Owner's Feedback on ST1300/STX1300 Pan European

People have sent me PM (private mails) and emails asking me questions about ST1300/STX1300 Pan European since nothing beats asking the owner versus reading bike magazine reviews.

The questions so far touched on the Pan's:
- Size
- Weight
- Handling
- Power
- Reliability


I will share with you some of the common concerns about the Pan. It would help to de-mystify the Pan, correct some myths and maybe add some of my personal bits of observation.

Reader beware. Rest of this article is rather technical and does not contain any pictures.
Go brew yourselve a nice cup of coffee and then start reading.


Size and Weight

Someone sent me this question:

"How tall are you?

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Hi endless, I have been reading yur blog for the past yeat and i must say i enjoyed it very much. Therefore i was rather surprised when i found out you have swapped your beloved "Frost" for the STX 1300. I was also an ex owner of a Fazer1000 before i loved its power, especially on the Malaysia's North South Highway. I was also thinking of getting an STX in the future but i worry the bike may be too heavy and tall for me. I am only about 1.7m and weigh less than 65kg. Do you mind telling me your height and also whether the STX is a shit to push around? Sorry for not asking in the forum but i very paiseh. Maybe yu can mention this little detail in your blog so that others may have the courage to try the STX."

A very good question. And my response was:

I am like you, but even smaller and thinner.
I am 1.7 m and I weigh a featherly 56kg!

The ST13, once on the move on it's own power, even at half-clutch first gear, is really amazingly agile. Go see the youtube.com ST1300 Police training videoes. If you close your eyes, you would feel like u r riding a Honda Super4.

Pushing the ST13 around when parking into and out of a lot needs a bit of getting used to from a Fazer. Yes, the ST13 initially feels solid and heavy. But it is all a matter of adjustment and getting used to it. Give yourself one month and you will have no trouble afterall.

The trick is really to keep the bike upright when pushing the bike around. Once the bike is upright, it's weight magically disappears and it is a doodle to push around. Second trick is to use your body weight and legs to assist you rather than use your arms.

So you see all the uncles, ah peks and ah gongs riding ST1100, if they can handle even the heavier ST1100, so can you handle the lighter ST1300!

Go Loois Motor and see Meng Tong the chief mechanic. He is even smaller than me. And he wheels my ST13 around like a scrambler in the workshop.



Next question:
How about when you are riding the ST1300? Does it feel heavy? Do you need to be tall to ride it? Do you need to be a big and strong fella like the ang mohs to ride it?

You don't need to be tall and strong to ride the ST1300.

The ST1300 comes with an adjustable seat that can go to three height positions, even at my height, I used the middle setting. At this setting, I half tip-toed with both feet or I can flat foot with one foot on the ground.


Once the bike starts moving, the ST1300 feels surprisingly nimble. I could do tighter U-turns on the ST1300 than on my Fazer1000. I could do one lane wide U-turns on the ST1300. BMWs, FJRs, sports bikes take that!



Does it take a lot of effort to make the ST1300 corner or lean over? Is the ST1300 very slow to lean over?

This is THE strength of the ST1300, to me. It is amazingly agile, nimble and flickable. It takes little effort to flick the ST1300 to its side.

I especially like the ST1300's riding position. The ST1300 has a modern sports bike upfront position, but with higher bars and broader foamier seat. You sit closer to the front wheel. So you have better feel and greater confidence of the bike. Therefore, the ST1300 has a short, but broad fuel tank. In contrast, you sit further back on the FJR and Fazer1000.

The ST1300's sitting position encourages you to adopt a MotoGP stance when turning agressively. Your head low over the brake-reservoir and half your bum sliding out.

When I first got the ST1300, I found myself doing some of my usual corners at +10kmh faster with little effort, than when going hard on my Fazer1000. This shows you how well the ST1300 can corner.

Perhaps, one slight disadvantage of the ST1300 is that it needs to lean over more, hence has lesser ground clearance compared to other lighter bikes.

Many touring bikes make the riders prefer to ride long straight roads. The ST1300 is one bike that makes you actually prefer to ride twisty roads than straight roads! This cornering-fun factor is definitely not found in ST1100. What a different animal the ST1300 is from its predecessor!

