It may well be that new motorcycle sales are finally, at last, on an upward trend. If so, an awful lot of punters are going to be in for a nasty shock. OK, OK, there are some thoroughly splendid race replicas out there if all you want to do is speed along at 150mph all day long - as long as you have enough dosh to pay for the fuel, oil, tyres, pads, chains and servicing; and have some kind of direct line to the chief constable in your area in order to avoid massive fines, if not imprisonment.
Unless you don't give a shit any more... just out drag them on some 170mph bolide, get far enough away to melt the tyres on the brakes and get the hell out of there before the helicopters or road blocks get you. Trouble is, most replicas have mirrors that go so blurred it’s like looking at yourself after spewing up ten pints of lager and an Alsatian curry; the cops are on you before you know what's happened.
But apart from the replicas most of the new stuff out there is flawed in basic design, poorly developed, ridiculously heavy and so overpriced that I can only assume there is a massive conspiracy between motorcycle manufacturers. And, yet, some suited git who would go into a mental trauma if someone ripped off his tie, would proudly point to booming sales, more punters than bikes and other sundry lies and gross deceptions (check out MCN’s display ads for huge discounts on many models if you think the whole market is booming).
Get away from the sheer kicks and macho-ness of the race replica scene; things become pretty dire and dismal. Commuters are as nasty and unsafe as they were in the sixties (perhaps more so because they are restricted on the back of the learner regulations) and any semblance of a sophisticated ride is dissipated by the rigours of ten thousand miles of abuse. None of these single cylinder cycles offer an easy upgrade to 25 horses (which is what most strokers in this capacity knock out in more liberal markets), say by changing the throttle cable. Crap that isn’t even that cheap to run, economy often much worse than the original sixties designs in which they have their roots; toadd insult to injury the cost in the UK represents two to three times what they retail for in the third world, often superior versions. Easy money for someone.
Commuters don’t matter much to serious motorcyclists, except that 25hp, 250lb strokers happen to be quite a lot of fun in their own right, as long as they have reasonable suspension and geometry. Scooters have at least evolved into more stylish contraptions but stupidly (incredulously) don’t even go to the bother of incorporating hand protection and have somewhat constipated performance and shockingly poor economy... handling on wet roads, on small, fat tyres (which if they grip reasonably last for less than 10000 miles (what fucking world are these people living in?) is often frightening. Anything half decent costs at least two grand.
You have to laugh at these companies - the whole lot of the idiots, not just the Japanese - they haven't got a clue what they are doing, just churning out mediocre dross and getting away with it. Partly because the mainstream press doesn’t want to blow all the juicy advertising revenue and partly because the punters, desperate for some way to get through cities jam-packed with excessive numbers of autos, will take whatever's on offer.
The glossy press is almost unreadable, these days, but then I seem to be totally out of it - the UMG in stately decline whilst these buggers (oops, that has an all too literal meaning as one UMG contributor found out when he tried for a job in gloss city) are in boom time. Unfortunately, my madness doesn't extend to naming names - just yet - as some of these companies have huge funds and nasty lawyers... just yet, note!
The nonsense in the commuter section’s mad enough, but the mainstream motorcycle game is so bad it makes you want to give up in disgust. Ride a CBR900 back to back against a CB750K1, and, for sure, progress has been massive, two completely different worlds - every single aspect of the newer Honda evolving almost beyond recognition. The cleverness of their development engineers turning a pig ear’s of a design (the only thing the CB750 ever had going for it was relative smoothness and hence reliability) into a sublime device.
Race replicas are viable substitutes for hard drugs and should be available on the NHS. Much like heroin addiction, you either get used to the madness of the accelerated feelings or you end up dead! Everything happens so fast that a moment's inattention will have you up the back end of some doddery cager or chucked right off the road in a blur of tearing metal and breaking limbs. You really need to snort up some coke just to get the reflexes in the right frame of reference (only in third world countries, children, where it’s possible to bribe your way out of trouble).
Suzuki, Yamaha and Kawasaki have all done the same trick with their maximum replicas. But ask any of these factories to take the dictum of minimum mass and apply it to mainstream motorcycles and they will just laugh, perhaps hysterically, at the thought of wasting such effort on bikes where the profits are in hundreds rather than thousands. Missing entirely the point that done properly sales would outstrip the pathetic number of replicas sold.
In odd moments of fantasy, I reckon I could do a lot better but then no-one’s likely to bung me the dosh... I’m not sure if it’s fortunate or unfortunate that I don't number amongst my acquaintances any drug dealers who need to launder dosh, unlike some in the publishing game (again, that temptation to name names)!
It is possible to make a big twin completely free of vibration without balancers in such a way that it fits in perfectly with the ideal motorcycle layout (light, low and narrow), and the more I look at this design, the more obscenely irrelevant it makes the almost obligatory implementation of the straight four. Just to make it clear, if you have a vibration free big twin you can make it large and light, and use the motor as the main frame member.
Anyway, I ain't telling you any more about that as it’s part of my retirement plan. Despite all of the above, the basic exhilaration of motorcycling remains, on anything from a 125cc learner to some 1200 behemoth... but it could all be so much better, cheaper and easier. I'm getting to that stage where I wonder if it’s worth the effort any more!
Bill Fowler
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