Yamaha XSR900 Abarth: First ride coming soon

MCN will be grabbing a full first ride on Yamaha’s rather foxy, new, limited edition XSR900 café racer today.

With an identical chassis set-up as the hugely popular standard XSR900 streetbike, Yamaha claims the new café racer comes with the same agility, stability and feedback chops as the base model, which itself featured much improved suspension performance over the original MT-09.

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The new 900 also uses exactly the same 847cc, 115bhp, traction-controlled inline triple as the standard XSR, which should mean spot-on fuelling and a gloriously loopy power delivery that makes you grin every time you hit the loud button.

But what sets the Limited Edition XSR900 apart from the standard model is it’s the first Yamaha built in conjunction with high performance sportscar tuners Abarth (who also sponsor Yamaha’s MotoGP team). The collaboration plucks a few choice items from Yamaha’s XSR accessories catalogue and mixes them with some lightweight, bespoke parts. These include:

• distinctive café racing carbon fibre front nose cone
• ‘swallow’ café racer clip-ons (for that genuine ‘hands by the front wheel spindle’ café racer riding position)
• carbon fibre seat cowl
• carbon fibre front mudguard
• sporty-style tail-light and tail tidy
• solo sports seat (with suede cover and red stitching)
• Akrapovič titanium exhaust
• numbered Limited Edition aluminium plaque
• special grey and red paint scheme with Abarth logos on the fuel tank, front mudguard and seat cowl.

Yamaha say XSR900 Abarth production is limited to 695 bikes worldwide with only 100 or so bound for the UK. Yamaha also claim this will be the final number of bikes built in the Abarth configuration. With 40 bikes already pre-sold at £9999, the remaining 60 machines probably won’t be around for long. The base model XSR900 is £8299.

Keep your eyes online with MCN later today to find out whether Yamaha’s XSR900 Abarth is an investment worth making, or a stock XSR900 in a frock.

 

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