While an average Joe might have difficulties distinguishing an RE Classic from a Standard, there is no mistaking this new Thunderbird 500 for anything else on the road. And I absolutely adore these bikes, so it was with natural scepticism that I approached this new Thunderbird 500.
While the bike certainly managed to impress me, it still wasn’t the quintessential ‘Enfield’ for me, and that slot always belonged to bikes like the Machismo (LB) 500 and more recently the Classic/Desert Storm 500. I’m not what you might call an ‘Enfield-guy’, but I’ve had the opportunity of clocking a few thousand kilometres on the older Twinspark 350cc Thunderbird during the 2009 Royal Enfield Himalayan Odyssey. So you can imagine then that when RE announced that a new flagship was coming out in the form of the Thunderbird, it left us a little stumped. The last big jump we saw what the appropriately named Classic 500 – a bike that looks like a 1950s Bullet, but is powered by a modern aluminium-block 500cc electronic fuel injected engine which shot to flagship status in the company’s line-up. Classically styled and nostalgia fuelled they might be, but the boffins at Royal Enfield have slowly, but steadily, modernising the motorcycles they make, at this juncture they probably offer a very interesting mix of old world and new in a way nobody has really done so far. The smallish Chennai based company has been churning out a steady stream of motorcycles almost since the days of the Raj and if anyone was to look at the kind of bikes the company made then and what’s rolling out of the factory gates right now, they might be forgiven for thinking little has changed in over the last five decades or so. It’s always a very exciting prospect when Royal Enfield launches a new flagship.
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