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Every few months some pub car park debate reopens the oldest argument in biking: which engine configuration is actually best? The trouble is that almost every answer you’ll find has been imported wholesale from somewhere else entirely — a track day in Spain, a keyboard warrior’s autobahn fantasy, a spec sheet drawn up for a country with wide, dry, arrow-straight roads. None of that has much to do with what most of us actually ride on. British roads are narrow, damp more often than not, stitched together from third-gear corners, and rarely let you hold a throttle open for more than a few seconds before the next roundabout, tractor or blind crest arrives. Judged against that reality rather than a fantasy one, the debate has a clear answer — and it is not the one the horsepower charts want you to believe.

I have ridden every configuration on this list on the same roads, in the same weather, in the same commuting traffic that most owners actually face day to day — not on a circuit, and not on a sun-baked press launch, but on the A- and B-roads of England, Wales and Scotland, where average speed rarely climbs much past 40mph and second gear gets more use than fifth. Run that test honestly and it produces a genuine winner. Let me walk you through why.

What UK Roads Actually Ask of an Engine

Before crowning anything, it is worth being honest about what British riding actually demands, because it is almost nothing like the conditions most engines are designed and marketed around. Our roads change direction constantly, so an engine needs usable drive from low revs rather than a glorious top end you’ll sample twice a year on a derestricted dual carriageway. Grip is inconsistent and frequently poor — wet tarmac, diesel spill, mossy hedgerow shade — so how an engine delivers its power at part-throttle matters more than how much it makes at full throttle. And because junctions, roundabouts and blind bends arrive every few hundred yards, you are changing gear constantly, which punishes anything with a narrow, fussy powerband or a slow, deliberate gearbox action.

None of this shows up on a spec sheet. A dyno chart tells you nothing about how an engine behaves at 30mph in third gear, in the rain, downhill, into a blind right-hander — which is, if we’re honest, close to ninety percent of real British riding. So that is the test I’m applying here, not top speed, not a quarter-mile time, not lap-record potential. Just the everyday reality of riding a motorcycle in this country.

The Inline-Four: Magnificent, and Mostly Wasted

There is no configuration more thoroughly vindicated by a racetrack than the inline-four. Smooth, powerful, endlessly tuneable, and capable of the kind of top-end fireworks that make naked fours like the Kawasaki Z900 so intoxicating on paper. The problem is that almost none of that fireworks display is usable, or even legal, on the road you actually ride to work on. Peak power on a typical inline-four arrives somewhere north of 9,000rpm, a figure you will visit rarely, briefly, and usually somewhere you probably shouldn’t.

On a tight, damp B-road, an inline-four spends most of its life below the point where it actually gets interesting. You end up working a taller, closer-ratio gearbox constantly just to keep the engine near its comparatively narrow sweet spot, and if you don’t keep it spinning, the bike can feel oddly flat and characterless at the pace UK roads actually allow. It is a phenomenal engine wearing the wrong job description — brilliant for a track day or a derestricted continental blast, frequently frustrating on the lane behind your house.

The V-Twin: Glorious Character, Awkward Fit

A good V-twin is one of the great sensory experiences in motorcycling: the lazy thump, the huge low-down torque, the sense the engine is doing real, visible work rather than merely spinning fast. The Ducati DesertX proves the layout can still be genuinely capable when it’s engineered right, with enough midrange shove to make gear-changing feel almost optional through a set of flowing bends.

But the layout brings baggage that UK roads expose ruthlessly. Many V-twins, especially the heavier, cruiser-styled machines, carry their weight low and wide, which is wonderful for stability on a motorway and considerably less wonderful when you need to flick the bike through a sequence of opposing bends on a road that changes direction every few seconds. The classic V-twin power delivery — a hefty, almost binary thump rather than a smooth build — also asks more of your right wrist in the wet, where a clumsy input is punished immediately by a rear tyre with limited grip in reserve. It’s a magnificent engine for a straight road or a gentle sweeper. It is harder work on the roads most of us actually ride.

The Parallel Twin: The Honest Workhorse

This is where the argument starts to sharpen. A modern parallel twin, especially one with a 270-degree crank, borrows much of the V-twin’s low-down character — that same accessible, unintimidating shove from low revs — while shedding a good chunk of its weight and width. Bikes like the Yamaha MT-07 have built an entire reputation on exactly this trick: an engine that pulls cleanly from little more than idle, a chassis light enough to change direction without effort, and a gearbox you barely need to trouble because there’s usable drive almost everywhere.

For town riding, commuting, and the kind of low-speed, stop-start, damp-morning riding that makes up most UK journeys, the parallel twin is genuinely hard to beat. It’s forgiving in the wet, unintimidating for less experienced riders, and cheap to buy, insure and maintain. Its only real limitation is character and reach: push toward the upper end of a parallel twin’s rev range and things can turn a little flat or vibratory, and there simply isn’t the extra layer of top-end drama that makes a bike feel special on the rare open, flowing road you do find. It is the most sensible answer here. It is not quite the most complete one.

