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  If you’re just starting out, you’re better off getting a lighter, more manageable bike in the 500-cc to 1300-cc range. You can find a lot of nice cruiser-type motorcycles in this range, including Triumph’s 865-cc America and Harley’s Sportster line.

  Touring Bikes

  Unless you’re an experienced rider, you’ll want to stay away from the type of bike I ride, and have ridden for the past twenty-five-plus years: a touring bike. As I noted earlier, touring bikes—especially Harley-Davidsons—are often called baggers because one of their defining characteristics is the presence of saddlebags. On most touring bikes these are panniers mounted as a pair, one on each side of the rear wheel. Most often these will be made of some sort of plastic or fiberglass, but a lot of cruiser-based touring bikes have saddlebags made of leather or vinyl. The other features you’ll usually find on touring bikes are fairings or windshields, comfortable saddles, and often some type of tail trunk. Most of the high-end touring bikes have all sorts of electronic gadgets, like stereos, CB radios, cruise control, and even heated seats and handgrips.

  I have heated grips and a heated seat on my Victory Vision, but the feature I like best is the six-gallon gas tank, which lets me ride 200 to 250 miles without stopping to refuel. This lets me pile on lots of miles each day.

  Telling you not to start out with a touring bike may sound like do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do type of advice, but touring bikes are extremely large motorcycles and a rider should have at least a few years under his or her belt before taking on one of these beasts. Victory claims a dry weight of 804 pounds for my Vision.

  A lot of touring bikes are as heavy as or even heavier than my Vision. Honda’s Gold Wing weighs 925 pounds wet, Harley’s Electra Glide Ultra Classic weighs 890 pounds wet, and Kawasaki’s Vulcan 2000 Classic weights 884 pounds wet. If you aren’t an experienced rider, keeping these big bikes under control will require so much work on your part that you’ll never develop proper riding skills. Once you’ve been riding awhile, a touring bike will likely be the most practical motorcycle you can buy; but earn your chops as a rider and develop good riding skills before jumping into one.

  Just because your ride isn’t classified as a touring bike doesn’t mean you can’t travel distances on your motorcycle. Any bike can be used for touring. In fact, when set up with windshields, saddlebags, and comfortable saddles, middleweight cruisers make great touring bikes. You won’t be able to bring everything you own with you on a trip with your middleweight cruiser, but most people bring far too much junk with them when they travel, anyway (having lots of luggage capacity on a bike just encourages people to bring too much stuff). You should be able to get everything you need for any trip, no matter how long, into a couple of saddlebags and maybe a tank bag and a tailpack.

  Sport-Tourers

  Another category of touring bike is the sport-tourer. Like the cruiser category, this one is a little tough to define. Sometimes things get grouped together not because they are anything in particular, but because they are something that others are not. That’s about as good a description of a sport-tourer as you’ll find.

  This type of bike can range from enormous machines like Honda’s ST1300, which weighs 730 pounds wet, to a small motorcycle like the MZ Skorpion Traveller, a German bike built in the 1990s and early 2000s that is claimed to weigh in at 416 pounds dry. The only common characteristic among sport-tourers is usually just a set of hard saddlebags; other than that, they can come in just about any size and engine configuration imaginable.

  The basic idea behind a sport-touring bike is that it combines the handling and performance of a sport bike with the comfort and convenience of a touring bike. BMW created the mold for this type of motorcycle. Until the late 1990s when it got into the business of building heavyweight touring bikes, just about every motorcycle the German company ever built could be considered a sport-touring bike. Even the company’s GS-series bikes, which were classified as dual sports, were really more sport-touring type motorcycles.

  Harley-Davidson was one of the first companies besides BMW to build a motorcycle that fit the German sport-touring mold. In 1983 Harley introduced the FXRT. In a lot of ways, this was an advanced motorcycle, at least for Harley. It had a rubber-mounted engine, five-speed transmission, sporty wind-tunnel-designed fairing, and a decent pair of hard saddlebags. Unfortunately it still had the old cast-iron Shovelhead engine. Most of the bugs had been worked out of the Shovelhead by that time, but it still used technology that the rest of the world had abandoned twenty years earlier.

  In 1984 the FXRT used an Evolution motor—no more Shovelhead. When I saw my first Evo-powered FXRT, I got rid of the Shovelhead I was riding at the time and bought the FXRT. It might not have been the best motorcycle made, but at the time I considered it the best Harley. I rode FXRTs until 2000, when I switched to Road Kings.

