Jawa unveiled the All Stars 42 Bobber at the Global Chess League in Bengaluru, and the coverage since has carried the same four things: the price, the five colour names, the chequered graphics, and the fact that Anand Mahindra did the unveiling. All of it true. All of it beside the point.
I have ridden a 42 Bobber, a long weekend of it, and I can tell you what this one does, because it does exactly the same thing. The 334cc single is untouched, 29.9 PS and 30 Nm, 177 kg on the kerb. It has a lovely lazy shove from about three thousand revs that makes the numbers read far, far too pessimistic, the single seat is honest for an hour and a liar after that, and the low bars put your wrists exactly where Bengaluru’s stop-start crawl will find them by the second hour.
Jawa’s paint, mind you, has always been eye-openingly good in the metal, and no press photograph has ever done it justice. A terrific thing to look at. A middling thing to sit on all day. Nothing in the All Stars changes either half of that, because nothing mechanical changed.
What actually changed is the bit nobody reported
Open Jawa’s own product page for the 42 Bobber. Every colourway on it now reads All Stars: Shadow Black, Silver Knight, Black Mirror, Jasper Red, Mystic Copper. There is no plain 42 Bobber left underneath. Go to the 42 FJ page and it is the same story, six colourways, all of them All Stars, the base bike gone. Which means this is not a special edition sitting alongside the range. It is the range, renamed, twice inside a week. Jawa calls the FJ version Strike One and this one Strike Two, which is a lovely way of saying nobody had to design anything.
The price depends on who you ask, and that is worth saying out loud. Jawa’s own website has the 42 Bobber opening at Rs 2,04,950 (about $2,300). The launch reports have it at Rs 2,08,942 and running to Rs 2,19,942. Both were live as I wrote this. Pick your source and quote it, but do not let anyone tell you there is a single number.
And now the part where I defend them
Because colour is a real reason to buy a motorcycle. Not a hygiene factor, not a tiebreaker. A reason. I have watched people walk past a mechanically superior bike to get to the one in the shade of copper they wanted, and they were not being silly, they were being honest about why any of us do this. That is allowed, no? Jawa builds handsome things and charges for them, and roughly fifteen thousand rupees separates the cheapest paint from the dearest. That is a fair trade if the copper one is the one that makes you grin at the parking lot every morning.
What I would not do is confuse it with news of a new motorcycle. Chequered graphics are not engineering. And the things owners actually complain about are still there waiting: rust that finds the accessories first, an ignition barrel that sticks and costs about Rs 3,000 to replace, a chain set gone by sixteen thousand kilometres, resale that nobody defends. Those are the sentences Jawa should be launching a fix for. Chances are the fix is duller than a chess tournament and sells nothing. It would still be the better announcement.
So buy the Mystic Copper because you want the Mystic Copper. Just know you are buying paint, and that Jawa has now made paint the only thing on the menu.
