It's been 10 long years since Yamaha debuted the MT-09 (FZ-09), a super-accessible, affordable hooligan bike with an 847-cc triple motor full of concentrated fun exactly where street riders need it. Now, there's finally a fully-faired R9 sportsbike.
Don't get me wrong; superbikes like the fabled YZF-R1 absolutely rule. If you've got functioning adrenal glands, and you enjoy giving them a good empty-out, you should definitely have "pinning the throttle all the way to the redline, in the gear of your choice, on a 200-plus horsepower superbike" high on your bucket list.
The next best choice would have been Yamaha's mid-sized YZF-R6, but with EURO emission standards getting as harsh as they are for those of us who like to haul the mail, the R6 was most regrettably axed from the lineup. It was replaced by the complacent – and yes, still a bit peppy – YZF-R7, based on the FZ/MT-07 power plant and frame. Yes, the R7 is a fun bike. Yes, it's easy to get in trouble on if you're not careful. But no, no it's not that visceral, hard braking, knee down, pick-up-throttle as you stand it up, wheelie-off-the-corner at your favorite race track kinda motorcycle like the R6 is. It's just an easy-going, happy-to-be-of-service, fairly soulless machine that's pretty comfy for the street. Click here to change my mind.
Honestly, that's left a pretty sizable hole in those truly looking for a fast intermediate bike. Sure, R9 is only one number off of the infamous R1 – ...wait, how does that work? – in cc-displacement, but the big cross-plane inline 4 monster strapped in the R1 is heaps different than the torquey 270-degree inline triple that's been the driving force behind the ever-so-hooliganish FZ/MT-09 and how the CP3 puts down power.
There's nothing quite like riding a liter bike in civilian life. Unfortunately, the way superbikes are geared, there's also precious few places you can do it without risking an appearance on local television news, whereupon a beige army of concerned homeowners will unleash a torrent of unpleasant tutting and clucking noises, and a legal apparatus will conspire to remove both your funds and your privileges.
Which is why I loved the original FZ-09 so much, despite its many flaws: the oddball looks, the bargain-basement suspension, the wooden brakes, and a bizarre riding position reminiscent of those weird ergonomic chairs that sat you on your shins for 15 minutes before you rolled them into the corner and relegated them to dirty laundry duty.
The FZ/MT's lightweight, compact triple engine only made 115-odd horsepower (86 kW) , but it was geared to redline well below highway speed in first, so one felt encouraged to celebrate every one of those ponies with extravagant wheelstands and vulgar displays of acceleration, more or less every time one rolled it out of the driveway. Third gear throttle wheelies are really hard to argue with.
This stellar three-cylinder motor felt so perfectly honed for street riding that the minute it dropped, it looked obvious that it oughta go into a machine that actually looks cool, where it could easily become an absolutely epic lightweight, accessible sportsbike targeted squarely at street riders and delivering all the same giggles with a more conventional riding position, a sportier chassis and a face that didn't need a paper bag over it.
Well, it may have taken a full decade since the OG FZ-09 and another three-odd years since Yamaha trademarked the R9 name, sending the entire internet into a frenzy, but here it is: the 2025 Yamaha YZF-R9. We haven't decided if it does, in fact, look cool yet. It might grow on us though.
Let's not spend too much time on the specs; here's the important bits:
The engine is the latest version of the 09 triple, now displacing 890cc up from its original 847cc. It peaks at 117 hp (87 kW) and 67 lb-ft (91 Nm) in the 2024 MT-09 nakedbike, but it's getting a "unique ECU tune" in the R9, so it might be a little pokier. Hopefully a little bit more linear, as clip-ons tend to exacerbate sloppy throttle inputs.
Yamaha also says it's "optimized" the gear ratio, which hopefully just means it's made the rear sprocket a tooth or two smaller, because that'd mean you and I could take it off and put a bigger one back on for more silliness at lower speeds.
There's a brand new Deltabox supersport-style frame – the "lightest aluminum frame ever offered on a Yamaha supersport model" – focused on a balance between low-speed agility and high-speed rigidity, so it'll be fun and fast on the road, but hopefully won't walrus you around on fast, bumpy sweepers like the original MT tended to.
Yamaha is pitching it as a bike that can walk – perhaps even run – in both the road and track worlds and we don't doubt it will be fun in both use cases. As it stands there aren't really any classes one could race an 890cc triple and certainly not without homologation and creation of a race class. In the meantime, it undoubtedly would make for an excellent track toy, for those so inclined.
