Motorcycle Forums

I purchased a new R1 in March 2004 and from 3000 miles onwards I noticed that the bike occasionally hesitated while pulling away from road junctions. The bike would begin to pull away normally and then suddenly stumble as if the fuel had been cut off. There was no pattern to the problem at all and weather conditions and miles travelled were irrelevant. The bike could do it 3 times in one day and then go a whole month without doing it at all. I discussed it with my dealer but they were unaware of any problems. In September 2004 when I had covered just over 4000 miles what I felt was inevitable happened. I approached a road junction with the throttle closed but clutch still engaged and made sure all was clear. Still carrying plenty of speed I fed the throttle in and as usual the initial response felt good but then as I lent the bike over it cut out. I didn't get the clutch in in time and didn't get my leg down either and the end result was £750 damage and my leg trapped under the bike. I returned to the dealer who checked the diagnostics and there was nothing there although he said it sounded like a TPS fault. He phoned Yamaha who asked him not to look at my bike but said they would carry out some research at their end. The end result was they felt what I described couldn't happen and it was a rider error. Having covered 5000 miles per annum for the last 27 years and exited that road junction thousands of times I knew it wasn't. For the last 2 years I have slipped the clutch for a ridiculous amount of time when exiting road junctions and kept the revs up too. I often hear it splutter and miss and were it not for my over cautious approach I would probably be down again. At the time I searched to see if anybody had suffered the same problem but couldn't find anybody. Following the current recall article in MCN I carried out a bit more research and now I find many cases where riders have crashed in this way particularly in the USA. What I really want to know is how many more UK riders have crashed as a result of this fault and do people think that Yamaha should pay for the damage to the bikes? I had a £500 XS on my insurance and paid for mine myself. Is anybody interested in taking a group action against Yamaha? As I am new to this forum please accept my apologies if this subject has already been discussed and point me towards the right thread. Thanks