2025 Yamaha YZF-R9 First Ride Review – Not What You Think!

The worst-kept secret in motorcycling for the past few years, Yamaha’s long-awaited YZF-R9 is finally here for us to ride! We here at Motorcycle.com love the 890cc CP3 three-cylinder engine in everything it’s been in, and personally speaking, each time I ride a Tracer 9 or MT-09, I’ve yelled to the rooftops about how cool it would be to see this engine in a sportbike chassis, appropriately called… the R9. The gap in Yamaha’s sportbike lineup was obvious, especially once the R6 got the kibosh in 2020, that there needed to be something between the R7 and R1, and with the appropriate engine already in circulation the natural next step seemed obvious. Naturally, you and I are going to call this the R6 successor, but Yamaha swears up and down that the R9 is not. The pursuit for track dominance ultimately priced yesteryear’s Supersports out of reach for a lot of people, and their peaky power made them impractical on the streets. What Yamaha’s doing here is taking the formula that worked for the R7 – accessible power and performance – and ramping it up a notch for those who are ready to graduate into something more. If you ask Yamaha, the R9 is supposed to slot somewhere in between the R7 and the R6. That might sound strange and like a bunch of marketing BS to some of you, but after a full day of riding the R9 around Sonoma Raceway, Yamaha may be telling the truth after all. To find out why, check out the whole video above, where Road Test Editor Troy Siahaan breaks down what the R9 is, what the R9 isn’t, and most importantly, how it all translates on track. If you’ve read the title and bothered to read this far, you can probably guess that the R9 isn’t what you think it is.