  Later in the 1980s Kawasaki introduced the first real Japanese sport-tourer, the Concours, and not long after Honda introduced its idea of a sport-tourer, the ST1100. These were good motorcycles; if they had been built by an American company, I might have bought one myself. I remember when I saw my first ST1100 in the early 1990s. I loved the look of that sleek, black machine. (I still love the look of the current 1300-cc version.)

  Then other European companies like Triumph, Ducati, Moto Guzzi, and Aprilia started building sport-tourers. Today pretty much every motorcycle company still in business builds some kind of sport-tourer. Some might even argue that my Vision is a sport-tourer, though it’s a little too big to qualify in my opinion. Even many of the bikes that are small enough to qualify as sport-tourers are too big for a newer rider to manage. They tend to be tall, with a lot of bodywork and luggage carried up high. This increases cornering clearance, allowing them to lean way over in fast corners, but it also makes them top-heavy and thus clumsy to manage at slower speeds. Cruisers carry their weight lower to the ground, making them feel less like they are about to tip over at low speeds. Because of this, a cruiser that weighs more than a sport-tourer can actually feel lighter.

  Another disadvantage of sport-tourers, at least for newer riders, is that they are covered with expensive bodywork that can break if the bike tips over. The sad fact is that when you are learning to ride, you will most likely have a minor tip over or two. I can’t remember my first tip over, but I’ve had a few. I’d like to say I haven’t tipped my current bike, but shit happens. Even though my Vision has a lot of bodywork, it’s well designed, with stop plates underneath that are the only parts that come into contact with the ground and hold the bike at a forty-five-degree angle in the event of a low-speed tip over. Most bikes with plastic bodywork hit the ground plastic first, which can get expensive. It seems the designers at Victory understand that motorcycles inevitably fall over. If you ride long enough, you will fall down; hopefully it will only happen when you are going slowly.

  Even with all the plastic bodywork, a midsized sport-tourer can make a good choice for a newer rider, especially a newer rider who’s fairly tall—just make sure you carry good insurance. If that’s the type of bike you like, you’ll find that most midsized sport-tourers are practical, comfortable, and versatile motorcycles.

  Sport Bikes

  Back in the 1950s and 1960s Americans weren’t the only people modifying their motorcycles; Europeans were doing the same thing, only they had a different aim in mind when they started customizing their bikes. Compared with America’s long stretches of straight, wide-open highways, Europe is much more condensed, with narrow, twisting streets, crowded high-speed freeways, and winding mountain passes. Americans need bikes that are stable in a crosswind on an open road, so we tend to go for motorcycles that are long and low; Europeans have to dodge fast-moving traffic on streets that often are older than the oldest American city.

  The different needs of American riders and European riders go back so far that you can see them reflected in the types of saddles used on horses. American-style saddles put the rider in a roomy, stretched-out, upright position; Eu
ropean-style saddles had the rider leaning forward in a racer-type crouch, his or her legs tucked up behind.

  When the Europeans, particularly the Brits, started modifying their motorcycles, instead of building long, low, stretched-out choppers, they copied European horse riding: low-mounted handlebars, footpegs set high and back, and cut-down saddles. This put the rider into a forward-leaning racer-type riding position. The Brits called this kind of custom a “café racer,” because their riders often raced from one café to another.

  This style of motorcycle was slow to catch on in the United States. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s most European and Japanese manufacturers equipped bikes sold in Europe with low handlebars and rearset footpegs, whereas bikes shipped to the U.S. market featured lower, forward-mounted footpegs and higher handlebars, which were often called “western-style” bars, because they had a sort of cowboylike look to them.

  BMW brought the R90S, a café racer with a small fairing—more of a headlight shroud, since it didn’t do much to protect the rider from the elements—to the U.S. market in 1973. Harley followed suit with the XLCR Sportster (“XL” is Harley’s designation for the Sportster engine, and “CR” stood for “café racer”) in 1977, but its model wasn’t very successful and was the last sport-type motorcycle to wear the Harley brand until the recently introduced XR1200. Other than an oddball European bike imported into the country in extremely small quantities, café racers were thinly represented in the United States in the 1970s.

  That was about to change, thanks in large part to the development of superbike racing. By the mid-1970s road-racing motorcycles had become so specialized that they literally no longer shared a single part with their road-going counterparts. At that time most road bikes were powered by large-displacement four-stroke engines while road-racing bikes were powered almost exclusively by purpose-built two-stroke mid-displacement engines.

