NAKED AND UNAFRAID

he mark of a truly brilliant idea is that it appears both inevitable and slightly unremarkable in retrospect, which is the reason any benchracer or armchair expert can easily tell you why the first-generation Yamaha FZ1 introduced in 2001 wasn’t such a big deal after all. They will say it was just a parts-bin special, a scaledup take on the Fazer 600 that had debuted three years prior. Hadn’t Suzuki already done the same thingtwice, first with the big Katana and then again with the Bandit 1200? How was this really any different from