That's exactly how the boys at ZigWheels felt when they decided to spend a morning riding around on a trio of the latest "macho" 150cc bikes, says Priyadarshan Bawikar

It's the perfect way to spend a Sunday morning - motorcycles, mates and miles of twisty mountain roads. But this wasn't a Sunday morning. In fact it wasn’t even the weekend. What it was, was a Wednesday, smack dab in the middle of the week. The three bikes before us were the perfect opportunity to play truant for half a day and go gallivanting on the hills that surround Pune. And the bikes in question were none other than the original 'muscle' bike, the Hero Honda Hunk, the internationally styled Yamaha FZ-S and the latest upstart in this 'naked' segment, the Honda CB Unicorn would also serve another purpose of judging which of these muscle-bound motorbikes would be the top trump of their class. Who says work can't be fun as well?

Recent times have seen a dichotomy in the 150cc market with one bunch of motorcycles taking the distinctive 'commuter' approach; with conventional styling and a preference for comfort over sharp handling and dynamics, giving them a wider appeal in general. Judging what bike is best among these is a simple matter of choosing practicality over everything else. On the other hand you have bikes like the ones the three of us were taking out for a ride; more aggressively styled, with great dynamics and oodles of grunt to top it off too. Now picking a winner amongst these is a far more difficult task with nearly every aspect of the bike needing careful consideration.

So after an early morning coffee on the highway and we were off, Shivaji, our head designer on the Hunk, me on my favourite, the FZ-S and Manoj, our other designer and resident body builder, on the Dazzler. A stop over before hitting the twisty sections followed a quick blast down the arrow straight highways and nary a word was exchanged between the three of us since we had met up in the morning. But with the bikes parked next to the road, under the "Ghat Start" sign, the sun peeking gleefully through a gaggle of dark clouds and highlighting every curve on these three beauties, all three of us could almost exactly anticipate what happened next.