I say suffer, since anyone who has ridden the two bikes knows that apart from the cubic capacity, there is little similar between the two bikes, and that is unfair to both.
For the Kawasaki, it is about being pitted against a much cheaper motorcycle that should technically be one segment below itself. And for the baby-CBR, it’s about needing to punch way over its weight, a street-spec single-cylinder going up against a scaled-down, multi-cylinder sportsbike.
So we decided to do a quick comparison between the new Honda and the scalpel sharp Yamaha YZF-R15. A quick comparison is what we churn out from our office desks - it means we didn’t take the two bikes out on the road side-by-side but having ridden enough of both, decided to pen down the thoughts off the top of our heads to paint a better picture.
On paper again, the two bikes are very dissimilar for a straight scrap, but we know too many of our readers, who find the Ninja 250R way beyond their budgets, were looking at an R15, and would want to know if they should shell out the extra money for the CBR instead.
By the end of our quick comparo, we get a feeling of being unfair once again, but that’s just the CBR250R’s fault for straddling the sparse Indian performance bike space so well. Or, looking at it another way, it provides the perfect rung to climb on to if the R15 is too little and the Ninja too much.
Plus, if you are the sort who does not have a sufficient explanation to the patent question about why the R15’s rear tyre is so skinny, you won’t have to face that question again. At an additional cost of about Rs 70,000, you get a bike that cannot do things half as well as the R15 can, but can do twice as many things instead.