The Inline Triple: The One That Actually Fits

Which brings us to the configuration I think the British riding environment has been quietly rewarding for two decades: the inline triple. Machines like the Triumph Street Triple 765 RS, the Yamaha MT-09, and the more affordable Triumph Trident 660 all share a trait that matters enormously on the roads we’ve been describing — a genuinely broad, tractable spread of torque from low revs that never runs out of ideas as the tacho climbs, right up into a top end with real character and pull.

That combination means a triple rarely leaves you hunting for the right gear on a tight lane, because there usually isn’t a wrong one. Trickle out of a village at low revs and there’s enough drive not to need a downshift; open the road out for a moment and the same engine finds another, more urgent gear of its own accord, without you doing anything except opening the throttle further. It is lighter and narrower than almost any V-twin, so it changes direction through a sequence of opposing bends with none of the heft a cruiser-style engine imposes on the chassis around it. And its power delivery is smoother and more linear than a V-twin’s thump, which matters enormously the moment the road turns damp and grip becomes something to manage rather than assume.

It is also, not coincidentally, the layout behind some of the most road-focused, UK-tuned motorcycles currently on sale — the kind of bikes shaped by engineers who test on the same wet Welsh mountain roads the rest of us actually ride, rather than a sun-baked circuit. That is not an accident. It is an engine configuration built, whether by design or happy coincidence, for exactly the roads most of us own a bike to ride.

The UK Roads Scorecard

Middleweight naked bikes are where motorcycling’s real money gets spent. Not on liter-class bragging rights, not on adventure-bike fantasies about Patagonia — on the bike people actually commute on, thrash on a Sunday, and can afford without remortgaging anything. Suzuki’s GSX-8S and Honda’s CB750 Hornet are currently the two sharpest answers to that brief, and having spent serious time on both, I can report the class has quietly gotten very, very good.

Both machines are built around a 270-degree parallel-twin under 800cc. Both throw a color TFT dash, ride-by-wire throttle, and a genuine electronics suite at a reasonable price. On a spec sheet they look like siblings. Ride them back to back for a week, though, and you realize Suzuki and Honda solved the same brief in almost opposite ways — and that difference in philosophy, more than any single number, is what should decide which one gets your deposit.

Two Twins, One Displacement Class, Opposite Personalities

Suzuki’s 776cc twin — shared with the GSX-8R and the V-Strom 800DE — is the more technically interesting engine on paper. Instead of relying purely on crank throw and counterweights to tame the inherent shake of a big-bore twin, Suzuki added a cross-balancer shaft, a secondary shaft spinning to cancel out vibration the 270-degree crank doesn’t. The result is genuinely uncanny: 82 horsepower at 8,500 rpm delivered with almost none of the buzz you’d expect from a twin this size. It pulls cleanly from low in the rev range, never feels harsh, and honestly could pass for a smaller inline-four if you didn’t know better.

Honda went the other direction. The CB750 Hornet’s 755cc engine uses a Unicam head — a single overhead camshaft borrowed straight from Honda’s CRF motocross line, running the intake valves directly and the exhaust valves through short rocker arms. It’s a packaging trick as much as a performance one, letting Honda build a shorter, lighter cylinder head. But the byproduct is character: this engine wants to be revved, makes a genuinely eager 90 horsepower at 9,500 rpm, and telegraphs a bit of vibration through the bars and pegs at speed that the Suzuki simply doesn’t have.

Neither bike is dramatically more torquey than the other — both land in the mid-70s Nm range — but where that torque shows up matters. The Suzuki’s is smeared across a wide, friendly midrange; the Honda’s arrives with more urgency higher up and rewards you for holding a gear. On paper the Hornet simply wins the engine fight — more power, more character, a genuinely thrilling top end. Suzuki’s twin is the better long-distance companion; Honda’s is the better weekend toy. Which one you want says more about you than about either bike.

Chassis and Suspension: Where the Two Companies Clearly Spent Differently

Suzuki kept the GSX-8S affordable in an obvious place: suspension. The 41mm KYB fork is entirely non-adjustable, and the shock offers preload only. Around town and on smooth roads this is a non-issue — the bike feels light, neutral, and easy. Push it on a rough, fast road and the limitations show quickly: some dive under hard braking, a bit of wallow mid-corner if the surface gets choppy. The brakes don’t help matters — axial-mount Nissin calipers that work fine for commuting but feel a little soft and remote when you actually need to shed speed in a hurry.

Honda didn’t cut the same corner. The Hornet uses Showa’s Separate Function Fork Big Piston (SFF-BP) design, splitting spring and damping duties between the two legs, and it’s a genuinely well-sorted unit for this class — controlled, communicative, and far less prone to getting flustered on a bad road. Pair that with radial-mount Nissin calipers biting twin 296mm discs and the Hornet simply stops and turns with more confidence than the Suzuki does, full stop.

