Yamaha MT-09 Review: The Everyday Hooligan

Some motorcycles want to be admired. The MT-09 just wants to misbehave. Yamaha’s middleweight naked has spent years perfecting the art of the cheeky, wheelie-happy hooligan, and the latest version refines that recipe without sanding off its edges. It is the bike that reminds you why you got your licence in the first place — an antidote to sensible, delivered with a grin.

What makes it so beguiling is that all this mischief comes wrapped in a genuinely usable everyday machine. Light, torquey and keenly priced, the MT-09 slots into a commute as happily as it terrorises a mountain road, and that breadth is exactly why it has become one of the best-selling nakeds on the planet.

The CP3 triple: master of midrange

At the core sits the 890 cc CP3 inline-triple, and it is one of the great engines at any price. With 117 hp and a thick 93 Nm of torque arriving low in the rev range, it fires the MT out of corners with a surge that feels punchier than the numbers suggest. The crossplane crank hands it a hard-edged, slightly unhinged growl that no parallel-twin can imitate.

Roll the throttle open in the meat of the midrange and the front wheel skims skyward in the first two gears — the MT-09 is a natural-born wheelie machine, and the electronics let you decide how much of that you want. It is not the fastest thing here on paper, yet the way it deploys its performance makes it feel gloriously, addictively rapid on any real road.