The woes of having a 200BHP machine, eh?
The insurance on the Ninja is due. And the bike is due for its annual service.
The former is obviously a legal requirement if I’m going to ride it on the road. But I reckon I did slightly over 100 miles in the last twelve months. Last year I had a to-and-fro between the insurers and a comparison website that was both revealing and financially advantageous.
The latter is a checklist of things that the local Kawasaki dealer takes half a day to do, then they put a stamp in the logbook to validate they’ve been done, and then they charge me an amount of money for their parts and labour.
My current insurer sent me a renewal quote of £226, that’s quite a bit more than last year’s premium of £186, so I went straight to a comparison website where Carol Nash offered me a substantially reduced premium for a slightly higher excess. I called my current insurer, gave them all the details and they reduced their renewal quote to £152. Nice!
And yet I remember the insurance for the Triumph Daytona 955i was a mere £98/year. Yes, I know the insurers say that the difference in BHP output between the 955i and the Ninja is a bucketful of scary but, conversely, the Ninja is packed with all of the computing to keep it safe and shiny side up, whereas the 955i had nothing apart from an EMS.
Anyway.
As to the annual service, with the demise of Leicester Kawasaki, if I want to keep the 100% dealer-serviced track record in the log book and on the USB fob (yes, really), my options are either Drayton Croft, Hinckley (45 minutes or 48 miles away), or Chris Walker, Grantham, (35 minutes or 28 miles away).
I don’t know where I’m going to have the service done yet, but Chris Walker (being the closer Kawasaki dealer) is looking favourite.
At least the reduction in my insurance premium will help towards the cost of the annual service.
Anyway (again). She’s in the garage right now. Cleaned, lubed, polished and ready for a sedate trundle around the British countryside.
In other news, I have been toying with the idea of replacing that exhaust with something that has a little more… oomph! It’ll cost £850 for an Akra, which seems a lot of money for an extra 0.5bhp and a weight-loss of a fraction under 1Kg.
But my, it would annoy the neighbours 🙂
She looks nice in that pic.
Carole put my premium up last year from 140ish to 180ish. If it goes up again, I may have to speak to the meercats.