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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Photo by Andrew Wheeler

Sometimes, I actually think of something and am cheered up by the novelty of it. Back when Valentino Rossi was first on Bridgestones, there was a big hoopla about how, because of their big, heavy, stiff casings, these tires were extra-stable and needed to be heavily loaded by weight transfer to get the best out of them. And there was Colin Edwards, saying how amazed he was at how the tires just kept gripping the more load he’d put on them.

None of this makes sense because, in the past, the way things have worked is that a company makes its tire carcass softer so it then spreads out a bigger footprint, which engineers can then exploit by using softer tread rubber and so on. For example, each time Dunlop made its car-racing tire carcass softer—the first time was when it reduced the number of plies in the tire by switching from cotton to nylon—it got a bigger contact patch because the softer carcass could more easily spread out to make a big footprint.

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Photo by Tim White

After the MotoGP post-race press conference at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, third-place-finisher Ben Spies stuck around to answer a few more questions. Actually, Spies posed the first question.

“Am I mad about the start?”

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Photos by Chris Cantle

“I am very sad. We hope that this weekend [would] confirm the performance of the last two races in Laguna and Brno—because this morning was much better with the bike.

“But, unfortunately, this afternoon, I had a crash at the beginning where I damaged the good bike and, especially, two new tires. So, I have to go with other bike, which was a little bit different. Also, I have to use the harder tire, and I don’t feel confident. I lose the feeling with the bike, and at the end, we are very much behind.

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