Ride the 150 160km? Not on your nelly! I'm not into touring. A quick 30km blast to "The Camel" for dinner and back again is about as much as I can cope with.

As for step thru's.....when you've witnesses a Yamaha Mio scooter, with a 380cc big bore kit go through the 1/4 mile at 11.9 you have to just scratch your head and walk away.

I haven't ridden a TZR125 since I raced one in Ministocks in 1991. That little demon had 33hp at the sprocket. A rip snorting little buzzbox with a variable volume expansion chamber, and a 'walkman' datalogger. How cool was that? My man was a crazy Czech genius and made all sorts of wacky stuff.

Funnily enough, there was only a couple of people racing the Honda, but they couldn't stay with the Yamaha. And the RG125 was a bit of a joke.

The poor old Cagiva got banned 'cos they had 7 gears and the Aprilia125 was in it's infancy and although full of Mediterranean promise, it didn't deliver.

As for all the bikes in SE Asia. There's some nice tackle. When I first came here in '93 I was shocked to see the Yamaha VR150R, which was like a morphed TZR on acid. Me and my mate Lee had both raced TZR's in Ministocks and we couldn't get over how cool it was. And the Krappasaki KR150 would hit a genuine 160kmh straight out the showroom.

I think the reason that the rest of the world didn't get the Asia spec bikes is because the various Governments in the developed world looked at the death toll on the Sukhumvit road and realised that selling these bikes to your average 17 year old was almost genocide! Yep, I used to spend many a moonlit night sitting on a stack of dumped concrete blocks watching the Saturday night drag racing from U-turn to U-turn. Spectacular. Also got caught up in it one night. There I was minding my own business on the Honda Dream 100. Flat out at about 80kmh when all of a sudden I was engulfed by about 50 strokers all at full noise. Very scary, but a good laugh.