Is it enough to justify that money? Good afternoon, USA. Welcome to Nailsho. Today, I am in Slovenia for the launch of Suzuki’s new GSX8 TT and T, which is the bike that you can see in front of me.
That one is the TT, and this is the T. That’s basically how I’m gonna refer to them for the rest of this, ’cause it just makes life a whole lot easier.
Now, if you’ve been following Nailsho, following motorcycle news, you will know that these two bikes are very closely related to the GSX8S, which I’m gonna refer to as the 8S, just to make things easy.
But they have had a styling re-tweak. So the 8S wasn’t to everybody’s taste. The headlights are- makes it look a little bit like an alien.
So they’ve gone with a retro theme for these two bikes, and they were only revealed to the world a couple of weeks ago.
It was just after the ABR festival, when they pulled the wraps off them and got to show them to us, and then a week or two after that, we’re out here in sunny Slovenia, riding the things round in the mountains just outside Ljubljana.
So I’m gonna take you through what the bikes are. Gonna take you through the differences between the two. There aren’t too many, so there’s not a lot to do there, and then I’m gonna give you two sort of reviews.
There is also a kicker which will arrive right at the end, where I’ve got a little bit of a kicker question that I wanna put to the people that are watching Nailsho at the moment.
Prices and Similarities
So what are they both? Well, the 8T, which is the bike in front of me, is $9,599. The TT, which is the one over there is, sorry, $9,999. So the stock 8S comes in at $7,499, which makes them around about sort of two and a half grand more than the stock 8S, the bike that’s already been on the market for a little while.
Internally, the engine’s the same. The chassis’ pretty much the same. The suspension’s the same. It’s all got the same damping rates. It’s got the same spring rates in there, front and back. The brakes are the same, even the same pad compounds.
The electronics are the same. Even the ergonomics are the same. It is literally just the styling of the things and the colors that you’re really buying into.
There are two slight tweaks. Each of the new bikes gets a slightly larger fuel tank. So it’s a 16.5 liter fuel tank, which is 2.5 liters bigger than the one on the 8S.
They both get that. They also get a lighter lithium-ion battery, which is two kilograms lighter than the one that you find on the 8S.
Inside, though, the engine, it’s still that 798cc, 80bhp, 57 pound-foot of torque parallel twin, which has been around for a little while now and goes into some other bikes, including the GSX8R and the V-Strom 800s as well, albeit with different mappings across the range.
That’s not the case here though. This has got the same sort of mapping as is found on the 8S. With the larger tank, they are claiming 393 kilometers of range.
Real-World Range
We didn’t get to test that today because they refueled the bikes at lunch, but I reckon to do the 280-kilometer route that we did today, we probably would have been right at the very limit of using a tankful of fuel, but we were riding the things pretty hard.
The weight goes up slightly for these two models over the 8S. So the TT, which is the bike that you can see over there, is the slightly heavier at 203 kilograms, and the bike that’s in front of me here is 201 kilograms.
It’s worth noting that the 8S is 202 kilograms, and we’re comparing like for like there, so that’s curb weights across the board. So really there is very little in it.
So the fuel tank adds a little bit of weight, but then they’ve given both these bikes a slightly lighter battery than is found on the 8S, which sort of equalizes everything out.
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Our Review for 8S Riders
So really this is gonna be a two-part review effectively. So if you are someone who has ridden a GSX8S or you’ve owned one and you just wanna know what the differences are, I’ll cover that off first. It’ll be quite a short review.
There really isn’t much to tell between an 8S and these two bikes here. The handling dynamics, the performance, the electronics, the ergonomics, the braking system, it’s all basically exactly the same.
There might be some slight changes in terms of where the weight of the bike is now carried because it’s lost some weight here and it’s gained a bit of weight here, that if you tested them back to back on the same road on the same day, you’d probably feel that minute difference.
But it’s not anything that makes this feel any worse handling than the 8S or likewise makes it feel any better. They both feel exactly, exactly the same.
So the review for people who haven’t ridden a GSX8S, spoiler alert, this is a really great handling bike. In the middleweight sector, this punches really, really hard and it’s down to really three factors.
It’s the engine, it’s the chassis, especially the suspension, because it does quite a good job for what it is. It’s not the highest, most premium spec suspension on the market but it does a pretty decent job, and the braking system, which is a Nissin braking system but it works really well.
Engine and Chassis
The engine is, it’s really punches above its weight. So it’s the 798cc engine platform that Suzuki have developed and it is just an absolute mid-range monster.
I’ve not spent masses of time on the GSX8S but I do remember it very being supremely punchy. And obviously, because these two bikes share the same engine, the same mapping, the same electronics, the same everything, it is extremely punchy.
It pulls very, very hard through the midrange of the RPM, and you only seem to run out of steam at the very top of the RPM range, just before you bang into the rev limiter.
Which is great on a bike like this, and it was great for the roads that we were riding today, because we had relentless switchback hairpins, we had fast sweepers, and it was right in the sweet spot.
You could just leave the thing in second and third gear pretty much all day and just enjoy the chassis of the bike.
Suspension and Handling
Because we’ve got fairly mediocre suspension. It’s not the top spec stuff that the V-Stroms get. They get Showa, they get adjustability, they got all that stuff.
We’ve got KYB stuff, and it is probably at the lower end of the KYB sort of range, but it does an okay job.
There are some points during the day today when we were pushing on really, really hard and the road was really rough that you could feel the suspension was starting to get a little bit at the limit of what it could do.
But if you kept it on the fast, sweeping turns, and you were just smooth with the controls and smooth with your inputs on the throttle and the brake, it performed, actually, really very well.
