2011 Cagiva Mito 125 sp525

The Cagiva Mito is pretty equal with the Aprilia RS125 when it comes to power and performance, but the ace up it's sleeve is it's mini Ducati 916 styling. 


The Cagiva Mito's handling is razor sharp, it pretty much goes where you think and the limit is the road and rider. In the right hands the Mito is an elbow-down scratcher and the focused riding position reflects this. The steering lock is poor too, so it's not the best bike to take your test on.


If you want Mito fun with a bit more practicality, consider the gorgeous naked version, the Cagiva Planet.


Most Cagiva Mito's will have been owned and thrashed by teenagers, so buy with caution. Make sure you get a full service history and that the bike has been run on quality 2-stroke oil. Build quality and electrics aren't up to much, so make sure you check up close and flick all the switches. 

2009 Yamaha yzf r125

Why’s it so important?

Okay, okay, it’s a tiddler and it wasn’t actually launched in 2009. But this year has seen a growth in sales of this bike in absolute parallel with the number of spotty would be ASBO recipients taking to two wheels instead of getting lashed on cheap cider and threatening little old ladies down the precinct. So thank Yamaha for that.

As kids, most of us here hankered after Yamaha RDs and DTs, dreaming of the day we could replace pedal power with the screaming resonance of pistons, thrashing up and down, belching out sweet-smelling two-stroke fumes, the blue haze a lingering airborne signature as we lived out our Wayne Rainey fantasies, complete with Marlboro paddock jacket billowing in the breeze. Of course nowadays we have to save the planet, so we’ve been left with strangulated four-strokes. Until the YZF-R125, the only other option was the fairly staid and somewhat wheezy Honda CBR125R, a bike that never quite lived up to teenage expectations in the same way the feisty Yamaha does.

There’s little wonder this bike has done so well. It’s a slimmed down R6 or R1, available as a pukka race replica in full Fiat Yamaha livery for the die-hard Rossi fan. It’s seriously stunning and it’s getting more seventeen-year-old backsides on bikes than we’ve seen in a long while. If the Yamaha YZF-R125 can play its part in ensuring a future generation of bikers over Vauxhall Corsa-driving halfwits with garish body kits and obscene stereo systems, then it will be a job well done.

The ride
Having been spoilt as a bike journalist for the last ten years, it would be easy to imagine that getting a go on this machine wouldn’t exactly excite me.

But you’d be wrong. Jumping on this bike in jeans and jacket and thrashing the pants off it round town takes me right back to my youth. Hell, even my riding gets worse as all I can think about is how fast I can make it go and whether or not I’m likely to pull Stephanie Miles from form 5B after she’s seen me outside the college gates leaning against my road rocket, coolly sucking on a Marlboro Light. As a thirty-five-year-old bloke with a mortgage and bills to pay, the Yamaha does things to me, takes me away to a special place, that place we all inhabited as a teenager, a world full of testosterone and devoid of responsibility.

It takes me a while to even remember that traffic laws still apply, that getting T-boned by the aforementioned Corsa driver is still a distinct possibility and that I’m not, as I certainly always thought as a youth, utterly invincible.

Pulling away on the little Yamaha requires a fair dose of revs to compete in the inner city traffic light GP, but once the elastic’s been wound up, the YZF-R really sings, lurching through a surprisingly slick gearbox as I desperately try to keep the revs above 6,000rpm. Once it’s there, it’s all about momentum. Slipstreaming becomes an all-important art – whether it’s another motorcycle or an elderly lady in a Nissan Micra makes no odds – forward motion must be maintained at all costs.

Unlike a few of its Fisher-Price competitors, there’s a real feeling of big bike quality to the Yamaha. Naturally, this is reflected in the price and at £3,699 for this plain blue version, you’re going to need to either deliver papers to half of the UK or have a pretty generous set of parents.

But you do get what you pay for. The suspension and brakes have a feel about them that lets you get on with carrying speed everywhere with confidence, in a way that even the least experienced rider can enjoy, all the while feeling like a MotoGP god, albeit one with serious acne and a penchant for alcopops and kebabs.
In the same way that the RD and DT induced the teenage trouser tent, twenty-five years on, the YZF-R125 is doing it all over again for Yamaha, bringing fresh blood to our wonderful world of motorcycling that until this year had fewer and fewer new members. And for that, we should be thankful.

This is the first proper Japanese 125 for ages, and it looks cracking. It goes like most other 125s, which isn’t so good, but if this spawns a new generation of tiddlers (bikes and riders) then this can only be a good thing.

FOR: Quality build, four-stroke reliability and good with kids
AGAINST: Crap steering lock, not exactly fast and looks faster than it is

2011 Aprilia RS4 125

Aprilia’s outgoing RS125 has been living on borrowed time. There was nothing wrong with its performance – with about 34bhp from 125cc, it was a fireball compared with most rivals – but its power advantage was a blast from the past. It was the last of the high-performance two-stroke motorcycles, which meant its power-to-weight ratio far exceeded any comparable four-stroke, as did its noxious emissions.

Aprilia shoehorned the RS125 through Euro 3 emissions regulations with a mix of strangulation and catalysts, but the more stringent Euro 4 standard spelt its downfall. Finally the unthinkable has happened: Europe’s most popular sports 125 (100,000 units manufactured) has been superseded by a four-stroke.
The new bike’s specification is impressive. The little single-cylinder engine has fuel injection, double overhead cams and four valves, but the output is governed by Europe-wide legal requirements for learners and peak power is just 15bhp – less than half its forebear’s.

The styling should cause more than a few stirrings among teenagers, however, with bodywork that’s so close to the look of the RSV4 superbike that at first glance you could easily mistake the 125 for a 1.0-litre machine – especially since one colour option is a replica of Max Biaggi’s Superbike World Championship winner.

Oddly, when you swing a leg over the 125, there’s more space than on the superbike, which is the tiniest and most cramped in its class – in contrast, the 125 is one of the largest of its type, on the perfectly reasonable assumption that youngsters old enough to ride it might be in their teens or early twenties, but they will be fully grown. The riding position is more upright than that of the RSV4 superbike and provides more legroom, so despite the sporting pretensions it’s a comfortable place to be.The RS4 isn’t quite the all-new bike Aprilia implies, however, because it’s closely based on sibling-brand Derbi’s GPR 125. The two share a frame and the engine is from the Derbi, too, with the injection replacing a carburettor and a new cylinder head and piston.

It goes well enough, propelling the sharp-steering chassis to an indicated 70mph or so, but you need to grab a handful of revs to stop it bogging down when you pull away. It also feels flat when you rev it past its 10,500rpm power peak, but it’s pretty strong in the mid range.

What you really need is Aprilia’s £700 race kit. It’s illegal for learners, but it’s worth considering once the test has been passed because it boosts power to a much-healthier 25bhp. It’s still not a patch on its two-stroke antecedent, but a lot livelier than the standard bike’s 15bhp.

I can’t comment on the precise package you’ll get from your Aprilia dealer because the test bikes on the track-only launch used costly, sticky Pirelli Supercorsa tyres in place of the usual Sava MC25 Bogart rubber from Slovenia, and the chassis was lightly tweaked to sharpen the steering.

I wish they wouldn’t do this, but I still think it’ll be one of the best-handling bikes in the sector.