Royal Enfield Classic 500 – Road Test & Review

A New Age CLASSIC

With the Bullet Classic, RE has added a tinge of modernity to their traditional, scrumptious Bullet preparation. Does the new recipe excite the taste buds of Rohit Paradkar?

Whenever a new Royal Enfield rolls out of the factory, for the audience outside the ‘Bullet’ cult, it’s just another iteration of the same old thumpers that the world has gotten used to seeing in the last few decades. I’m one such person – be it the legendary cast iron mill, the AVL engine or a Y2K model, it all sounds the same to me – the most basic form of a four-stroke engine which needs to be drastically overhauled to keep up with today’s technologically advanced times. However, when we sampled the Machismo LB500 in our search for the ‘Fastest Indian’ last year, I knew that a potent thumper had arrived on the scene. Regardless of what people think, the LB500 was probably one of the best Bullets made throughout the last century. Being a Japanese litre-class bike devotee, I am not very fond of Royal Enfields..

However, I had somehow managed to develop a soft corner for the LB. So when the news of the Classic 500 came along, I was eagerly waiting to get my leg swinging around its cycle-seat. The chance finally came through last month in the form of a ride from Bengaluru to Chennai. Since the itinerary only included long highway stretches and absolutely no ghats or off-road sections, the 350-odd kilometer ride still turned out to be a mere ‘first ride’ than an exhaustive report. But nevertheless, here are my two pence on the C5 (RE’s abbreviation for the Classic 500) …

The Classic gets a new starter motor from Denso unlike the unreliable sprag-clutch starter motor on the earlier Bullets

What used to be a tool-box on the earlier Bullets, now acts as the air-box on the Classic

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