With my '98 T595 now being almost exactly 12 months old, with 12,000 miles under it's wheels, any attempt to replace it is going to cost me big heap wonga in depreciation. Yet, despite all the factors that attracted me to the T595 in the first place still applying in spades, I've found myself drawn to the idea of chopping it in for a new Sprint ST. Why? Well, part of the reason is that 12,000 mile total - well below the 18-20,000 miles that I racked up in successive years on my two previous VFR's (an '86, & a '92). There were days in this last winter when I actively avoided non-essential journeys, simply because I didn't want to go by bike! The T595 is not, by any measure, a winter bike. Although as ultra-sports tools go it's a very versatile machine, it just can't cut it after 5 hours in the saddle, laden down with half a ton of luggage, at 3am on the M6 in a December hailstorm. I can also say with bitterness that hard luggage messes up the weight distribution, & buggers up the handling of the T5 to some extent. Thus it was that I found myself standing beside Trumpet dealership Carl Rosner Motorcycles' Sprint ST demonstrator just south of Croydon, late on a Monday afternoon. These are my impressions...

To look at, the Sprint ST is not particularly striking. The T595 is far more pleasing on the eye - whereas the ST has more than a hint of Suzuki GSX750 Teapot to it. Stylistically, I'd say it plays second fiddle to the old 97-style VFR750, but has the measure of the utterly bland VFR800. The clear flush-fit front indicators look slightly odd, I'd say, but I guess they'd grow on you. The rubber-treaded front pegs are practical, but make the T595 parts-bin pillion pegs look slightly incongruous. Practicality is well catered for with a centre-stand which is well designed, & easy to use. Throwing a leg over the machine, it all seems very familiar as my hands fall to the bars. Pure VFR! Having said that, after a year on the T595 it feels like I'm sitting bolt upright, although I know I'm not. The clocks are very clear & well laid out, although the little numbers on the speedo make it look cluttered; this isn't a huge issue, since my experience with the T5 - numbered more sparsely - is that you soon learn what needle angle equates to what velocity. All the idiot lights are arranged in a neat row across the top of the dash, & in addition to the fuel warning light (a la T595) there is a pucker gauge, along with a little LCD clock! The screen appears at this stage to be very low indeed (of which more later), & the headlight controls have moved from their T5 placement across to the right hand grip. The seat feels extremely comfortable - much better than the hemorrhoid special on the 595.Pulling in the clutch to fire the beast up, my first & only ergonomic gripe is that the lever span is huge. This wouldn't be an issue if it was adjustable, & indeed the clutch assembly appears to be the same as the T595 unit, but it's a pain, aggravated on this bike by the fact that the bite point is set quite a long way out in the clutch travel. Fortunately, that aspect of clutch operation is adjustable. Later, I nearly dropped the bike doing a low speed U-turn from rest, as I looked for the bite point in vain while the bike toppled gracefully to the right... found it just in time!

The motor starts first time, & if you discount the noise like a bag of spanners in a cement mixer at idle, it sounds great. This demonstrator has the Triumph performance can for the ST fitted, but it's far less raucous than it's T595 equivalent when blipping the throttle. The glorious bark on the T595 (low performance can) can become wearing after a while, but it's an incomparable sound when you're pressing on in the twisties - & the Sprint ST can't quite compete in that area. It can compete with the VFR though! My 92 VFR with the Remus can demonstrated how good a V4 can sound, a rich, spine-tingling howl that just begged me to wind it open. The VFR800 I tried last year couldn't compete - it sounded flat & sanitised, even allowing for the standard can, & completely uninspiring. Later on, I discovered that when you give it proper stick, the ST sounds almost as good as the 595, which provides a soundtrack that can give best only to Carl Fogarty's Ducati at full chat. Pulling away, & getting out of the car park, once the aforementioned clutch action has been overcome, reveals plenty of low down grunt, providing precise control at trickle-speeds. The steering lock is infinitely better than the supertankeresque steering on the T5, while the wide bars give plenty of leverage for low-speed manoeuvres that would become three-point turns on the 595. On my bike, I'd need to be holding at least 4,500-5,000 rpm & slipping the clutch if I didn't want it to pop, bang & surge, but the ST seems to pull cleanly from 2,000 rpm, & is geared slightly lower then big daddy T595. Considering that 5,000 rpm is about 30mph in first on the 595, you can see that filtering & trickling through traffic is less than entertaining. I gather that the 955i has better mannered fuelling than the 595, but that even so it can't compete with the ST.

