Well after my ranting about getting about 32mpg around town, and thinking there was something wrong with the bike, I feel I must make a public apology!
Have done two longer journeys on the old girl now and I was bloody impressed, did a tank of 195 miles, about 155 of that was motorways and 50 odd of that was very short run commuting - mpg on that tank worked out to be 52mpg! Didn't think that was at all bad as I averaged about 85/90mph for pretty much the entire run home from London to Leicester, fully loaded with my hard luggage on the back!
Had an even better result today, went out for a bit of a quick leisure blast, it was still pretty nippy out and there seemed to be cars everywhere so I couldn't properly hammer the old girl around, but on my tank of 100 miles, roughly 50 motorway and 50 having a blast, I got an mpg reading of 56.6mpg! Not bleeding bad at all that in my book, from a 1000cc pretty powerful engine!
Must admit, as much as I loved the top end scream of my old ninja 900 there's something lovely about the midrange on the FZS, the amount of time I spent today trying to put it into 7th! Even when I was at the twisties I was alternating between third and fourth for most of the time and the old girl was surfing the mid-range like a goodun.
They've got quite weird fuelling characteristics though as stock haven't they, I can tell it's running lean as it's quite hard to maintain a completely neutral throttle, and going from closed to open throttle does resort in a bit of jerking. Even more weirdly when I got home the bike smelt quite petrolly (usually a sign in my book of the bike running rich) which I don't really understand, I had flled it up so it may have been leaking a tad out of the overflow pipe or something, but I'd done 20 odd miles between the petrol station and my house!
All i need to do now is win the Euromillions; set of clipons, suspension upgrade, nice set of race wheels and a decent jet kit and setup, and this bike would be a BEAST.