I would tell you one less commonly known trait of the ST1300. Honda designed the ST1300 so eager to corner that it sacrificed some straight-line stability at high speeds.

At high speeds say >180kmh, the ST1300 starts to feel a little nervous and you need to concentrate a bit on going straight. Just understand that the bike is designed to turn with the minimal effort. The problem is that at high speeds, the bike still wants to tip over. So you would find going straight and fast on a slower steering bike more relaxing, assuring and planted (FJR?). It is not anything wrong with the ST1300 (or FJR). It is just a double-edge sword thing.

This side effect can be made more pronounced if an unsuspecting Pan rider tries to ride at >200kmh with a fully raised windshield! The Pan is one of the few bike that has a windshield (at its highest position) that can deflect windblast completely above the rider's head, like the Goldwing. To do that, the Pan's windshield got to be really tall. BTW, the Pan's windshield has a greater adjustable range compared to FJR. Just see how tall the front fairing of the Pan, compared to FJR.




Brakes

I read many times in bike magazines that the bike editors dislike the ST1300's linked brakes and claiming they can stop better themselves if they handle the front and rear brakes manually themselves.

The ST1300's linked brakes mean that the front and rear brakes are actuated even when you squeeze only the front brakes. It is just that the bike moderate the brake distribution effort itself.

And if you know me, I am really picky on a bike's brake.
I believe in the saying that, "The quickest bike is the bike that can stop faster."
You can have all the horsepower in the world, but if your bikes can't stop quickly, you would be reluctant to appy the horsepower isn't it? I am sure the Suzuki Hayabusa owners understand what I mean


Picky as I am on a bike's brake, so it is a surprise that I am now a fan of the ST1300's linked brakes.

The linked brakes is really great and effective in halting the ST1300. Much more effective than you can do it yourself if you separate the front and rear brakes. More than once, I thank the linked brakes for stopping the ST1300 quickly without any drama. Yes, the feel is different from that of a sportsbike. But you can still feel the bike.

The linked brakes is really bringing the advantage of a car to a bike. In cars such as Evolution, WRX and F1 cars, you just need to stamp on one brake pedal and the car stops. You don't need to have two brake pedals. So why can't we have that on a bike?

Yes, we can. So you find it on Honda's ST1300, BlackBird and VFR.
Don't believe the bike journalists on this one.


Power

This is an interesting one. Because, this seems to be the one that most people use to decide between the Pan and the FJR.

Do you know that sometimes an engine can "feel" powerful yet it doesn't make you go faster?
In contrast, there are engines that don't "feel" fast, but you just get shocked at the high readings when you look down at the speedometer. The ST1300 is like that. I will explain in a moment.

The ST1300 has a V-4 engine layout. The commonly known advantage of a V-4 layout is lower CG compard to inline layout. This, coupled with Honda's mass centralisation design philosophy, sharp steering rake, a short wheelbase, little trail, make the ST1300 so eager to steer. The disadvantage of V-4 layout is higher cost of production => higher price tag.

Another lesser known thing is that I suspect that Honda designed the ST1300's 4 cylinder engine fire and feel like a twin.

Why would Honda make a 4-cylinder fire like a two-cylinder engine?

The rider can go faster on such a engine.

Have you ridden a twin before? It feels so unintimidating when you turn the throttle whether going straight or when exiting the corner. But on any 1,000cc inline-4 bike, the pull of the engine is so constant and so fierce, that psychologically, it makes the rider slower to apply the power of the engine. There is also real science behind it that explains why a two-cylinder engine can allow the tyre to grip the tarmac better than a 4-cylinder engine. But I don't fully get it so I can't explain that here. Anyhow, just know that the RCV V-5 fires like a twin! And I believe so does the ST1300.

Another characteristic of the ST1300's engine is that it is a flat-torque engine. There is horsepower and there is torque. You don't understand the difference, you just go and wiki yourself.

The ST1300's flat-torque engine delivers more or less constant torque throughout the rpm range. So the bike gets pulled along at the same rate on the same gear even as the rev goes up. This results in the rider "feeling" not much pull, and the bike doesn't feel fast.

