Despite the upright ride position there’s no major windblast and so you perambulate in some relative comfort.
The gearbox shifts sweetly, not that you need it so much given the vast amount of torque, and given a smooth road the SCR, with its belt drive, makes smooth comfortable progress. An odd choice, but the simplicity is fine and at night actually it makes a pleasing glow! The speedo unit is a bit odd, being black-bodied and digital, putting us in mind of those first-ever black screen digital (LED?) watches we all had back in the 70s, with the red numerals you needed to press a button to see. The bench seat is firm but its okay and the view forward with those crazy old handlebars, tall, but pulled back toward your lap, make you smile, and actually they’re tall enough for a comfortable standing position if you were to go off-road (if…). Character is lobbed at you by the bucket load, and it’s a curious thing, when something starts to feel right it starts to look right, too. The Triumph has a 270º crank to replicate the feel of a 90º vee-twin, but the Yamaha is a real vee-twin, with a 60º angle (there are probably balancer shafts in there somewhere, too). The motor is tuned just like Triumph’s latest 900 twins with low power but big torque – heck, it’s almost an identical match to the Street Scrambler at 53.5bhp and 79.5Nm, the latter maxing out at 3000rpm. Then you pluck up the courage to ride off (‘please don’t let anyone see me’) and you get the first whiff of real motorcycle. Then the footpegs – well, they’re just plain wrong, a road race type for some reason and right where you want to place your legs when sat stationary – boy, they annoy. You sit on it and it’s higher in the saddle than you first think (830mm) and it’s one firm saddle at that. We’re repelled by the SCR950 – but equally attracted to it. Maybe it’s the knobbly Bridgestone Trailwings and the silver-grey steel mudguards? Definitely, once you press the starter, it’s the noise – for a fully compliant exhaust system it sounds lovely and throbby, even if aesthetically it looks like a matt-black painted dustbin. Perhaps it’s the proper 60s style steel scrambler handlebars (big and ugly just like they used to be). Perhaps it’s that peanut tank – its paint puts us in mind of the old XT500. So we come back to the SCR950 and we’re not put off. Open face lids, beards and crap goggles are the go, even for mainstream bikers (just like when dads got into wearing cargo pants). Race reps are history, adventure is the new touring (apparently) and so for the cool dude of today stripped-down retro things are the new black. Thing is this bike comes from 2017 (and it’s now 2018) and all sorts of experiments are going on as the mainstream bike manufacturers try to get a handle on the custom-bobber-hipster-scrambler-whatever-it-is movement.
We’re used to seeing roadsters being converted into scramblers (like Triumph’s Street Scrambler and Ducati’s Desert Sled as seen in RUST #32) but has anyone before taken a cruiser and tried to make it into scrambler? There are little features, design nuances, to this bike that make you think somewhere in the R&D team there is at least one man who knows something about real motorcycles. It is the weirdest thing, first thought is pretty much ‘no!’, only it has something – maybe an air of familiarity – that stops us clean running away. The bare wires on the end of the cable can be connected to the fuse box or even directly to the battery.The SCR950 kind of leaves us flummoxed. This 10-foot cord provides a permanent power source for your detector.
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