Qjiang QJ600GS / Benelli BJ600GS - rumors thread

[euphonius]

OK, for Felix and anyone else curious about this Qianjiang/QJiang/Benelli QJ600GS aka BJ600GS, we convened a small quorum of the Shanghai chapter of MCM this afternoon in Pubei Lu, home of several motorcycle dealers and supply shops. The Benelli shop was closed, but test rides were indeed being offered outside the BMW dealer. (Really sorry the pictures are so relatively small. When I try to post "medium" sized pictures, this recently updated version of vBulletin says they are too big. So how is it that Roadrunner posts bigger pix? Am I doing something wrong?)

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So that's 998S aka Eric on the left, and Mrs 998S on the right. TB-Racing and TB Jr in the center. It was pretty cold, but at least the rain let up for most of the day.

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Here's the first QJ600GS in the wild in Shanghai, one of maybe a dozen that have been made so far and handed out to dealers around China in advance of a planned March launch.

This bike has been test-ridden by several dozen riders in Shanghai, and has battle scars to prove it.

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Yes, that's quite a chunk of the right side plastic that was sprung free when one overzealous test rider laid it down on Saturday. There was also some bad scarring on the right rear panel beneath the pillion seat. There were thick crash pegs on both sides of the engine, which you can see in wider shots, but these were unblemished so we're thinking they were installed AFTER Saturday's little getoff, or the damage surely would have been less.

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From this angle, you can see the left-side crash peg emerging from the trellis -- yes, what is it about this profusion of trellis frames going around? -- and you can also see something else odd about this bike: It's branded QJiang on one side, and Benelli on the other. Jekyll and Hyde?

Apart from the seemingly fragile plastics, the bike seemed to have a fairly decent build quality, though I found the footpegs and foot controls to be very thin and flimsy, at least compared to my Jialing JH600.

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So here's a closer look at the front end. I'm not sure about the copper color for the forks, which was not pleasing to my eye. I asked MaoMao, the tall guy in the blue down jacket who was organizing the test rides, whether this bike is actually even "in production" yet, and he said they were making small batches numbering in the tens or scores, no more than that. It's still early days, but low production runs like that do not engender high levels of confidence -- as we know from Jialing, which builds only as many as bikes in its monthly production runs as it receives orders in the previous month; five orders, five bikes, eight orders, eight bikes.