2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ Touring Test: Las Vegas Bound

December 8, 2023

When Ultimate Motorcycling got wind of my upcoming trip from my home in Los Angeles to Las Vegas, a desert settlement in the state of Nevada, we decided to turn it into a travel story. Rather than ride my Moto Guzzi V7 III Special again, as I did on my summer trip to Maryland for a wedding, something different was in order. After some discussion, we settled on the new 2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+.

The Tracer stood out to me for one feature in particular—radar cruise control. For those not in the know, radar cruise control enables the bike to follow the vehicle in front of you at a certain distance when there is a slowpoke in a Camry, cramping your style.

Fundamentally, it’s a super simple trick. The reality is that it totally transforms the way you interact with the machine. Once you grow accustomed to it (there is a learning curve, so you should RTFM to understand the system), you may find that you spend more highway miles with the system on than off.

Long interstate cruises melt away into the pavement. People cruising along at a lower speed cease to frustrate, the system simply paces them. It allows you to (when safe) pay more attention to what is going on far ahead of you and out to your sides—maybe that is traffic conditions, maybe that is the beautiful California desert landscape. When you do get off the bike, you feel less fatigued, as though you were hardly actively riding at all.

The system does not steer for you. You need to handle that yourself. It does not shift for you. However, you will be shown a prompt if you need to change gears. It will not handle stop-and-go traffic, and you would not want it to take care of that, anyway. Regardless, this is an amazing feature to have on a highway-heavy motorcycle.

Now, the 2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ fits into two categories—Sport and Touring. What does that mean? A motorcycle that has to do two different things well must have compromises somewhere, right? Right?

As a sport bike, this thing is sick. It makes as much power as a Miata but weighs as much as the old ladies at your grandmother’s bridge game. It can use those powers to rip your brain out of your skull and into your feet faster than your grandmother can pull her aces to win a trick.

In the twisties, the Yamaha shows its sport side. With a push of the thumb, sport mode is activated, and the Tracer handles roads better than its 500-pound weight would suggest. The mileage-leaning Dunlop Sportmax GPR-100 tires work well, and the suspension is well-tuned, giving me a great deal of rider confidence as I zipped up Angeles Crest Highway and onto Angeles Forest Highway to the upper desert.

While the inline-3 motor is happy to pull you along at 2500 rpm with its oodles of low-end torque, spinning it up to about 6000 rpm brings out another beast. From there to the 10,500 rpm redline, you have a mind-bending amount of power on tap, which the triple-cylinder engine dispenses with glee. In the mountains, you have enough torque that a novice like me can enjoy myself without shifting much. Getting on the freeway, you can hit highway speeds in second gear. On the straight, flat desert roads approaching Trona and Death Valley, the bike easily and comfortably hits speeds in Cessna territory.

The Tracer 9 GT+ also has an up/down quickshifter that can be used while accelerating or decelerating. Shifts are crisp and punctual while screwing it on and less so while braking, though certainly still fun and acceptable. I enjoyed the QS so much that I was using it in everyday traffic and changing gears with the radar cruise control engaged. Who wouldn’t want to glide through The Vegas Strip with no effort? When you need to use the clutch, the assisted slipper unit that Yamaha has put in made me feel like my downshifting was much better than it was (thank you) with absurdly light lever effort.

Other standard electronic rider aids on the GT+ include ABS, traction control, wheelie control, and slide control; everything is cornering-aware, thanks to an IMU.

Getting back to touring, Yamaha could not stop at just having the radar do one thing. The radar also feeds into the Tracer 9 GT+’s linked braking system. When the motorcycle detects an obstacle within colliding distance, it adds brake power to the proper wheel(s) to ensure you do not mate with it. Simultaneously, the radar talks to the KYB semi-active suspension to stiffen the fork damping to ensure you don’t dive.

When riding in the standard mode, I was very happy with the supple damping that comforted my bee-hind on the potholes of LA’s freeways. In the twisties, this can easily be pushed too hard. Sport mode instantly firms up the ride, making the bike zip along on rails far beyond this author’s riding abilities.

Touring did bring out some not-so-great sides of this bike. First and foremost for my frame is the seating position. I am five-foot-ten with a 30-inch inseam and rode the Tracer with the saddle and footpegs in the low position.

I could not flat-foot the 2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+, which suggests I am too short for the bike. When riding, my knee was bent at a rather small angle, suggesting that I am too tall for the bike. The saddle is shaped well, though much too hard for a full day of touring. Also, it is angled in a manner that pushes my, um, family jewels into the tank. Ouch.

Speaking of the tank, it is huge. At five gallons, you have quite the range, hypothetically. In reality, the fuel gauge tells you that you are on your last ‘bar’ of fuel, with somewhere between 1.5 and 2 gallons in the tank. The manual references a 0.75-gallon reserve; the low-fuel light comes on when you tap into it. This inconsistency unnecessarily hampers the effective range of the bike; I simply could not trust the display enough to rely on it.

After a particularly harrowing experience going into Ridgecrest, I began to rely on the odometer. Thinking you are about to run out of gas in the middle of the desert at night and finding out that you have a scooter-and-a-half’s worth of fuel left is enough to make the gas gauge on this bike nearly useless.

The rest of the interface is modern, straightforward, and easy to use. Everything you would want to adjust, such as your heated grips, is at your fingertips. The interface does have some smartphone integration features, though they are not worth bothering with unless you use Garmin’s Motorize app, which I didn’t test—I knew where I was going.

The magic of the 2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ is that it does not egg you to push its power. The wide saddlebags, which will comfortably swallow a helmet, scream that you are on your way to a dentistry convention, not to do wheelies. In my time with the Tracer, I have used it to grocery shop to feed 20 people. I have used it to go for tea with my parents. I have used it to twist through the mountains and glide across the desert. This motorcycle does it all.

The 2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ allows you to have your cake and eat it, as well. You can ride to a dentistry convention, not get covered in bugs, hide your helmet in your saddlebag, and leave to crush a canyon twisty or two. You can glide in giddy ease with the power of radar across state lines and pack everything you would need in the saddlebags. Sport. Touring. The Tracer does both.

Travel photography by Marcel Sereboff
Action photography by Don Williams

RIDING STYLE

Helmet – AGV Tourmodular

Jacket – Spidi Net H2Out

Gloves – Spidi Flash CE

Pants – Spidi 4Season H2Out

Boots – Xpd X-Village

2024 Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+ Specs

ENGINE

Type: Inline-3

Displacement: 890cc

Bore x stroke: 78.0 x 62.1mm