The other effect of flat-torque engine is such engines are very willing and easy to rev. So the ST1300 is surprisingly likes to rev. You can easily make use of the full rpm range of the ST1300 (max hp at 8k rpm) and hence it's full 113 hp. I personally observed that for any road bike, 100 hp is all you need to go fast on the road.

Honda likes to designed engines with flat torque. This is why the CBR1000/CBR600 feel more friendly and less threatening than the non-flat torque engines of Kawasakis ZX-10/ ZX-6.

Non-flat torque engines have a lump or mountain shape in their torque curve. The Fazer1000 has such type of torque curve. Maybe the FJR too. As the rev climb, you start to climb up the torque curve. This is called "volumatric efficiency" meaning the bike starts to get more and more efficient. The rider starts to feel the "pull" of the bike.

The result of engines with a torque curve is that the rider has a greater sensation of the bike is going fast compared to flat torque engines. The engine thus make the bike feel more "sporty". The disadvantages is that this "greater pull" sensation requires the rider to be more daring and to have bigger balls in applying the throttle to go fast, as compared to the rider on a flat torque engine who doesn't get intimdated by such a sensation.


Given that the ST1300 has a flat-torque engine that mimicks a twin-engine, a windshield that is very good at deflecting windblast, shaft-driven meaning more weight and less responsiveness than a chain-driven engine, the net result is that riding on the ST1300, the rider seldom feels like he is going fast whether he is going straight or doing a corner until very high speeds (>180kmh).

This could be why the FJR is described to feel more sporty than the ST1300.

Note that so far, I used the phrase the rider feels. In reality, the ST1300 is going really very very fast. I get shocked at seeing how fast ST1300 rider rides on the road.

Therefore, I am also not surprised when the Bike Magazine described that the ST1300 rider actually goes faster than the FJR rider most of the time for the same rider input.

When I first got the ST1300, I find the speedometer registering 110-120kmh even though I really felt I was riding slower than on my Fazer1000 when it was doing 90kmh. So honestly, I was a bit disappointed when I first got the ST1300 because I couldn't feel it's sportiness. It is after I lowered the windshield by 5 cm (to let in more breeze) and after riding the bike more, that now I can appreciate the ST1300's sportiness. Contact me for the windshield-lowering brace if you are a Pan owner.



Gear Box

The Pan has 5 gears. The gearing makes the ST1300 accelerate well from 50kmh to 200kmh.
In this zone, it would not out accelerate modern sportsbike, but probably could dust or keep pace with most other bikes.

Some people wished the Pan have a higher 6th gear. I don't think so. I think it's gear ratios are fine. If I am asked to change something, maybe I would add a lower first gear to make it 6 gears. The Pan's first gear is rather tall. So it is not great at racing out of the gates from standstill. Honda might have intentionally not made the first gear short as tourers don't need such fast first gear acceleration and it would just add more effort to shift through the gears to get to the tallest gear, given the ST13's strong long-end torque.

The ST13's gearbox is easy and light to shift. The gears do not pop out and you don't miss gears. It is also easy to find neutral on the Pan.

I find the hydraulic clutch needs a bit of effort to depress though (like the BlackBird). I also suspect the Pan has a twin plate clutch design, perhaps to cope with the 1,300 cc torque.



Reliability

The Pan is really a very sophisticated bike. V-4 engine. Windshields that raise and lower at the press of a button. Computer readings that can read anything from outside temperature to on-the-fly fuel consumption to distance countdown to empty tank (I have a story on this). Counter-balancer shaft-driven and whatever bells and whistles.

It didn't help that for its first 3-4 years of production, there were recalls on Pan to fix some design issues. They were mostly small like heat shield, oil plug. But still.

I must say so far, my Pan has been most reliable. Fires up everytime no matter how I rev the tits out of it. And I have done the long trip to Thailand and back and it never crossed my mind throughout the trip that my Pan would give me any problems.

I believe its engine will be most reliable, just as Honda has designed and delivered a very reliable ST1100. But with more parts such as electric motors on the windshield, I would expect an very edged ST1300 would have parts that need replacement, nothing more due to usual wear-and-tear.


Parting Shots

Thanks for sending me questions as we help to share information with everyone who comes here to read about motorcycling. So keep the emails and PMS coming. Keep your questions, comments and even articles coming. You are most welcomed