At one point during the press introduction for the 2016 Yamaha FJR1300, talk turned to how time flies. And how, as we get older, events that seem like just a few years ago in fact transpired a decade or more beforehand.

That’s sort of how it is with the FJR1300. It seems like “just the other day” overseas markets got the swoopy new sport-tourer while we had to wait. The FJR debuted in ’01 as an ’02 model but didn’t arrive on these shores until ’03. In ’04 it was upgraded with ABS, and the ’06 model year saw new styling plus the introduction of the AE auto-clutch version. There was another restyle along with the addition of throttle-by-wire in ’13, and then in ’14 came the ES version with electronically adjustable suspension.