Here's another video that homes in on this point with jackhammer-like subtlety and a degree of repetitive bludgeoning that suggests Family Guy fans might be Yamaha's key target market.
Suspension won't be a problem. It gets fully-adjustable KYB forks, and a KYB shock that's even more fully-adjustable, with high and low-speed valving that lets you dial in your preferred degree of squish under acceleration forces and bumps. Braking should be impeccable, too – the R9 goes big here with lovely Brembo Stylema monoblocks with all the master-cylinder radialness you've come to expect, massaging a beefy pair of 320-mm discs.
(At this point, some alarm bells are going off in my hip pocket region, but let's proceed.)
Yada yada full-color dash, 6-axis IMU, rider modes, two-way quickshifter, 9-stage traction control, three-mode slide control for painting corner exits black, three-mode wheelie control for nannas, linked ABS with "lemme back this thing in" mode ... The levers are adjustable, the dash talks to your phone, and the blinkers offer a highly decadent self-cancelling feature.
And the left-thumb switchblock, which we'd normally expect to break out into a serious case of button-pox on these all-singing, all-dancing, aggressively overcomplicated machines of the 2020s, is nicely understated despite having separate switches for my personal favorite feature. That'd be the cruise control system, which will get you home from a long day on the road with about 60% less swearing and moaning on the final freeway stretch, accompanied by a corresponding increase in demonstrative gloating if your riding buddies don't have it on their bikes too.
In terms of wet weight, fully fueled and ready to rock, it's scarcely heavier than the MT-09, coming in at 195 kg (430 lb). A decent whack less than the big-daddy YZF-R1 superbike at 203 kg (448 lb), even if the R9 gets an advantage on the scales thanks to its smaller 14-liter (3.1-gal) fuel tank, compared to the R1's 17 liters (4.5 gal).
Looks are a totally subjective matter, but I suspect the fashion-conscious will be suitably gruntled here. The R9 gets little gill slots in the front of the tank, which I've always found rather natty on the R1. It gets a sharp, sporty backside, a suitably brutal-looking pillion seat, and a front screen angled higher than the R1's, which makes it look a smidge less predatory and aggressive, and a hint more youth-group-pastor people-pleasey, which was probably the exact brief.
There's also a set of highly spurious front winglets, which look silly to me wherever I see them. But friends, I'm an old man shaking my fist at clouds at this point. The young people of today want their bikes to have all the wings of the rainbow, and by golly, Yamaha is making sure they get 'em. On the positive side, they look like good places to stick a GoPro mount or rest a coffee.
I'll say this for sure, though: you want the blue one. The black one ... I don't know, it just doesn't look black enough to me, and comes off as a tad milquetoast, which is not how black motorcycles are supposed to come off. [Editor note - the red and white one is the best one.]
The red and white, on the other hand, is a flat-out crime against motorcycling. It's ghastly. It looks like somebody designed the most boring, cheap-looking white motorcycle in the world, and then rode it through an unfortunate pigeon on the way to the photoshoot.
Whichever designer first slid that paint job across a boardroom table should be banished forthwith to work on the Sonigenic SHS-series Yamaha Keytar, where there's no chance this dangerously inept individual could make the product look any worse. Although it's hard to see what they could add to that stellar offering, since it's already as red and white as it's likely to get.
So it looks like a slightly friendlier and less-threatening good-boy version of a bad-boy race bike, but the R9 promises to be loads more fun on the street, where 95% of sportsbikes spend 95% of their time. Outstanding! It seems to me that at the right price this thing should sell like hotcakes, presuming those still sell. I don't actually know what a hotcake is, now that I bring it up, but I certainly haven't ever seen one for sale, so they must really sell out fast.
And so to the price. Despite my earlier fears, US$12,499 seems pretty dang reasonable to me; it's naturally more than the $10,599 MT-09, but only a squeak more than the $12,299 MT-09 SP version with decent suspension. And it's well under the $18,999 you'll need to slap down for a brand-spankers R1. Three years ago, the internet speculated a price of around $11,500 ... adjusted for record inflation, twelve five seems about right.
I've found it hard to get too excited about supersports bikes for a while; they're so sharply focused on what happens well north of any speed limit that they strike me as fish out of water on the road. Magnificent fish, but like actual fish, they're just so much happier in the environment they're designed for than they are on the street.
The R9 puts street riders' needs front and center. I think the vast majority of motorcyclists will have more fun on the R9 than the R1, and they'll get to use a lot more of the throttle. I'm all for it!
There are other new Yamahas as well for 2025, and you can see them in the video below.
Source: Yamaha