Once out on the main road, I find that everything is cool in traffic - quite literally. The 595 cooks your legs when it gets a bit hot, & it gets moderately hot every time it has to crawl, & especially every time it has to sit stationary at traffic lights. The riding position means that unlike on the 595 I can look over my shoulders relatively comfortably, while the mirrors contain barely any elbow (about all I can see on the 595 unless I contort myself to peer round them). This all contributes to far more relaxed riding in traffic, & the additional height that is a side-effect of the more upright stance is useful here as well. Suspension is softer than the brick-hard T5 stuff, but much firmer & better controlled than the boingy bits on my VFR's ever were - & much the better for it. At least my teeth aren't in danger of falling out every time I come to a small imperfection in the road surface, which is the effect that the T5 generates.

Eventually, after much 30mph riding, & the odd opportunity to explore the incredibly elastic roll-on midrange as I exploit the gaps that open in traffic every now & then (my VFR750s were both good at this stuff, the ST is if anything better), I find myself approaching a smallish offset shellgripped roundabout, beyond which is a twisty National Limit B road. I've only been on this bike ten minutes, & yet without a second thought I'm weighting first one peg then the other, & using the incredible leverage that the wider bars coupled with the riding position give me, to wang through the obstacle at a rate of knots, heeling first one way then the other. By contrast, on the T5 I always find that I'm much more locked in position, & have to steer almost entirely using only my forearms; the high pegs in particular make weight transfers difficult, & the net result is that the extra, & excellent, high-speed flickability of the bike is compromised by the ergonomics. The front biased riding position on the T5 certainly makes the steering feel more precise, but for me, pushing the front tyre hard into corners isn't on my agenda; I ride every bike (T5 no exception) slow(er) into corners on the road, & accelerate out, so a front end that would allow a racer to trail the front brake harder & deeper into a corner while howling the front tyre has no benefit for me whatsoever. Even the better tyres on the T5 serve only to go square & wear out more quickly on real roads, & of course bearing in mind that I've dragged pegs in the wet on the track on my old VFR shod with BT57's, the likelihood of me noticing the extra grip that the 56's offer on the road is pretty infinitesimal.

Exiting the roundabout (that's traffic circle in 'merkin, by the way), I'm away, winding it on hard & exploring the performance envelope. At speed, I discover that while the screen may seem low, appearances are deceptive. I wouldn't be surprised if my head took a pounding at insane speeds, but I was unbuffeted at a merely mildly bonkers velocity. The brakes are the same as those on the T5, & are just as sharp - but you need to allow for more rear-to-front weight transfer than on the T5, & I have a feeling that the rear brake on the ST might actually have a purpose, what with a less front-biased weight distribution meaning that the back wheel spends more time on the ground. At least, in their plagiarism of many of the best features of the VFR, they didn't steal those damned stupid linked brakes!

Experimentally nailing the sucker open is revealing as well... the bike is better in the mid-range than the T5, pulling from 2K right round to the redline, with a rush at the top, but it is just missing the really extreme top-end rush of the T5. Thing is, apart from a lap of the old Nurbürgring , a couple of mad moments on country roads & a few hundred miles on the Autobahn & other continental motorways, the number of times that I've reached the hot part of the power band in top can be counted on the fingers of one foot. The number of times I use the top 15 horses on my T5? Very few indeed & in winter never if I want to keep the bubble up & the rubber down! No, I reckon on the road the ST might even be the faster real-world bike, for most conditions, because it has more power where you need it for picking off traffic & suchlike.