WATCH WorldSBK stars tickle the red line on new Kawasaki ZX-25R

If there is one motorcycle we’d really love to get our hands on this year, we think it’d be the new Kawasaki ZX-25R.

Why? Well, for one we always want something we (probably) can’t have but also because every time we catch a glimpse of Kawasaki’s brand-new four-cylinder lightweight pocket rocket it just piques our curiosity and gives us itchy booted feet.

Revealed at the Tokyo Auto Salon in October 2019, the ZX-25R is a 249cc four-pot with some serious bite, harnessing all the best bits of its flagship, WorldSBK Championship dominating ZX-10RR into a compact, high-revving charger.

With this in mind, there is no-one better out there than a certain Jonathan Rea – five-time WorldSBK champion = and his new already race-winning team-mate Alex Lowes to give the screamer a few knee-down laps of the Jerez Circuit in Spain as demonstrated here in this latest promo video.

It shows the pair giving their (no doubt semi-scripted but genuine) positive opinions of its sharp lines before ripping it around the Spanish venue.

With 45hp being squeezed from that engine, we’ve already seen shots that show the ZX-25R is a free-revving sportsbike with a redline going all the way to 17,000rpm, but the video just emphasises it for effect with the dash revealing 160km/h (around 100mph) in fifth gear, suggesting there is still plenty more oomph to come from it.

A sportsbike in the truest sense of ‘bang for your buck’, the Kawasaki ZX-25R is seemingly a machine that is designed to give plenty of loud, fast accelerating joy in a way not often experienced as manufacturers temper their models with restrictions due to emissions or general refinement.

Alas, those aforementioned emissions regulations in Europe would suggest to us that this ZX-25R is destined for Asian markets only where such a model isn’t subject to quite so much compromise, which is a crying shame.

Frankly, it just makes us want it more…