Motorcycling remains one of the few ways of getting high, without becoming compulsively physically or mentally addictive, that can fit into the everyday scheme of things. Many devices from a mere 100cc up can provide an interesting turn of speed and lots of kicks, even if it’s in the form of a twisting, sliding chassis; the brittle rubber blues and fading brake rattles.
Compared with the simplicity and utility of motorcycling, most other forms of excitement require both an excess of money and effort: As well as being the only way of moving through major cities, which are practically clogged to a standstill with cars, with speed, economy and panache, the ability to arrive at work. with a mad. grin and mutinous. mind is so rare and shocking amidst a media sedated society that it's a wonder millions rather than thousands of bikes aren’t sold every year. And no surprise at all that they’ve almost been legislated and priced out of existence.
Of course, the sad, pathetic way that motorcycles have evolved helps not one bit. All too often, the resemblance to a pushbike with an engine added on lingers, with the same old exposure. to the elements and marginal fidelity to the road surface. Ever since Honda introduced, in the mid sixties, the electric start, oil tight, reliable four stroke engine, nothing much has changed other than a few details.
Service intervals are much extended with the sad exception of oil changes; a refinement no more onerous than separating gearbox from engine oil. Valve clearances, once bedded in, on many models don’t need adjusting for tens of thousands of miles. Automatic cam chain tensioners and electronic ignition just leaves carbs to balance. Just a matter of time until the latter are replaced with fuel injection or the Japanese finally figure out the cost effectiveness of the single carb.
A little more effort would eliminate the messy and costly need to have anything to do with dealers or their mechanics, make buying a bike, as a high tech purchase, no more traumatising than passing the time of day, or trading technical terms, with the salesmen in any number of High Street emporium. Given some of the unreliable, third world manufactured, electrical goods that some high profile Japanese companies palm off on unsuspecting customers (OK, I was suckered), one hopes that some other manufacturers take this enlightened approach.
Also, a raising of the stakes in power to weight ratios, taken to almost sublime heights in the CBR900, and the like. Ruined, of course, by the dim implementation of the race replica creed, the glory of the race track turning a brilliant concept as uncomfortable as a night in a Brazilian prison and as twitchy as a GSX550 on worn out tyres.
Plus a passing understanding of chassis. dynamics - that secret art that’s finally revealed itself after years of race track experience and the odd Japanese engineer who can see past the reverence for his computer screen, Even so, the handling finesse was bought at the price of shockingly short-lived and exorbitantly expensive tyres.
Running a race replica on cheap rubber's as safe as using a Russian condom in a Chaing Mai brothel, And, a whole gush of styling elements, from alloy frames to full plastic enclosures, that've prettified motorcycling whilst at the same time making it less practical. This enticing gloss under the showroom lights, far from the reality of a British winter, has turned many a head and blinded many an eye to their manifold faults.
Alloy frames don’t take well to being straightened after an accident and unless the alloy’s very expensive and exotic has to be constructed in such thick sections that it doesn’t work out significantly lighter than steel. Many an old hack, after 15 years of dutiful service, can be found with cast alloy wheels cracking up, as the effects of age and fatigue take their toll how well these alloy frames will last remains to be seen, although it’s probably beyond the imagination of most Japanese that anyone would want to ride a fifteen year old bike!
The plastic’s so shaped that the only way it’s effective is with a race replica riding position that ruins spines and makes the bike impractical in heavy traffic or at speeds below the legal limits. Whilst in an improbable racing crouch some of the wind and rain’s thrown around the rider, a lot of the time the elements are focused even more heavily upon the poor old pilot, not to mention the pillion who's often whiplashed into mumbling submission.
Only BMW have shown any willingness to experiment with designs that give both protection and style. The clue to such abandon is to keep the handlebars very narrow in width, the lack of leverage that results requiring a low centre of gravity and as little mass as possible. There’s obviously a lot of convergence in recent designs with these requirements, which will in the end turn out some useful motorcycles. Not that the nineties, or even the new millennium, calls for merely some clever detail work on existing designs.
It’s pretty obvious that all this race replica nonsense is another vein of TV inspired fantasy, a glossy collage produced by images of speed and skill that are all very well as entertainment for the almost brain dead, chained by apathy and exhaustion to their favourite armchair, but more than likely to lead to hospitalisation if indulged on the open highway by the vast majority of bikers.
The outrageous skills of the top racers can be admired from afar, but the reality of their craft means nothing to anyone other than themselves. An exploration of personal abilities that has become the mantra of the nineties, and which everyone has to explore within the context of their own particular skills.
I'm all for kicks from an excess of power and torque but, as ever, see no real reason why I should suffer for my pleasures, at least in the context of riding a motorcycle in 1998; it’s not as if the accursed plastic does much for aerodynamic efficiency and, as much a surprise as it might be to many, I really don't need the glitz of a replica to add to my image - I need a hell of a lot more than that.
After a while, after losing a lot of dosh along the way in ridiculous expenses, all this bullshit becomes a bit too excessive, rather too much of a rip-off by large corporations and their various lackeys who see motorcycling as just another facet of their huge commercial empires, having as much tolerance of the spirit of the motorcycle experience as a Yakuza gangster has for nonpayment of the huge bribes most Japanese companies have to pay to stay in business.
It may or may not amuse readers to learn that every new, and indeed used (as it keeps the business flowing), Japanese bike contains within its price a proportion that ends up in the pockets of Yippon gangsters. Despite, or maybe because, of its success Japanese society remains well and truly fucked up!
The collective way, a sort dreadful combination of all the worst elements of communism and capitalism, that Japanese society works must surely be at heart of its sourness. The strictness of the regime whereby all is well as long as the surface remains intact, a direct echo of selling their motorcycles as glossy products that however efficient and exciting somehow lack soul and spirit; an absence by its unplanned nature that actually kept people turning over their bikes at an incredible rate, given the unlikely cost, until some viable European alternatives began to turn up on the market. Will Japan drown in its own peculiar ignorance as Europe rises again? Who knows or cares!
Bill Fowler
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