Full Review- We put the Royal Enfield Continental GT aka Cafe Racer through its paces

Ride, Handling and Braking

The RE CGT comes with 41mm dia Gabriel telescopic forks up front and Paioli gas charged twin shock-absorbers at the rear. The setup is sufficiently efficient to endow the latest RE with a decent ride quality. However, worth keeping in mind is that the CGT has a lot of sporty aspirations and isn’t exactly the bike for those wishing for cushy, posterior friendly ride. The bike does tend to get unsettled while dealing with undulations and this means that the CGT is best kept away from all kinds of off-road excursions. On the beaten tarmac though, the bike performs well and the rider surely won’t fear to deal with the occasional speed-breaker that our roads are famous for.

Unlike the TBTS, the Cafe Racer won’t really push you to plan a trip to the Leh. However, those willing to attempt Ironbutt Association’s Saddlesore run may find the CGT to be just the tool they have been looking for.

Seldom did we dream of associating terms like handling-prowess with bikes from Royal Enfield. Until, we found ourselves pushing the CGT hard into the corners and emerging out of them with huge grins plastered on our face! Yes, the new Royal Enfield Continental GT is easily the best handling RE to have ever come to us and the CGT has surely got the cornering-prowess to match all that engine performance.

The RE CGT is built around a new chassis that has been developed in cooperation with Harris Performance. Harris Performance is a UK based tuner that specializes in chassis-development for high performance bikes. And the UK based tuner has definitely helped RE a great deal with endowing the new Cafe Racer with just the right ingredients to make apex hunting a pleasure with this machine. 

The CGT’s chassis is a double cradle frame unit that scores highly on stiffness and optimum weight distribution. Thanks to the new chassis and the suspension setup, which is a bit on the harder side, the rider of the new RE can surely dream of keeping up with similarly priced (and lighter) Japanese motorcycles on most of those ghat sections.

The icing on the cake here is the set of tried, tested and much-loved Pirelli Sport Demon tires (100/90-18 53H for front and 130/70-18 63H for the rear). These tires are high on grip levels and play a large role in making the CGT an accomplished handler.

However, thanks to all that weight, the new bike isn’t exactly the best tool to go leaning around the bends. 

The new Royal Enfield Continental GT comes equipped with a floating type 300mm diameter disc brake up front and a floating type 240mm diameter disc at rear. While the front disc boasts of twin caliper arrangement, the one at the rear is a single caliper unit. Putting it simply, the new RE CGT has enough stopping power to haul itself down quickly from triple digit speeds, sans any sort of drama. The front disc has a good amount of bite and loves to chew away speeds at the slightest dab of front brake lever. The rear disc though, reminded me of the one on my 4 year old Bajaj Pulsar 220 DTSi. What I intend to say here is that while the rear disc brake of the RE CGT is reasonably efficient, it doesn’t really have the bite one generally associates with disc brakes. It is easy to lock both the wheels under hard braking and we would want RE to soon come up with an ABS variant.

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