It’s 8:30 and I’m already drooling out the front of ‘Moonraker Motorcycles’ in Norwich. A total coincidence (not) that I booked my 3100 mile service on exactly the same week they had the new ‘Super-Meteor’ available for everyone to have a good old gorp at. Gorp I certainly did!
First impressions.

Honestly, it’s a lot smaller than it looks from the reveal, I’m not sure if that was down to camera angle, dynamic lightening or plain old trickery to make the bike appear bigger. It’s not huge, a lot chunkier as you can see from the pictures and when I was sitting on it, my feet easily touched the floor. It’s taller than the Interceptor but it doesn’t feel an awful lot different to the 350 in terms of proportions.
The weight.
Getting personal here straight away, without fuel in it was naturally a bit lighter than it would be in proper running order. Yes, the bike does obviously feel a lot heavier and you can really feel that weight sitting on it. This isn’t the 350 where you could shuffle on the seat and the bike will move, I tried and nothing happened. Royal Enfield have done that weight voodoo again as the weight feels low to the ground and the balance is SUPERB. I can’t really state this enough, I took both feet off the ground for a moment and the bike just hung there, motionless. It doesn’t have the weight pendulum effect the Interceptor has. When I rocked it forward off the centre stand it did it with considerably more ease than the 350. Someone far more clever and more experienced could no doubt tell me why this is, for me it just me a great feeling that the bike wasn’t going to tip over for a less than full seasoned biker.


Controls.
For anyone who owns any of the J platform or Interceptor/GT’s will know the controls are fairly standard, there’s nothing actually wrong with them and they feel sturdy and not at all loose, it’s just there is “nothing to write home to muma about”. These are rather different.

They feel solid, tactile and with a good deal better quality on touch with & without my gloves on. If you were trying to justify the price difference between this and the other twins (and I’ll get to that) you can easily start here. None of the controls are loose, while I’m aware this is a straight from the factory display model it should be noted RE didn’t send them a key deliberately so it couldn’t be started up for test rides. This is what we can expect to purchase.
One for Alex.

Yep I took a pic of the gas cap, this isn’t to mock Alex but merely something I appreciate gets over looked quite a bit and so this is a homage if anything. My current 350cc gas cap is plastic and takes a quick cap lift and key insertion to get the job done. It feels kinda cheap, like RE needed a way to keep the price down a bit and so chucked one on that does the job.
For the Super-Meteor I can only imagine they figured this bike was going to sell like hot cakes and we’d just pay for a better one. I think they’re probably right on this as it feels so much sturdier than the prior offering.
Just tell me the price.
While currently no-one appears to have a price set in stone, the general consensus seems to be £6800-£7200 OTR. So we’re looking a good £300 cheaper than the BSA and this includes the Tripper navigation system I so enjoy on my current 350cc incarnation.
To conclude:
I hope this has given everyone a quick heads up of what to expect after release day, sadly we couldn’t start it up or have a ride today. That’s for another visit….