Could The New Yamaha R9 Look Like This?

Easily the biggest news story so far this autumn was the teaser video for the upcoming Yamaha R9, which dropped this week on the Japanese brand’s social channels.

As will all teasers though, it gives very little away in terms of the final look of the bike. Fleeting glances, blurry close-ups and a gratuitous slow-mo burnout were all we had to go on. But what if there was a person who could piece these blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moments together, to create a more complete picture of the bike…

Enter Kar Lee, the man behind Kardesign, a UK-based designer, motorcycle journalist, and part-time two-wheeled limousine ‘rider’ - check out his website for more information on that service. He has a knack for doing just that, giving us a good idea of how the new bike could shape up based on just a few small slivers of information.

The image you can see in the post above is an update of an existing CG image he created a while back, and it seems that as soon as the teaser landed, he was busy updating the earlier concept to reflect the elements gleaned from the Yamaha teaser.

His original rendering, seen below, was pretty close looking to the machine we saw in the teaser, although a couple of design elements were revealed in the teaser. The first of which seems to be that the R9 will be running a centrally-mounted DRL, sitting within the front air intake of the bike. The svelte-looking DRLs of the bike have also been tweaked from the OG rendering. Again, this will have been done as the LEDs on the actual bike are one of the easily visible elements of the bike in the official video. Some other parts of the bike have been tweaked to tie-in to the snappy and often blurry teaser, including the black forks and calipers, and the seat unit of the latest rendering looks much more like a factory part.

It is though, just a rendering. And no matter how many hours Kar puts into his artwork (spoiler alert - it’s a lot) we won’t know for sure how close it is until October 9. We can tell you that we’ve seen these kinds of crystal ball musings from him in the past, and he’s never far from off!

If you want to check out more of Kardesign’s magic, head to the official website here, or the official Instagram channel here.

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