Weight amplifies all of this. Honda’s claimed wet weight sits around 190 kg; Suzuki’s is closer to 205 kg. Fifteen-odd kilos doesn’t sound like much until you’re flicking the Hornet through a set of esses and it changes direction with none of the effort the GSX-8S demands. This is the single biggest reason the Hornet feels like the sportier motorcycle even before you factor in the engine.

Electronics: Nobody's Cutting Corners Anymore, But the Details Differ

Both bikes get a color TFT dash, throttle-by-wire, multiple ride modes, and lean-sensitive traction control — features that would have been sportbike-only a decade ago and now show up on nine-thousand-dollar nakeds without complaint. Suzuki’s Drive Mode Selector and Honda’s own ride-mode system both do the same basic job: soften or sharpen throttle response depending on mood and weather.

GSX-8S vs CB750 Hornet: The Numbers That Matter

For the better part of a decade, asking which naked bike offers the best value in Britain has had a boring, one-word answer: Yamaha’s MT-07. It arrived in 2014 as a bit of a happy accident, a cheap parallel-twin wrapped in an unglamorous steel frame, and somehow became the default entry on almost every learner’s, commuter’s and downsizer’s shortlist. That is a remarkable run for any motorcycle to sustain, and reputations built that early tend to calcify into assumption rather than fact.

But assumption is exactly what I want to test here, because the naked-bike middleweight class in the UK has quietly become the most competitive corner of the entire market. Suzuki’s GSX-8S undercuts nothing and still manages to feel like the smarter buy on a spec sheet. Honda’s CB750 Hornet turned up with a genuinely thrilling engine and a badge that opens doors at resale. Kawasaki refreshed the Z650 rather than letting it fade quietly, and Triumph’s Trident 660 keeps sniping from the same price bracket with a triple that sounds better than anything else here. So does the MT-07 still deserve the crown, or has nostalgia been doing its marketing for it? I have ridden all of them back to back this year, and I have a clear answer.

The Rivals Have Actually Turned Up

Let’s give the competition its due, because for years the MT-07 barely had any. That is no longer true. The GSX-8S borrows a 776cc parallel twin from Suzuki’s own V-Strom, and it feels like a genuinely more sophisticated machine at a standstill: a proper TFT dash, a chassis that turns in with real precision, and a fit and finish that makes the Yamaha’s switchgear feel a generation older than it actually is. The Honda CB750 Hornet is sharper still. Its 755cc twin spins harder and more eagerly than either rival, and Honda has wrapped it in bodywork that looks like it costs more than it does. Kawasaki’s Z650, smaller in displacement but sharper than ever, undercuts everything here on price and remains a genuinely lovely, unintimidating first big bike. None of these are also-rans anymore. They are proper, considered motorcycles, and any one of them would make a perfectly sensible purchase.

This matters because the MT-07’s original pitch, that nothing else this cheap is this good, depended on a vacuum that no longer exists. The gap in outright competence has closed, and in a couple of isolated categories, like dash quality or braking feel, I think the newer bikes have actually nosed ahead. If this were purely a showroom beauty contest judged on spec sheets and first impressions, I am not sure the MT-07 wins anymore.

The Engine That Still Wins Arguments

Which is why the CP2 engine matters so much to this argument. Yamaha’s 689cc crossplane twin produces a relatively modest 73 hp, well down on the Hornet’s peak figure and a few horses shy of the GSX-8S, and on a spec sheet that looks like a weakness. Ride it, and it stops looking like one almost immediately. The 270-degree crank gives the motor an uneven, lumpy firing order that translates into real, chest-level torque from just above idle, with 67 Nm arriving at only 6,500 rpm, low enough that you rarely need to visit the upper half of the tacho at all. It pulls cleanly out of roundabouts in a gear too tall, shrugs off a pillion and a full tank, and never asks you to work for the fun the way a peakier engine sometimes does.

The Hornet’s engine is the more thrilling thing to rev out, and I will not pretend otherwise; it wants to be worked and rewards you when you do. But the MT-07’s motor is the one that is genuinely more usable on a wet Tuesday commute, and usability, not lap times, is what most owners are actually buying. There is also something the spec sheet cannot capture: character. The CP2 has a slightly agricultural, off-beat thump that makes even gentle riding feel eventful, and after eleven years on sale it remains one of the most likeable engines in motorcycling at any price, let alone this one.

Price Is Not the Whole Picture

On sticker price alone this class is closer than the reputations suggest; a few hundred pounds separates most of these bikes once you are actually stood in a UK dealership. But that is the wrong way to compare them, because the MT-07’s real advantage has never really been the RRP. It is everything that follows the purchase.

Indicative UK on-the-road prices