the wet of great importance. Then there’s the fact that sport-touring tires offer almost the same level of grip as their sportier siblings – at street temperatures – while offering significantly better longevity. (At lower temperatures, sport-touring tires can offer more real-world grip than even the stickiest of sporting rubber, which are designed to work their best at elevated temperatures.) With the release of the Michelin Road 6 sport-touring tires, Michelin claim an increase in both wet grip and wear characteristics when compared to their precursors, the Michelin Road 5.

All we learn from history, goes the current cynical wisdom, is that we learn nothing from history. Then again, maybe we do? For instance, I just learned this morning that Yamaha is still stamping out the FJR1300ES 20 years after the original 2002 FJR1300 hit our shores. Well, they’re still selling them anyway. I remember FJ1100 very fondly, FJ1200 was the tool for inhaling great draughts of western landscape at ludicrous speed… all before this first liquid-cooled FJR blew our moldy sport-touring socks off. (Note Minime’s acting out by spelling three of four names wrong in only the first 2.5 lines of copy. Is there an Editor in the house?)

BMW released initial details on its 2023 model lineup, including new colors and minor updates. BMW also announced the base MSRP for most of its models, though that information is rather moot, as it also announced additional packages which will automatically be added on to all models in the U.S.

It only seemed fitting, after posting a 2022 BMW K1600 B review last week, to revisit Herr Duke’s review of the original six-cylinder Bavarian butt missile ten yeas ago. The basic building blocks really haven’t changed; only the electronic controls and features have stepped up over the years. The biggest surprise is what hasn’t changed much. The 2012 GT with Premium Package sold for $24,540; the 2022 bike with PP is listed at $28,285.

Kawasaki’s November 2019 acquisition of a 49.9% shareholding in Bimota has brought the Italian boutique manufacturer back from oblivion, to the point that despite a slowdown caused by component supply issues, it’s now constructed all 250 examples of the its limited edition kickoff model unveiled at the 2020 EICMA Milan Show, the supercharged hub-centre Tesi H2 now being shipped to its dealers around the world – but mainly in Japan. As Bimota’s strapline for the bike succinctly puts it – “The Revolution Continues!”

I’ve worn gauntlet gloves for years because I like the superior protection they offer. However, it always came at a cost of no cooling air flow up the sleeves. So, when I found myself looking for a new set of gauntlet gloves, I thought I’d try a pair with gauntlets that go inside the sleeves to see if they allowed for the ventilation I was craving. I ordered up a set of Dainese Steel-Pro In Gloves because of both the protective features and the fact that they had a low-profile cuff that would fit inside of jacket sleeves. When they arrived, a visual inspection showed the features to be every bit as stout as I had hoped they would be. The funny thing is that when I first put them on, I didn’t like them at all. It had been a while since I’d worn a pair of gloves that required more than a minimal break-in period. However, after the all-day use afforded by my multi-day tour in Virginia and North Carolina, I changed my tune considerably as the Steel-Pro In gloves had molded themselves almost perfectly to the shape of my hands. 

This V4 Pikes Peak version is the sporting Multistrada, says Ducati, getting back to the pavement performance of the original Pikes Peak via a beautiful set of 17-inch forged Marchesini wheels – the rear one spinning on a one-sided swingarm. The Marchesinis, Ducati says, remove fully 8.8 pounds of spinning, unsprung mass compared to the other Multis’ 19-/17-in. wheelsets. Apart from that and a few other electronic and ergonomic differences, the PP is pretty much the same Multistrada V4 as the base and S models. That’s in no way a bad thing, since the Multi V4 S was just named our Best Sport-Touring Motorcycle of 2021. 

KTM isn’t officially at EICMA, but that didn’t stop the Austrian manufacturer from getting in on the fun, announcing an updated 1290 Super Duke GT for 2022.

After teasing us with a preview of the new 2022 Moto Guzzi V100 Mandello in September, the Piaggio Group released further details on the new sport-touring model at EICMA.

