The Motomethod Story from Zenga Bros on Vimeo.

I love the idea behind this, but it will require teachers with superhuman calm and love-of-fellow-man to make it work.

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This question came in for KC via Facebook:

Can you take a look at this and tell me what you think? Not sure how the port cutout above the ring pack would work out, but it’s interesting none the less.

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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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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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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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Note to younger riders from an old rider: Sure, have as much fun in the sun as you can, but if you have Northern European ancestry, be aware that too much skin exposed to sun for too long can kill you. Not right away, but much later in life. Skin cancer is no fun at all. I speak from sad experience. 

When I was a kid (1940s and ’50s), I spent as much time in the sun as I could. My folks encouraged it, being outdoorsy types themselves, and motorcyclists, to boot. So, in the summer, depending on where we might be living (my dad was an Air Force pilot, so we moved a lot), I’d be outside as much as possible, usually getting sunburns instead of tans, thanks to my English and Scottish heritage. I had light blond hair, green eyes and skin blems aplenty. 

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Just what Robert Frost had in mind with the road not taken, I don’t know, but my puzzle begins years ago, just after CBS bought Cycle World.

CBS founder Bill Paley asked CW founder Joe Parkhurst, “Why do people ride motorcycles?” and Joe said, “It’s fun.”

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Claudio Castiglioni lost his long battle against cancer on the morning of August 17 at the age of 64.

Well aware of his health problems, Castiglioni had named his son, Giovanni, president of MV Agusta upon final closure of its association with Harley-Davidson and the return of MV Agusta under full control of the Castiglioni family. He kept for himself the title of honorary president and had remained very active in the company until last spring, when his health sharply declined and he flew to a clinic in the U.S. for what was regarded as very advanced chemotherapy. Though I always received reassuring messages about Castiglioni’s recovery after the treatment, I never had a chance to meet with him once he returned to Varese.

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It’s a literal pain in the butt, the wallet.  Necessary to modern life, because it hauls around who we are, how much we have and what the government has licensed us to do. When it’s all packed into a wallet, our cash and cards can add up to an inch or more of pure pain.  More importantly to motorcyclists, when parked in a back pocket of our pants, the damned thing can all too easily just slip out silently and disappear onto the road. Hence, that signature behavior common to all street riders of the male persuasion who persist in not parking their wallets in their jackets or shirts: checking the rear pocket to make sure the wallet is still on board.

So long as we have to haul our drivers’ licenses, cash and credit cards around with us, the challenge becomes finding ways to minimize the problems presented by the wallet. Some riders—cruiser types and especially H-D cruiser types—solve the theft-and-fallout problem of the wallet with the “biker’s wallet,” secured by a chain to the belt. Some people split up the cash and cards and put the money in one front pocket and the cards in another, secured by a rubber band, a box clip, a card case or some other means. Others move into specialty wallets designed for a particular garment—the inner breast pocket of a suit coat or sport coat, say, or a waist bag’s purpose-built cards-’n’-cash section.

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2012 Morgan 3 W Bespoke. Photo by Dennis Glavis

Morgan cars and three-wheelers used to be called Moggies by the blokes I knew in the car and motorcycle racing world of Britain in the late 1960s. They were generally considered to be vehicles of choice for people who wanted to be self-consciously different. Like motorcycles, though, three-wheelers had been used traditionally in Britain for transportation by those unable to afford a car.

The recently unveiled 2012 Morgan 3 W, currently slated to have a $44,000 price tag in Malvern Link, England, is obviously intended for those who can afford a car—as well as a vehicle which, in the U.S., will be considered by state motor-vehicle agencies as a special-category motorcycle, not a car. Meaning that in all but a few states (such as California), any new three-wheel driver will need to get a motorcycle-operator’s license with a three-wheeler restriction, and will also have to wear helmets in jurisdictions with mandatory helmet laws. So, we’ll soon be seeing that most curious of vehicles: a three-wheeled cyclecar steered by steering wheel but driven by someone wearing a helmet.

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Photo by Jeff Allen

Kevin Cameron is a friend and colleague, so this rant will begin with a total agreement: Honda’s air-cooled Singles are the best class of motorcycle in history.

This is firsthand fact. My shed houses a 1975 XR75, a 1989 XR250 and a 1999 XR100, owned for 15, 22 and 10 years, respectively, and I’ve never had to lay a wrench on any of them, not once. Like a Chevy V-Eight, the only reason an air-cooled Honda Single stops is because it’s out of gas.

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Imagine a little piece titled “Affording Your New Four-Stroke Motocross Bike.” It would cover such topics as being born a Saudi prince or maybe a yachtsman, techniques for quickly acquiring large amounts of other people’s money, such as fraud, bank robbery, etc., and non-violent financing techniques of the kind used for years by Team Obsolete’s Robert Iannucci, who has said he never spent a dime of his own money on racing.

 It would also include a cheerful explanation of how we got into this mess: “Back in the beginning, the idea of four-stroke MX machines sounded hot to everyone, because at that time, our ideas about four-stroke MXers had been conditioned by Honda’s many super-durable XLs—the bikes we bought for our kids and kept up at the lake, which now, 25 years later, are still starting and running like trains every summer without so much as an oil change.

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