USED BIKE GUIDE
We’re now getting used to sub-400cc sportsbikes, but the current generation of singles and twins are very different to what came before them. Back in the eighties, 400cc inline four supersports machines made sense – albeit within a very narrow boundary. Introduced to the Japanese market to abide by license restrictions – think of it as a Japanese A2 class – some soon saw a gap in the market at home and began shipping them over to Blighty to feed a generation of youngsters hungry for looks and knee sliding performance. We were used to fantastic and peaky 250cc two strokes, but these more ornate four-strokes were something else – and in many cases offered staggering ability and technical prowess to match anything seen in bigger capacity bikes.
There was only ever one machine officially imported by a manufacturer – Kawasaki’s ZXR400 – so that meant that everything else was a grey import, and thus had to be tickled in a few ways to get it strictly road legal. But for every big bike moniker there was a version with a 400 suffixing it – CBR, FZR, GSX-R, ZXR. And boy did they look the business.