Tech Features
Obviously, we’ve got the same electronic system that you find on the 8S and a few of the other 800 models, and it’s all very easy to use. You can adjust the traction control, you can adjust the engine power separately.
It doesn’t tie you into specific modes. It’s all very easy to do from the left-hand switch gear there. And when you change the engine power modes, they do make a meaningful difference to how the bike performs.
Likewise with the traction control. As you ramp the traction control up, you will feel it intervening much, much earlier. In fact, if you put it up to its highest level, it basically won’t let you have any fun whatsoever.
But for most of the day today, because we’ve been riding on beautiful, dry, warm, and sunny roads, it has been switched off, and I’ve just been using every inch of that 800cc engine that Suzuki has developed.
I’ve also gotta give a mention to the gearbox, because that is, and it has been all day, very slick, very direct, and very accurate.
It has got an up and down shifter and blipper, which also performs very well. The only time that you start to feel it being a little bit clunky is if you’re going quite slowly in the low gears around town, where a lot of quick-shifters on less premium bikes will start to come unstuck, is in the low gears and around town.
It will be very abrupt if you shift up a gear. But what I like about this one, and it’s not something you’ll be doing on a daily basis, but it will let you change gear up and down the box on a trailing throttle, which is a very handy feature.
Cause there are times where you’re slipping through traffic or you see a gap and you need to go for it, where you don’t wanna back off the throttle that you need to get that next gear and get going down the road, which is all very good. I like that feature, and it’s something that’s arriving on a lot of bikes a lot of the time.
Braking System
I mentioned the chassis, I mentioned the engine, I’m gonna talk about the brakes. They’re Nissin four-pot calipers.
They’re radially mounted. They look very flashy. They’re probably a little bit higher spec than the suspension that they’re connected to.
But they work very, very well. You’ve got a lot of power at the front end on this, and that’s the one thing that I will take home from today is there is a lot of power within that lever and through those calipers.
And you can really drive the front end into the tarmac, brake very, very late into hairpins, probably later than you should be, and just trust that the front wheel will stick, especially on a day like today.
ABS and IMU
One thing you haven’t got, and this is probably something that some people maybe think it should have, and I’m not so sure, is an IMU. It’s a two-channel ABS system.
It has chimed in over the course of the day, but it’s not overly intrusive. When it does, it doesn’t bleed the pressure out the lever.
It’s quite a nice system in how it operates and when it operates, but you can still have fun with this bike, even with the ABS turned on. Like I mentioned the gearbox.
There is a slip-assist clutch on there, and if you come down the gears into a corner and drop the clutch out, you can just feel the back end sliding around, and you sort of play with the bike on the deceleration, through the slipper clutch, and also with the back brake.
And you can get it sliding around, and you can have a little bit of fun with it, even with the ABS turned on, which is quite a nice feature. Do I think it needs an IMU? Probably not.
I mean, the price of this thing is $2,500 above the GSX-8S already, and the rest of the competition that it’s really in that segment against are all around that ballpark or some of them even lower.
So you put an IMU on it, just gonna take the price up, and then that is gonna affect sales, which is probably something that Suzuki really didn’t want to do.
I’m gonna talk briefly about the comfort, ’cause that’s one area where these have actually changed over the 8S.
So, both of these have got a new seat design, so it’s a different shape, it’s got plusher, thicker padding on it.
And if you go for the T, which is the bike I’m stood in front of, you also get this tuck and roll cover, I think they call it.
It’s got a little bit of extra padding, and it is slightly more comfortable to ride over a long distance than the TT. It is, both of them are also slightly more comfortable, seat comfort-wise, to ride than the 8S as well. Overall, the rest of the ergonomics are exactly the same.
What am I comparing these bikes to?
So, onto the verdict. I mean, what am I comparing these bikes to? Am I comparing these bikes to each other because they’re basically exactly the same, say, for a bit of seat comfort on this and a bit of weather protection on that?
Or am I comparing them to the 8S, or am I comparing this to everything else that’s out there? I suppose I’m trying to do all of that, really.
And on that front, Suzuki is right in the ballpark there. The only thing that really is going against it with these bikes is there are some others in that middleweight sports naked category that come in quite a lot lower than this still, and they’ve just made two that are slightly more expensive.
There is a caveat to that though, and that is that these are probably two of the better looking retro in the middleweight sector. You know, I think that Suzuki have pretty much nailed the styling of them.
They’ve done enough with the styling to make them stand out and especially with the TT, which I think in that color scheme, with the yellow and red stripes on the black sort of metallic finish tank, I just think looks absolutely brilliant.
Coclusion
So when it comes to asking me which one I would buy if I was in the market for one of these two bikes, it would definitely be that one over there.
But there’s a kicker to this, and this is the thing that’s been playing on my mind sort of all day while we’ve been riding, and that’s, did Suzuki go far enough with them?
Did they do enough? It is $2,500 to get a color scheme, some decals, and a headlight cowl, and a new seat. Is it enough to justify that money?
And you’ll have to let us know in the comments whether or not you think it is, but I’ve got a theory on that, and that is that I would have loved to have seen Suzuki just go just a little bit further than they did with the AS.
Be it a different suspension set-up or a different suspension setting, or a different ergonomic triangle, or just something.
Just something to make it just dynamically that little bit different, because I think for me as a rider, I prefer bikes that, you know, I’m all for look and styling and how bikes look, but when it comes to riding a bike, you’re not looking at it as you’re riding it.
You’re riding it, and I would have just loved for that extra $2,500 for them to just be this little twinkle of something special that sets it apart properly from the AS.
But you’ll have to let us know in the comments down below whether or not you think I am right or wrong, and please jump in there and do tell me.