You may not be familiar with QJ Motor as a brand in itself, however, you may be familiar with Benelli and MV Agusta, companies which have forged strategic partnerships with the Chinese manufacturer. In fact, Benelli is owned by QJ Motor, and all of the Italian brand’s motorcycles are manufactured in-house by QJ Motor in China.
With that, it isn’t surprising that QJ Motor has a plethora of models slated for launch in the 2022 model-year. As if we haven’t talked about them enough, QJ Motor is expected to, yet again, release another small-displacement sportbike equipped with a 400cc parallel-twin engine. Now, if you’re thinking that this sounds like a familiar recipe (i.e., one employed by a certain Japanese manufacturer with a fondness for green), then you’d be right. The QJ Motor GS400RR has yet to break cover even in China, yet even then, Chinese motoring publication Manyanu is calling it a Ninja 400 imitation.
Now, whether or not the upcoming GS400RR is a Ninja copycat or not is certainly up to debate. However, what we do know is that it stands the chance of hitting the global market either under Benelli branding, or who knows? It may even be one of the small-displacement MV Agusta-branded bikes the Italian company has in the pipeline. That being said, let’s take a closer look at what the GS400RR brings to the table.
From a performance standpoint, the engine we find in the GS400RR bears nearly identical architecture as that of the Kawasaki Ninja 400’s. Honestly, it won’t be surprising if this mill is just a reverse-engineered Ninja 400 engine, as Kawasaki’s parallel-twins tend to be the most imitated engines in the market—next only to Honda’s 471cc power plant. QJ Motor claims that the new 400cc engine has a power output of 33kw, translating to around 44 horsepower—exactly the same amount of power we find in the Japanese twin.
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As for styling, I’m of the opinion that MV Agusta’s design team will have their work cut out for them if they even want this bike to remotely be worthy of wearing the famed Italian badge. This leads me to believe that the GS400RR could eventually make its way into the global market under the Benelli brand. But hey, that’s just my opinion. We’ll have to wait and see just what QJ Motor and its affiliates have in store for us in the coming months.
Sources: Manyanu, Cycle World