We’re all motorcyclists, right?

I’ve been riding the Cycle World long-term-test 2010 Can-Am Spyder RT-S for almost 18 months, and a couple of things about it have become clear. First, it’s still thought to be very cool by many people. And second, a lot of motorcyclists apparently think it’s some kind of affront to motorcycling—a slap in the face of “real” motorcyclists. One of those guys had his young daughter yell out the window of his Honda on a local Northern California road, “My daddy wants to know if those are your training wheels!” Ha-ha, yuk-yuk.

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Now and then, I wonder about the high-tech future that is said to be upon us. Any minute, I’ll be able to have a routine outpatient injection of nanobots that will enthusiastically nibble away any arteriosclerotic plaque I may have, leaving me with an athlete’s blood pressure. They won’t make any mistakes at all, such as accidentally eating away my adrenal glands or my recollections of Intermediate Algebra. Super capacitors or hyper batteries will shortly be invented by brilliant marketing guys working in one of those modest double-overhead-door units in an industrial park, so gasoline will become as quaint as buggy whips. Autonomous vehicles will seamlessly take over from the accident-prone, traffic-jamming, human-guided kind. To commute to work, we’ll just go sit in the car (which has no steering wheel or other controls), sipping coffee and reading the paper, as a vast computer network integrates our transportation requests into routes, speeds and lanes. We won’t need driving licenses, and speeding will be impossible. I can even doze and my car will let me know that I have arrived by “dinging” like the clothes washer or microwave do. Because I may in the interim have forgotten where I was going, the destination will appear on a screen along with a happy face, urging me to “have a great day.” As I take the elevator to my tasteful corner office on the 40th floor, my car will route itself to a high-density underground auto-storage facility.

It might not be quite like that because the scheduled breakthroughs that the futurists predict actually come at their own speed or not at all. And some of the fabulous new technologies might be very expensive—not for everyone; maybe only for presidents, big-time CEOs and the Sultan of Brunei. So, I sometimes imagine a world in which some but not all of the science-fiction occurs.

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In 1963, when I was learning to ride my new 80cc Yamaha YG-1, I discovered the value of metal bits that bent instead of broke whenever I managed to screw up and drop the bike again, usually in a rock-strewn streambed or sandy wash. I grew fond of that little rotary-valve two-stroke engine, which always restarted easily after I untangled the bike and myself from whatever mess I’d gotten us into. And I grew even more fond of the simple and rugged construction of the cycle parts as I bent back the brake pedal or the clutch lever after a low-side someplace.

You’d think, reasonably enough, that the take-away message would have been the most basic from Motorcycle 101—“Don’t crash.” But, in fact, the one I took most to heart was its corollary: “When—not if—you do crash, make sure you’ve got the tools to repair the bike and get going again.” Said tools being not just the onboard toolkit but the knowledge and skill to use it.

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Photo by Mark Wernham

The 2012 MotoGP season began on Tuesday with the first post-Valencia test sessions. Honda, Yamaha and Ducati were there with 1000cc prototypes, and Randy de Puniet and Stefan Bradl rode Suzuki and Honda 800s. Several of the new “CRT” bikes—prototype chassis powered by production-based 1000cc engines—also took part (CRT stands for “Claiming Rule Team,” a clumsy name we hope will soon be changed).

Next year won’t really be racing as we know it, because these 25-percent-bigger, 1000cc prototypes will be limited to the same 21 liters of fuel that compelled 800s to run lean in order to finish races. As has been the case the past two years, six prototype engines will be all that a rider gets for the 18-race series (this requires roughly a 1200-mile engine-life guarantee). CRTs are, by contrast, allowed 24 liters of fuel and 12 engines per rider.

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Photo by Mark Wernham

Josh Hayes finished a spectacular seventh in his MotoGP debut at the season-ending Spanish Grand Prix. The 36-year-old American completed the 30-lap race just half a minute behind winner Casey Stoner and second-place Ben Spies. Stoner’s Repsol Honda teammate, Andrea Dovizioso, rounded out the podium.

A replacement for Tech 3 Yamaha regular Colin Edwards, injured two weeks ago at the Malaysian GP, Hayes showed steady progress throughout the weekend. He even topped the timing sheets in Sunday morning warm-up.

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Photo by Mark Wernham

Newly crowned 2011 MotoGP World Champion Casey Stoner stormed to his 12th pole position of the 18-race season today at the Comunitat Valenciana Ricardo Tormo Circuit near Valencia, Spain, equaling the premier-class record set by five-time 500cc World Champion Mick Doohan in 1997. At the other end of the grid, 4.181 seconds back in 16th position, two-time AMA Pro American SuperBike Champion Josh Hayes got his first taste of an 800cc Grand Prix prototype fitted with Brembo carbon-carbon front brakes and Bridgestone slicks.

“I’m not happy about P16,” admitted Hayes. “The team has reassured me that I’m doing better than they expected. They expected me to be 3 seconds slower than Katsuyuki Nakasuga [Yamaha test rider and stand-in for injured Jorge Lorenzo this weekend], not within a tenth of a second of him. That’s great, but I don’t like being last.”

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Photo by Mark Wernham

Two-time AMA Pro American SuperBike Champion Josh Hayes made his MotoGP debut in practice today at the Comunitat Valenciana Ricardo Tormo Circuit near Valencia, Spain. The 36-year-old Mississippi native posted the 15th- and 10th-quickest lap times—2.5 seconds slower than the top riders—in the two timed sessions, both of which were run in wet conditions, the second more so than the first. Newly crowned MotoGP World Champion Casey Stoner recorded the quickest time of the day, a 1:45.513. His Repsol Honda teammate, Dani Pedrosa, was second. Ducati’s Valentino Rossi rounded out the top three.

