#mt-10sp

It’s been about a month since we introduced Motorcycle.com’s 2022 Yamaha MT-10 SP semi-long-term project bike. In case you forgot the premise of this whole thing, Yamaha offered us the opportunity to hang on to an MT-10 SP for an extended period of time, and since I have a soft spot for the bike, I decided to give it some tasteful upgrades to address some key weaknesses while also unleashing some trapped potential. The point here is two-fold: first is to see what the bike could do with some simple upgrades. Second is to not break the bank while doing so because otherwise, you could easily go buy one of the European competitors that would probably still spank this MT, stock. 

Long-term test bikes aren’t something we normally do here at Motorcycle.com, but when Yamaha’s PR guy Gerrad Capley said I could take the MT-10 SP home after the press intro, it was an offer that was hard to resist. When I asked him how long I could have it, he basically shrugged his shoulders and winked. “Can I modify it?” I asked. “Only if you give it back to us in stock form,” he said. Just like that, I dashed away with an MT-10 SP for an indefinite amount of time. Nice.

Let the record show that, despite my best efforts, Yamaha’s MT-10 was not included in either the street or track portions of our mega seven-way open-class naked bike shootouts last year. I fought for its inclusion but was ultimately denied by the Bossman who wrote it off by saying our field was big enough and it wasn’t going to win anyway. That and we also knew a new one was already on the way.

This news should come as a surprise to nobody, but it’s still equally as exciting to finally get the official confirmation: Yamaha is bringing an updated MT-10 to the US. Maybe more exciting is the announcement that Yamaha is also bringing an MT-10 SP here as well. We reported earlier this month that a new MT-10 was coming, but at the time, the report was only confirmed for Europe. Now the US can rest assured it’s coming here, too.

Yamaha announced minor updates to its FZ-10, as well as a new SP variant with electronic suspension and Thin Film Transistor (TFT) instrumentation from the YZF-R1M.