As we previously reported, BMW has updated its K1600 models for 2022, revising the six-cylinder engine to meet the Euro 5 emissions standard and adding a number of small but notable upgrades.

After giving us a glimpse of a pre-production prototype in August, Triumph officially revealed its new Tiger Sport 660. Sharing the same platform as the Trident 660 roadster, the 2022 Triumph Tiger Sport 660 is a middleweight “adventure sports” model, claiming class-leading power and low cost of ownership.

When Suzuki introduced its new GSX-S1000 earlier this year, we figured it was a matter of time before we saw a faired version to replace the GSX-S1000F. Well, Suzuki didn’t disappoint us, announcing a new 2022 GSX-S1000GT sport-tourer.

If this were any normal year, Moto Guzzi would be holding a big party this week to celebrate its 100th birthday. Because of the pandemic, however, the Piaggio-owned brand had to postpone its Moto Guzzi World Days 2021 Festival to 2022, celebrating its centennial on what would actually be its 101st year.

We were hoping to learn more about Triumph‘s new Speed Triple 1200 RR after the British brand dropped a teaser for the faired roadster last week. Instead, we’ve received teaser images for a different new Triumph model we’ve been anticipating: the Triumph Tiger Sport 660.

Has it really been six years since the Shoei GT-Air helmet was released? Well, it has, and that means the lid was due for an update – even though, when Troy tested it back in 2017, he said, “[T]he Shoei GT-Air really impresses when it comes to all-day touring comfort. It’s got all the features you’d want from a helmet, with the fit to match.” Using the previous generation as the starting point, Shoei’s designers set out to improve on the already top-notch lid. The result is the brand new Shoei GT-Air II, which ups the ante when it comes to premium touring/sport-touring helmet comfort and utility. To make the helmet even more enticing, Shoei partnered with Sena, as with the Shoei Neotec II, to create a fully-integrated Bluetooth communication system, the Sena SRL2.

Gennelmen, start your engines. Ten years ago, Tommyguns Roderick still had his video-star good looks, EiC Duke was Eic, and where is Kevin Smith today? The Suzuki GSX-F, also now defunct, was the spiritual (and mechanical) descendant of the mighty Bandit 1200, and the FZ1 was the Jeb Bush of the family. Ten years on, only the Ninja 1000 soldiers on, MO’s  Runner-Up for Best Sport Tourer  of 2020.

Updated May 2021

Twenty years ago we didn’t need no stinkin’ TFT displays or active suspension or adaptive cruise control, cause we had paper maps and Walkmans, our butts were tough from all the beatings, and our wrists were well-developed from all the, ah, riding. And we liked it that way. Twenty years ago, Minime and the “MO Staff” escaped to Yosemite for a nice ride aboard a pair of Italians stallions. Why doesn’t Aprilia make a modern Futura? Why?

Twenty-five years ago the Aprilia RSV1000 Mille won our Open Twins shootout, the SL1000 Falco was a staff favorite, and the Scarabeo 150 scooter was “practically Italian sex in a practical package.” Wait, what? Anyway, the Futura was and is a great sport-tourer, but maybe not great enough, since Aprilia pulled the plug after 2005. Have they built a sport tourer since? I think not. Shudder to think how good a thing to ride an RSV4 Futura might’ve been.

Customization is a staple of motorcycle ownership, and when it comes to sprucing up the looks of modern sportbikes, there’s no better way to get dramatic and eye-catching results than to turn to aftermarket fairings. Then again, maybe you’ve had the unfortunate fate of crashing your sportbike and damaging the stock bodywork. Aftermarket fairings are a great way to replace your damaged bodywork at a fraction of the cost of new, while also injecting some personalization at the same time. Whatever your reason, you should look to Monster Fairings for your aftermarket bodywork needs.

