I happened to ride BIKE India’s long-term Pulsar 180 DTS-i the other day and was completely blown away by the performance. Yes, I had been riding weedy little economisers for the last many months and yes, I rode the 180 DTS-i after many months – and what a revelation the bike was! The 180, with its aggressive power delivery, sharp brakes, perfect riding position, firm suspension and immediacy of controls, behaves like no other Indian bike. It’s actually a proper motorcycle that offers some real involvement for the enthusiast rider. It’s a taut little whippet – a bike which doesn’t start panting and wheezing if you thrash it a bit. It’s happy being ridden hard – accelerate, brake, shift, open the throttle and accelerate even harder – the 180 lifts its front wheel in sheer joy, and you end up having an absolute blast.

While handing the 180’s keys back to Amit, I told him how much fun I had on the bike, and somebody chimed in with ‘yeah, we never had such a bike before in India.’ Oh, really?

Flashback to 1992. I was in college, and had a Yamaha RX100 as my daily runabout. Small, light and powerful, my RX used to make mincemeat of Yezdi 250s, Kawasaki-Bajaj KBs and assorted TVS-Suzukis. It would explode off the line and wheelie endlessly. It would scrape the footpegs in fast corners. And on full chat, the exhaust note was intoxicating. Brilliant stuff. But there was one machine (apart from the Yamaha RD350 of course…) that could not only keep up with the RX, but also beat it in the top speed stakes. The Enfield Fury 175.



Back in 1987, Enfield decided that they wanted to do something different from the ubiquitous Bullet, and the result was the Zundapp-sourced Fury 175. I quote from an old Enfield advertisement (from the April 1988 issue of Car & Bike International magazine) for the Fury: “Choose the bike with the quick pick-up. Not the fast pack up.” And “Once you ride the Fury, no other bike really stands a chance.”  

Ahem. The Enfield Fury, essentially a Zundapp KS175, was powered by a single-cylinder, 163cc, air-cooled, two-stroke engine, which made a claimed 15.2 horsepower. And you got electronic ignition, alloy wheels, five-speed gearbox, and a disc brake at the front – space-age stuff for the late-1980s Indian motorcycle market. In its performance intent, the Fury really was leagues ahead of almost anything else made in India at that time. And at Rs 20,300 (ex-showroom, Pune, in 1988) for the DX 175, the Fury was almost a bargain. (For those who wanted to go cheaper still, there was also a DW model, with drum brakes at the front instead of the DX’s disc, for Rs 18,800.)