Ben went away to some office-related work for a longer duration than usual, which gave me the chance to steal back the keys of the Suzuki V-Strom SX. During my last stint with it, I only stuck to paved roads, so this time round, I wasted no time and promptly went off-road with it, to satisfy my own curiosity.
Owing to the advent of the monsoons, there were no shortage of mucky trails around, and I found one of those, bright and early on a Sunday morning. Being used to my Impulse for this sort of shenanigans, the weight of the Suzuki impeded my progress a smidge, but I soon learned to trust the grunty motor to pull myself out of predicaments, which were entirely of my own creation. The torque is omnipresent, and so long as you do not select a completely unreasonable gear to begin with, pulls you through most situations with aplomb. Another thing to note — the few jumps (or yumps if you’re a WRC fanatic) I encountered were acquitted rather well by the suspension, and the stiffness ensured it didn’t bottom out in these situations. Would I have preferred a softer suspension setup off-road? Yes. Did the stiffness of the suspension turn my excursions on rugged terrain into an exercise in futility? Absolutely not.
That being said, it was quite evident that the MRF tyres the V-Strom came shod with were optimised for usage on firm pavement, and having ridden with some of the more off-road-biassed tyres recently, I can’t help but feel that swapping the tyres out on the V-Strom would open up a new chapter in the book of the off-road capability of the Suzuki. The lesson I learned, though, is not to be afraid of being a bit crazy, as the results may be surprising.