What Tiger 850? When I went to St. Louis to learn all about the new Triumph 900 family way back in December 2019, there were five Tiger 900s – two 900 GTs, two Rallys, and a base model Tiger 900. Sometime between then and now, Triumph decided to distinguish the base model by calling it Tiger 850 Sport, but in fact, it has the same 888 cc Triple as the other four bikes, supposedly slightly detuned.

Yamaha has updated the Tracer 900 GT, renaming it the Tracer 9 GT and giving it similar updates to the new MT-09 including the larger 890cc three-cylinder engine, new frame and six-axis IMU.

Triumph is set to announce a new sport-touring model to be called the Tiger 850 Sport. The new model will be based on the current Tiger 900 adventure models, with the same 887cc Triple, but we expect it to be purely street-based model without off-road aspirations.

As motorcycles become more reliable and maintenance intervals get more spread out, one consumable remains on a fairly frequent interval for motorcycles. Tires have made tremendous advances in the last decade, but they are still the most frequent maintenance items for motorcyclists. With the rates for mounting and balancing tires going through the roof (My local shop charges $60 for a pair of tires with the wheels off the bike.), buying a tire changer makes a lot of sense. I’d been eyeing No-Mar Tire Changers for quite a while before pulling the trigger and installing one in my garage. In less than a month and after changing a dozen tires, we’d have already spent about 35% of the cost of the No-Mar Classic HD Motorcycle Tire Changer at our local motorcycle shop, but what’s most important is how convenient it is having a tire changer in my garage available when I need it. I no longer have to load my wheels into my truck, drive to my local shop, wait an hour (or more) for them to be ready, and finally take them home to reinstall on my bike. 

Frankly I was a little intimidated when I saw the all-new 2020 BMW S1000 XR sitting there in the warehouse. It’s large, and the seat’s not low, and the battleship gray and sharp prow reminded me of touring the USS Iowa. It fired up with a raspy bark when I climbed into the stiffish saddle. You barely even need to let things idle anymore before you take off, but I usually do anyway (the computer on this one will only let you past certain rpm points as it warms up). Still, its 6%-lighter engine and 7%-lighter drivetrain doesn’t like it when I try to ease away with minimal rpm; it snatches and jerks and I almost kill it a couple of times before I remember what I’m dealing with here (I’ve been riding a lot of Rebel 500s and Burgman scooters lately).

Whatteth the heck was going on in 2010 anyway? Not much, really, relatively speaking. The World Health Organization was in trouble for overestimating the swine flu pandemic, the Deepwater Horizon had a small leak in the Gulf of Mexico, and the US was busy finishing up Operation Iraqi Freedom. Small things. Of much greater import, Honda launched its first big VFR. It really wasn’t what anybody was expecting, but you don’t go riding the motorcycle you want, you go riding on the motorcycle you have. Let that be a lesson, and always strive to know the unknowns as well as the known. Amen. Over and out. Good luck.

I’ve ridden touring bikes all across the American continent. From a transcontinental dash on a touring cruiser to multi-day jaunts on Gold Wings to a gravel road to the Arctic Ocean in Prudhoe Bay, AK, I’ve done my time and racked up the miles, but none of the touring motorcycles I’ve ridden appeal to me as much as the sport adventure touring class of motorcycles. They appeal to me and the type of riding that I like to do. With that said, the 2020 Ducati Multistrada 1260 S Grand Tour is a great example of the species.

Since its introduction in 2015, the Sportec M7 RR tire has been a popular seller for Metzeler and continues to sell well to this day. So, why fix it? Well, while we may think that the advent of motorcycle electronics has been growing quickly, the arena of tire performance has also been undergoing seemingly exponential change, and a five-year-old tire runs the risk of being left behind in the marketplace. Enter the Metzeler Sportec M9 RR, a tire designed to capitalize on all the M7 RR’s strengths and then exceed them. Does Metzeler, the only tire manufacturer to exclusively produce motorcycle tires, have another hit on its hands? Let’s take a look.