The RX4

I first rode the first prototype RX4 in June 2015, which is really quite a ways back if you think about it.  I was in Chongqing to discuss things we were doing on the RX3 and the new RC3 model, a sports bike based on the RX3 engine.  The RC3 bike was stunning, but it suffered from a bad case of “me, too” (Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha all had credible 300cc sports bikes here in the US) and the RC3 just didn’t sell well when it reached our shores.  The RX3 was going great guns, though, and there was a cry for a similar bike with more beans.

Enter the RX4.

That first one was wild.  I remember standing out in the heat and humidity with the Zongshen folks snapping photos of the RC3 when a Zongshen engineer rode into our midst on what appeared to be a hacked-up RX3, smartly executing a stoppee that lofted the rear wheel 3 feet in the air, and coming to rest right in front of us.  This guy can ride, I thought.  In my younger days I had done stoppees like that, but not by design and they didn’t end the same way.

The bike was rough. It was an RX3, but somehow the Zongsters had shoehorned a prototype 450cc motor into the frame.  The engine was made of castings and machinings, and it looked (and sounded) very rough.  Telling me that they hadn’t worked out the mapping, my hosts asked if I wanted to ride the prototype.   Is a bear Catholic?  Does the Pope poop in the woods?  Hell, yeah, I wanted to ride it.   I couldn’t talk about the bike in the CSC blog at the time, and that was probably a good thing.  It didn’t run well, and the handling was, well, let me put it this way:  Imagine you’re drunk as a skunk and you’re wearing stiletto heels, and you’ve got to walk across a rocky stream bed through swiftly-flowing water.  In my checkered past, I’ve done two of those three things, and I don’t need to try the stiletto heels thing to imagine what the combination would be like because I rode that first prototype RX4.  It was that bad, and I told the Zong folks what I thought.  They smiled politely.  They knew.

A year or two later I was in Chongqing again, and I rode an RX4 that was closer to what the production bike would be.  It was a much more refined machine.  Heavier than an RX3, most definitely.   Faster?   I really couldn’t tell.  It was raining and I was on the Zongshen test track, which is a tightly wound affair with topes and no straights tucked away on the Chongqing manufacturing campus.   It felt a lot better than that first prototype, but I really couldn’t let ‘er rip because there wasn’t enough room.  I also saw a clay mockup of the RX3S (the 380cc twin) in the Zongshen R&D center, a bike I just couldn’t understand. Again, no photos allowed, but it made no matter to me because the RX3S was a solution to a marketing problem that didn’t exist.

That brings us to today and the production configuration RX4 I am picking up later this afternoon.  Or maybe tomorrow.  It depends on when Joey has it ready.  It’s going to be interesting.  I’m flattered that CSC wants my take on the bike, and that they want me to write about it with no preconditions on what I can and cannot say.

Like I always say, folks:  Stay tuned.