GSX1400 Owners .org

Some of you may recall I had my 14 up for sale recently and after a fair bit of searching around I found a replacement bike I quite fancied in a local shop who were also willing to give me a reasonable price for my 14. I paid a deposit on my new toy with the plan to collect it the following weekend when I would ride down on the 14 and ride home on the Triumph Bonneville but all this went up in the air when the day after paying my deposit I had a phone call from the shop saying we have a problem as you're bikes been stolen!!!! At first I thought they meant the Triumph but they meant my 14 "It can't have been " I said "it's parked right under my kitchen window!" then they dropped the bombshell that when they ran an HPI check they got told it was stolen and never recovered in August 08!!!! This threw me completely as I'd owned the bike since new in 06 and I knew for a fact it had never been stolen, never been reported stolen, and never had any kind of insurance claim against it. I got onto HPI myself and sure enough they told me an insurance company had declared it to be a stolen write-off but they wouldn't give me any more details other than the records had been amended. I was bloody fuming at this point as I knew this was all wrong but HPI wouldn't help as I wasn't a client of theirs and they wouldn't tell me which insurance company had declared it stolen either as "they were not at liberty to disclose such information"  :angry:
The bike shop did offer to repay my deposit and asked if whoever I bought it from had mentioned it had been stolen when I said I had bought it new and from your shop, at this point he got quite sympathetic and said he would see if he could do anything. He called me again a few days later and said that he'd trawled back through the shop's records and not only found the paperwork from when I'd bought it but also discovered that at the time it was allegedly stolen it was in their workshop being serviced and a month later it was back in there again for a warranty claim so they got HPI to launch a full investigation. It seemed to take forever but eventually HPI informed the shop, not me, that an insurance company-they wouldn't say who-had reported a vehicle stolen and written off in August 2008 but had mistyped the VIN number by one digit making it the same as mine. At some point later someone else had noticed the anomoly and had changed all the other details to match the VIN number making it appear as if my bike was the stolen vehicle! After all this the shop did honour the original arrangement so I finally got to trade my 14 in for the Bonneville but I did notice the shop never put my 14 in their showroom so I don't know where it went.
During all this I didn't know what to do to make the records right and had a chat with someone I knew who until recently worked in the motor insurance industry and he said whatever you do do not ride the bike until it's sorted as your insurance company may claim I gave dishonest information by not declaring it as stolen as they will take HPI's information as being correct. I asked him how I could have been insuring the bike all these years without any insurance company picking up on this and what it seems to be is when you buy insurance they rarely check much at all until you make a claim then they dig into everything looking for a way out so it's pretty lucky I never had any incidents in the time I owned the 14!
Finally I would just like to add a thank you to Orwell Motorcycles of Ipswich to take the time to sort all this for me as they could easily have sold the Triumph on to someone else and HPI were just giving me a "computer says no" response to everything I asked!

You got me confused here. There were no GSX 1400 in 96. Do you mean another make/model?

Amended it now  ;) my ancient keyboard sometimes writes 9 when I hit 0!

Fark! That would do my head in Dave.
Glad you've got it sorted now.

What a nightmare...Glad you got it sorted in the end though :onya:

Great dealer there - should have kept the 14 though methinks :embarassed:

Was it an omen you should have kept it? glad all sorted  :smile2:

Glad your sorted!!

Jeebus, that would have had me dragging someone over the counter by the throat.
How's the Trumpet?

I'm definitely enjoying the Triumph although I do miss all the roll on power of the 14 - I couldn't have kept it though, since age and various old injuries have caught up with me the days I felt fit enough to ride it were getting fewer and farther between and the Triumph is way easier to handle. I have found that I can enjoy having less power too as so often I used to find that I felt like I was holding back with the 14 due to either slow traffic, road conditions or speed cameras, I'm spending alot more time with the throttle open on the Triumph and round the lanes it feels like I'm pushing the limits of both myself and the bike without travelling at "throw the licence away" speeds  :grin: