Suzuki Intruder M1800 Boss

Essentially these three bikes are on a sliding scale from Intruder to Diavel, from traditional cruiser dynamics and ergonomics to relatively light, agile and almost roadster. After the Ducati the Suzuki feels vast, its fuel tank splaying your knees wide and the forward controls demanding a stretch of even fairly rangy legs. Even the engine keeps things old school. It may be double overhead camshaft, eight-valve and liquid-cooled but it does a very good impression of looking old school and air-cooled, with the radiator heavily shrouded and pronounced fins on the barrels.

Fire up the engine and you can, to an extent, see what all the fuss is about. Funnily enough the 1800cc twin feels monumental at idle and it sounds it too, the vast black silencers hopelessly overwhelmed by the sheer volume of gases being moved. The noise is really quite delicious V8 muscle car but soft with it, almost mellow. Without wishing to sound cruel, this moment with the bike idling and, in this paint scheme at least, looking a million dollars in the sunshine is one to be relished for unfortunately it’s about as good as the Intruder gets. Hear me out.

On the move you just have no real idea what to do with the thing. Unlike the Harley you could never argue that the weight evaporates with speed. The laws of physics are rigorously enforced here and the Suzuki never stops feeling like a very heavy machine. Ground clearance is pitiful, and this isn’t some shit-hot road tester writing that in between placing another bulk order online for knee and elbow sliders I’m a normal rider who regularly punts around on some pretty normal bikes. In the first left-hander I came to on the Suzuki, which I approached at something like walking pace because it was a cold, wet morning, the pegs hit the road and I nearly crashed into a dump truck coming the other way. Through the first right-hander, which was sunlit and dry, the tarmac caught the heel of my boot and wrenched my foot from the ’peg. Scraping pegs can be funny, but the Suzuki’s appetite for it is faintly terrifying. On big, multi-lane roundabouts mums in Nissans overtake you around the outside, glancing at you through aviator sunglasses with a look that feels suspiciously close to pity.

So you slow down, of course you do, but why then the serious looking wheel, fork and front brake combo? Why the 46 mm upside downies, the GSX-R-sourced four-piston radial Tokicos and the acres of sporty looking rubber? And if it’s about going slowly, why the monstrous engine with the soaring, almost superbikeesque top end? The low-rev torque is there, sure nothing’s going to touch you off the line but oddly, and I suppose because the heads are four valve rather than two, the engine’s forte is charging from 4000rpm to 9000rpm like a rock from a trebuchet. How does that tally with back-to-basics, gaze at the scenery cruising ?

Good points? The mirrors are good, the brakes stupendous and the clutch delightfully light and progressive. The fuel injection and twin throttle butterfly set-up do a fantastic job of smoothly metering out the engine’s prodigious torque. But soon you can’t ignore the more numerous niggles. The steering is the least neutral and accurate here, corrupted as it is by the big back tyre and monstrous wheelbase. Coming out of corners you have to keep pushing on the inside ’bar to stop the bike wandering wide. It can’t lean we’ve established that. The gearbox is heavy-handed and clunky, with even careful shifts sounding like a serious accident in a shipyard. The riding position is by some margin the least comfortable and practical here, requiring an uncomfortable contortion to even get your hands and feet in the right place and barely making any more sense once you get moving. Where the Diavel pilot can cruise at 80mph and the V-Rod rider 70-75 mph, anything above 60mph feels like hard work on the Suzuki. ABS isn’t standard (or even an option). The instruments, separated into a digital dash up in your line of sight (tacho, gear position and idiot lights) and an analogue clock in the top of the tank (speed), are the wrong way round so checking your revs and selected gear are easy but you never feel the need to, because you’re riding an 1800cc twin making nearly 120 lb.ft of torque the thing could happily ride through Rome stuck in fourth.

Ultimately a bike should be judged on how well it does the job for which it was designed. I can only assume the Boss was designed to turn heads with its style and noise and to rip away from a standing start and back to rest with indecent haste. Judged thus, it works. The blacked out livery with brilliant yellow accents looks spectacular, it sounds good, it’s fast in a straight line. But it’s hard to see rewarding ownership in that faintly odd set of qualities.