IF you’re a parent then you probably understand the difficulty of selecting a name for your offspring. Unless you take the George Foreman option and call all your offspring George, that is.
You’ll probably want something that stands out a little, but at the same time you have to think carefully to minimise the risk of playground taunts (like the person who legendarily named their daughter Chlamydia because they thought it sounded pretty…)
Then there’s the complication of what happens when you combine the seemingly perfect Christian name with your existing surname. It’s all very well to call your kid Hazel, unless you happen to be Mr and Mrs Nutt…
Now consider the difficulty that any manufacturer has when it comes to branding its range of products. As well as the problems of finding a fitting – and not embarrassing – name, it’s got to be unique, as unlike kids, products get trademarked.
Given those issues it’s easy enough to see why so many firms end up reverting to alpha-numeric codes for their bikes. Once you’ve established that ‘YZF’ isn’t offensive or embarrassing when read out in every language around the globe, why not stick to it and just add another number for each different model?
But then again, sometimes it’s the name that turns the bike into a legend… Here are our picks for the best 10 out there. Let us know if we’ve missed any other blinders.