Currently, this question has been applied to many kinds of racing as a way to justify removing the use of engineering to make racing machines faster.

Why not apply it to riders, as well? Differences in riders tend to make racing one-sided, and it is not always the popular riders up there on the podium. Quite often, riders with the concentration to win races have little left to give to spectators, despite terms in their contracts requiring so many minutes of autograph signing and so many appearances in press briefings. Frequently, the best-loved of riders have not been those with the most championships. Rather, the hugely popular ones have been those who obviously, grandly, gamble everything in every corner and fall too frequently to win championships.

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In 1925, Georg Hoffmann, a technician, patented a rolling bearing employing long, slender rollers—what in the U.S. has come to be called a “needle bearing.”

It got that name in the most direct way possible: Early producers of such bearings, such as the Torrington Company in Torrington, Connecticut, and Durkopp in Germany, were originally makers of needles for sewing machines. Like bearing rollers, such needles must be strong, hard and precise.

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Being informed you have pancreatic cancer is pretty much a death sentence, right? Well, don’t tell Chris Calaprice. This former U.S. Army Ranger has been undergoing chemotherapy for pancreatic cancer for seven years now, a disease he was diagnosed with in 2003 at the ripe old age of 36.

An avid motorcycle enthusiast, Chris took his passion and a Victory Vision on the road three months and 7000 miles ago with the goal of riding a total of 42,000 miles—one mile for each person in the U.S. who’ll be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer this year. His doctor, oncologist to the stars Dr. William Isacoff, travels from Los Angeles every eight weeks to administer Chris’s chemo treatments throughout the course of his grueling tour through all 50 states. (Yup, you read that right—ride, stop, get chemo, get back on the horse and ride some more. Kinda makes you feel like a slacker, doesn’t it?)

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es, I knew my new-to-me 2000 R1 Craigslist naked bike was losing a little air from its balding rear tire at the rate of a few pounds a day, but I’d only had it a few days. So I thought I could make it to the Hansen Dam vintage ride and back easy. I even shot some SLIME into it, which I was assured (by the SLIME bottle) is just the thing to temporarily seal up leaks, nail holes, etc. By the time we got to Pacoima, though, the rear of my beautiful new 10-year-old bike was covered in the green goo, and things were going flat in a hurry.

God may watch over drunks and idiots, but He also takes the form of curious types who hang around mainly to see what ridiculous thing will happen next. My pal Brad was prepared, as usual, with a plug kit, and shoved one right into the nail hole from which the SLIME was abandoning its post. Perfect, now all we need to do is fill with air—which is when the valve stem snapped clean off. In the billions of tires I have inflated over the eons, I have never seen that happen… Some days we are just not meant to ride. Instead, the R1 and I rode home in friend-of-a-friend Chuck Johnson’s pickup and got a lesson in local mountaineering, which is something I am going to do one of these days. Sure I am. And I fed the eternal flame of those around me who are repulsed and amused by my morally and mechanically haphazard ways.

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It’s easy to tell which books in my collection are most frequently referred to: They’re the really second-hand-looking ones. One of the tattiest-looking is Motorcycle Engineering, by P.E. Irving (designer of Vincents). The specific motorcycle models described therein date to the 1960s, but the principles described are as solid as physics.

The next pillar is Harry Ricardo’s The High-Speed Internal Combustion Engine, recently returned to print by popular demand. This is the clearest treatment of the subject in English, and it presents only the minimum of math. Why? Ricardo was an experimentalist like most of us. For the overall history of how internal combustion came to be, I like Internal Fire, by Lyle Cummins (yes, son of Clessie Cummins, who gave his name to Cummins Diesel Co.). If you are curious about how internal combustion evolved out of steam technology, here’s your meat.

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Paris-Madrid, 1903, marked the end of an era, as well as the end of Marcel Renault in this ditch. The French government stepped in and stopped the race at Bordeaux, and the cars were shipped home by train.

It interests me that electronic rider aids were at first greeted by cries that they were “impure” and detracted from “the true fight” of rider against rider. But now that so many of these critics have personally felt their own skills magnified in test rides of the new electronic production bikes, most have fallen silent.

This is not the first time for this cycle of technology change, traditionalist complaint, followed by mute acceptance.

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