Owner's Experience - Comet 250. Review on Kinetic Comet 250

The post payment wait for the Comet was almost pre-natal, sweet with anticipation yet pregnant. It took me 3+ months a few e-mails and many phone calls before I finally got my Comet home delivered. Kinetic really had not got their delivery act together. The bike arrived in pristine shape and promptly took my breath away. It looks and is much bigger than a 250 and references to Dhoom are aplenty especially among kids everywhere in Pune. The riding experience albeit less than a 1000 kms thus far has been good. Handling is the best I've ever ridden and while India's first sports bike the Rajdoot Yamaha 350 is faster accelerating, the Comet's is way ahead of the Yamaha 350 in the handling and braking departments. Its sounds as good as the twin cylinder 350 and the few times I've opened it out to 10000 rpm, the normal growl becomes a nice howl. The front disc is not as sharp as I would have liked it and needs a hard pull when you need to shed digits quickly. The rear disc feels a lot better and I've ended up using the rear brakes more often than I usually do. An interesting experience was chancing upon the Poonawala Ferrari 360 Modena gassing up at Bund Garden and following the Ferrari up to East Street. Obviously the Comet was no match for the 360s straight-line speed or awesome exhaust note, but Pune's speed-breakers allowed me to play tag and easily keep close enough to show my son what a Ferrari is capable off. Two aspects mar my ownership experience and are yet to be sorted out by Kinetic Pavilion, the authorised dealer. They are a faulty front fork oil seal for which they have not been able to provide a replacement as yet and the engine skipping a beat at exactly 5500 rpm in every gear. The busted oil seal causes the fork oil to ooze out and it could potentially affect braking. The latter problem seems to be either faulty timing or carburetion and causes the engine to feel like its starving fuel between 5500 and 6000 rpm post which the revs climb normally all the way to the 11000 redline. The dealer at the first service reset the carb and advised using a fuel additive but neither action has solved the problem. Have referred this to Kinetic's Service Engineer and will post an update post my next visit to the dealer. Till then cheers to the fact that there is no better Indian ride than the Comet. Well unless Honda obliges with the CBR 600 F ....I don't dare ask for the RR.