When I spoke with Hayes, he was watching a tennis tournament on television in the Tech 3 Yamaha hospitality. Hayes is an avid tennis player and a fan of the sport. “I wish I could play,” he said. “That might take my mind off things. I’ve been a wreck all day. I’ve never been more nervous in my entire life.”

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Two-time AMA Pro American SuperBike Champion Josh Hayes had mixed emotions after learning that he’d been selected to replace injured Colin Edwards on the Tech 3 Yamaha YZR-M1 for the final MotoGP race of the season this weekend in Valencia, Spain.

For weeks, Hayes had known that he would test Edwards’ Yamaha on Tuesday, November 8, two days after the season-ending Spanish round. He was looking forward to it. According to Yamaha, the ride was a reward for Hayes’ back-to-back AMA titles. Moreover, it would be a real test, not just a few hot laps, with multiple sets of series-spec Bridgestone slicks at Hayes’ disposal. In addition, his wife, Melissa, who races a Yamaha YZF-R6 in the Daytona SportBike class, was told she would also be given an opportunity to swing a leather-clad leg over Edwards’ bike.

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Allan Girdler (86d) about to put Dennis Kanegae (51E) a lap down. When asked about this devastating blow to his racing career, Kanegae stated, tongue firmly in cheek, “I don’t know where Allan found this new speed. He has this unshakable persistence to be consistent on any track surface. My hat’s off to him.” Photo by Janice Blunt

Never in my life have I found it more difficult to fake modesty.

When my friendly rival, Jeff Evans Sr., stood up to accept his second-place trophy, he pointed to me in the stands at Perris Raceway and said, “Allan took off so fast I thought he’d been shot.”

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Photo by Mark Wernham

Reactions were varied to the cancellation of Sunday’s Malaysian Grand Prix. The riders knew immediately that Marco Simoncelli’s condition was grave; some even changed out of their leathers and into street clothes shortly after returning to the garages. Most of the record 67,112 spectators ringing the 3.447-mile Sepang International Circuit, however, were apparently unaware of the critical nature of the second-lap accident.

According to eyewitnesses, some fans were actually angry. They’d paid a premium for their tickets and felt shortchanged. They threw bottles of water and trash onto the racetrack, and in the accompany photo, track marshals can clearly be seen running for cover. By the time Simoncelli had been pronounced dead, most of the crowd had gone home.

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Since July, 2010, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin has evidently made a point of being seen with Russian biker buddies. Nicknamed “Abaddon” (one meaning is “destroyer” in Hebrew) when he was inducted into a biker club by the “high council of Russian bikers movements,” Putin publicly rides a Harley-Davidson Lehman Trike with his fellow club members in the “Night Wolves.” He rides helmetless, at least for the photo-ops.

This year, at the opening of a motorcycle show in the Ukraine, according to the website RiaNovosti, Putin said of motorcycles that, “Bike is the most democratic transport vehicle. Bike is the most-daring, challenging as it gives its owner the tempting feeling of freedom, that is why one can say without any exaggeration, bike is a symbol of freedom.”

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Periodically, I stumble across a statistic that bowls me over, changes the way I think and feel. Earlier this week, I sat over lunch, looking at a recent issue of Diesel Facts, a publication of the German MAN company, which makes diesel engines.

The statistic was in an article about 40,000-horsepower MAN two-stroke marine engines being specified for giant new 400,000-ton bulk carrier ships. The sentence that got me said that 19 such ships “will transport iron ore from South American mines to the Chinese steelworks that currently take 60 percent of all iron ore mined globally.”

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Suspension engineer Jim Lindemann has died after many years of successfully fighting brain cancer. Jim was for 25 years a familiar face on the AMA roadracing circuit and could sometimes be seen with a wire loop around his neck, onto which he had threaded the washer stack of a suspension unit he was servicing at the moment. It kept everything in sequence!

Like the roll of duct tape often kept handy on the wrists of mechanics on the starting grid, that wire loop also proclaimed his profession. Jim helped a great many riders over the years and not only by his knowledge of suspension. He always seemed pleasantly taken by surprise by life, and that optimistic outlook was contagious. Racers need the company of optimists.

We will miss Jim’s presence.

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Long before the Can-Am Spyder three-wheeler showed up in the United States, three-wheeled vehicles of all sorts had been a staple of automobility in Asia and India. So it’s not surprising that in 2011, Chinese-made three-wheeled scooters such as the 300cc Roadrunner, identified as made by “Dong Fang,” suddenly appeared online for sale outside China, specifically in North America.

Sold by distributors directly to retail customers, a whole lineup of trikes in various formats suggests that somebody in China sees a much bigger market for three-wheeled scooter-ish gizmos than do, presumably, the product planners of Japan’s Big Four. Of course, Honda was typically years ahead of everyone else with the Gyro three-wheeler, but it was the Piaggio MP3 scooters that seemed to raise consumer awareness of alternatives to two-wheeled motorcycles and scooters.

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Go ahead, look at the picture first. My bet is, you won’t be able to guess what it is, or why it’s shown here, until you read the blog, a clear case of 1000 words giving value to one photo.

How so?

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