The High Cost of Nostalgia

If it didn't sometimes affect my life, I guess the prices asked for many of the classics could be dismissed as merely amusing. I'm not objecting to the fact that devices like Vincent Vee twins are now so valuable that very few of them are actually used in anger on the road - although their rarity and cost does mean that no-one's willing to let me borrow one to bring you my usual brand of delinquent road test.

Which is probably one of the few ways anyone's likely to find out the truth about those old beasts. The way most classic tests are written is as bad as those sixties style road tests that so helped the British industry to self destruct — so scared were the magazines of offending the manufacturers and losing advertising in those days that they didn't even dream of reporting on the reality of some awful machine. The impetus of these old tests, mixed with a bit of patriotism and fuelled by the present profoundly dishonest classic scene has seen all sorts of awful devices promoted as both useful and classic machines.

As I have as little as possible to do with this scene (having neither the money to waste nor the time to keep on checking bolts, tappets and anything not welded firmly to the frame), I could normally ignore it with impunity, with the occasional bout of hysterical laughter thrown in, just to keep a sense of perspective.

Unfortunately, the same mixture of blind faith and disturbing ignorance are beginning to make their insidious way into the used Jap camp. Of course, the forces are nowhere near as strong — I mean it's relatively easy to become absorbed by some old brute of a British bike, given that they often look so right and it's one of the few ways left of waving the Union Jack. When magazine writers, and even the occasional punter, begin to shout the joys of certain old Jap bikes, I can only wonder if we live in the same world and ride the same bikes.

I appreciate Jap bikes because they have engines that can often be neglected and thrashed without any ill effects, and because some of these engines in certain rolling stock can produce great thrills on the road at a cost that doesn't burn huge holes in my bank account. If the price of these bikes were to rise to the heights of the British stuff, then I would rapidly lose interest.

A lot of the old Jap bikes are really terrible devices that do not even have reliable engines to mitigate against flimsy frames, soggy suspension and unreliable brakes. If anything goes wrong with them, spares are often either horrendously expensive or difficult to find.

Regulars readers will be finding this difficult to follow, as most of the space in this magazine has been devoted to used Jap bikes, promoting them, for most of the time, as a cheap way of getting some fast but inexpensive kicks on these increasingly dreary roads. But that's just the point — it's still possible to pick up a used Jap bike for a couple of hundred quid that has a reliable engine and enough power to make life interesting.

Let too many idiots write too many articles that fail to mention the downside of so many Jap bikes and we end up with a market that starts to inflate prices and fails to differentiate between the good and the bad. While there are a few old Japs that do merit classic status - either because they started a new trend or performed so well that they can't be ignored, there's a whole genre that has only one point in life to provide excitlng transport on the minimum of money.

It's bad enough having highly dubious Wop bikes costing the earth, if the same process begins to afflict the Japs, we may as well give up and start figuring how to get enough cash together to abscond to Bangkok.

Luckily, in this one sense only, the UK is still deep in recession; the market forces that could wreck the used bike scene for the private punter can't really get going. It'll be amusing to watch the established magazines as they try to latch onto the used Jap market, because their editorial policies are more or less determined by the amount of advertising they can generate, so their coverage is going to be slight until the prices of used bikes become high enough for the dealers to afford the adverts, but the market won't respond until the coverage increases...

Bill Fowler