This nifty looking liquid cooled RS Sport is a 50cc machine with enough street cred to tempt a teenager away from the X-box and at £1999 on the road it’s not too pricey either.

With the Rieju you’re getting a Spanish built scooter with a Yamaha/Minarelli liquid cooled two stroke engine. That engine is a great little lump and has loads of tuning goodies available for it off the shelf should you want to find a little bit of extra speed and power. In restricted form the scooter will hit it’s legal 30mph limit but our test scooter wasn’t the fastest fifty I’ve ever ridden, especially from a standing start and it suffered when pulling away uphill but thankfully it is quite cheap and straightforward to unleash it’s hidden power (see separate derestriction feature). Rieju UK also assure me that the bikes going into dealers will be modified to give more bottom end power which is great news. Yamaha do tend to be over cautious when they restrict their 50cc engines, as I found out when testing the Aerox R a few months ago.

Factory custom

Aside from an engine with great hidden potential the RS is well equipped with 13” alloys, fitted with low profile Michelin Pilot Sport tyres, it’s also got wavy discs at both ends to improve braking performance and a multi function digital dash complete with trip, time, speed and battery condition readings, plus the usual warning lights. Lighting is very good on the Rieju, with dual projection halogen headlights and a trick looking ‘alien face’ front LED running light, which should help the scooter to stand out a bit on the road. The whole front end looks very modern and is set off well with the contrasting blue and white paintwork and race graphics. In my opinion the scooter looks even better in black but colour choice is quite a personal thing and Rieju have recently launched a new service which allows you to go on to their configurator on the website and personalise your new scooter before it even leaves the factory. You can choose from eight different base colours, add four kinds of graphics (or leave it plain), choose from three different seat colours, upgrade the rear shock, add naked bars if you like, or a large (unsightly) screen and swap them about instantly to perfect the look you’d like. Once you’re happy you can order your customised scooter for delivery to your local dealer within 15 days, how cool is that? Obviously it adds cost to the scooter (in much the same way it does if you order a new car and add changes to the spec) but it means you’ll get a much more individual machine and I expect more graphics options will be added before too long. To configure your RS Sport, or just to play about with it visit: www.riejumoto.com click on configurator and select English.

Protecting a scooter is always important, especially when it looks as nickable as the RS (even more so with your custom design) so Rieju have incorporated a steel security loop for you to attach a chain through and of course the scooter also has a steering lock as standard, my advice to any new riders is to always lock your scooter up properly to an immovable object, having a security loop makes that job a whole lot easier. One thing I’m not too keen on is an unnecessary separate indicator cancel button, it’s located just above the indicator switch but means you have to move your hand a bit to cancel the indicators, not a big deal but it’s one more thing to remember, although you do soon get used to it.

In bog standard trim the scooter was a bit sluggish but it becomes a much more useful beast once the natural power is liberated. It instantly sounds better after the decongestion has been dealt with; it revs cleaner and will see a genuine and much safer (in my opinion) 45mph, which enables you to hold a good position on the road rather than hugging the pavement for your own safety. The brakes are fantastic on the Rieju, as are the tyres and suspension and they’re perfectly able to cope with anything you can throw at them so there are no concerns over the running gear or equipment. At less than two grand the RS Sport is good value for money and with the engine being sorted before it leaves your Rieju dealer it should perform much better than our test bike did when it arrived. There’s also an RS Sport NKD available complete with motocross style straight handlebars which gives the scooter a more aggressive look.