On May 5, 2021, Yamaha Motor Europe dropped its first official video teaser for a new R bike. Most people expect that it’s the hotly anticipated R7, but Yamaha has, of course, been playing its cards extremely close to its chest. So, you know, nothing’s official about it just yet.  

Just a week later, on May 12, YME posted a second R/World teaser to its YouTube channel. At last, we have a date when all will presumably be revealed and made official. It’s right in the title of this video, after all: R/World is within your reach, 18/05/21. Folks, that means only six more days until Yamaha puts an end to all the speculation and shows us the goods. 

The caption underneath reads, “There’s a place where the track and the road meet a different kind of rider. Where R/World meets yours, 18/05/21 at 15:00 CEST. #RWorld” That’s 9 a.m. Eastern, if you don’t want to do the time conversion in your head.  

What does the video show this time? Instead of simply showing us an on-board video at an unspecified track, this video spends more time with the riders at that track. They’re fairly young (though not children), and some are women. They’re dressed in track-appropriate leathers, but not full race suits. In other words, they look like the kind of people you might see at any given track day, and could even be new to the whole experience. 

This teaser concentrates less on telling us about the new R model, and more about who this bike is for. Taking an R1M to the track might be fun for some people, but it’s probably not the best idea for track day newbies, who haven’t spent much time at any track just yet. Everyone has to start somewhere, and if you want to encourage new track day enthusiasts to explore and develop that enthusiasm, well, they need nimble, appropriate bikes to do it.  

Will this new R be that type of great, middleweight track bike? Looks like we only have a week more to wait before we find out. 

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