The 2009 Yamaha FZ1 Throttle Response

The big question with the new 2009 Yamaha FZ1 is what have Yamaha don with the snatchy throttle?

Answer: they've 'cured' it. It is no more. In fact the Yamaha FZ1 now feels slightly woolly - when you pick up the throttle, it doesn't leap forward with quite the same urgency.

I used inverted commas above because I'm not convinced Yamaha had anything to 'cure'. I was chatting to Suzuki fuel-injection engineers recently and I asked them how they messed up the fueling on the snatchy GSR600. They replied that they know how to make flawless fuel injection - I have to say the fuel-injection of the GSM-R's, Hayabusas, etc works more then fine. But they made the GSR snatchy because they thought that's what we'd want - instant throttle response on a naked bike.

This difference between what Japanese engineers and marketeers think we want and what we actually want happened in the Seventies. They thought in terms of utility - literally, a motorized bicycle.

If you consider that Yamaha are equally capable of building fuel injection systems that don't snatch - and given that they've improved the 2009 Yamaha FZ1 by making it slightly less responsive - then we can assume they simply got it wrong first time. In the meantime: can I get some of the responsiveness back?

More about the new 2010 Yamaha FZ1 can be found The 2010 Yahama FZ1, What a Bike