  Historically motorcycle racing had been something that an average motorcyclist could do. Back in the early days most clubs formed around racing; early clubs like the Boozefighters focused as much on racing as they did on raising hell. Remember, this was a time when you’d ride one motorcycle to work every day, then race that same bike on the weekend. But by the 1970s a person who wanted to race competitively had to buy a purpose-built race bike that cost half a year’s salary, if you had a good job. Racing had changed from something that anyone with a motorcycle could do into an elite activity.

  At just about the time that two strokes completely took over the top levels of racing, an alternative form of racing based on production bikes started to gain popularity. This happened when the Japanese introduced their big, powerful four-cylinder machines. Magazines called these “superbikes,” so the production class in which these motorcycles raced became known as the “superbike” class.

  Production-based classes reinvigorated the sport of motorcycle racing at a grassroots level. In the early days of superbike racing, anyone with $2,500 could walk into one of the thousands of Kawasaki or Suzuki shops that could be found in any small town and buy a production bike capable of being built into a competitive racer. Within a few years thousands of people were competing in club races all across the United States. Due to the popularity of this type of racing, manufacturers began offering sportier and sportier motorcycles. Racers liked these bikes because it was less work (and less expense) to convert them into race bikes, but a lot of nonracers bought them, too, just because they liked the style of the bikes.

  At first these bikes differed little from the standard bikes of the day. They had lower handlebars, maybe a small café-racer fairing, or at least a set of footpegs moved back a few inches from the standard position. But as superbike racing grew in popularity, the manufacturers got into the sport with factory-supported teams, which meant they started making production bikes with specifications that approached those of full-on race bikes. This is how we got the first factory crotch rockets, the Honda Interceptors, Kawasaki Ninjas, Yamaha FZRs, and Suzuki GSX-Rs.

  These bikes became more and more capable, until they reached a point where it was virtually impossible (and completely insane) for riders to come anywhere near reaching their limits on public roads. Today’s crotch rockets are more potent than the pure racing bikes of a generation ago.

  High-performance sport bikes are poor choices for beginners. Any of the 600-cc class sport bikes qualifies as one of the highest-performance machines you can buy of any type; probably only Formula 1 race cars generate more power per cubic inch than the engines in 600-cc sport bikes. But as mentioned in the last chapter, sport bikes don’t generate much torque. Because of this they are difficult for a newer rider to ride smoothly in traffic.

  In fact, I don’t recommend anyone use modern sport bikes for daily transportation on public roads. I dislike telling people what they should and shouldn’t ride, and if you want to ride a crotch rocket, you have the freedom to do so—sport bikes are popular and a lot of people use them for everyday transportation without any problems. But that said, I believe this type of motorcycle is best left to the racetrack. It’s great fun to get out on a track and put your knees down on the pavement in high-speed corners, but out on the street that type of riding will just get you killed, and probably sooner rather than later. And when you’re riding on this type of bike, you’ll be tempted to ride it like you stole it every time you throw your leg over the saddle.

  Even if you have the self-restraint needed to keep from exploring your motorcycle’s limits on public roads, sport bikes are excruciatingly uncomfortable to ride. The racer crouch is ideal when you’re on a track, throwing yourself from side to side, putting your knee down in the corners, and accelerating hard in the straights, but for the rest of the time, riding laid out over the gas tank puts a lot of strain on your body.

  Sport bikes are especially bad in stop-and-go traffic, where you have to crane your neck back so far to see what’s going on around you that your head is likely to stick in that position. Unless you’re extremely young (and I mean young, like so young your fontanel has barely hardened over), if you put serious miles on a sport bike, you’d better keep a chiropractor on your payroll.

  Standards

  In 1980 most of the motorcycles you could buy were still basic do-it-all type machines, much like the BSA Gold Star had been thirty years earlier. Most companies built a basic type of motorcycle and only modified it slightly for different uses. To make a cruiser, a company would take its basic bike, add a pull-back handlebar and a stepped saddle (the magazines called them “buckhorn” bars and “king-queen” saddles back then), and give it a coat of black paint. The same bike might get a square headlight and a square plastic rear fender cover, maybe a fork brace or an oil cooler, and that would be sold as the sport-bike version.

  The only companies making touring bikes at that time were Harley-Davidson and BMW. The Japanese manufacturers began to offer touring and racing accessories, but these amounted to tinkering around at the margins; the basic motorcycle underneath remained more or less the same. But everything changed during the 1980s. Cruisers evolved into carbon copies of Harley-Davidson motorcycles, complete with V-twin engines; touring bikes sprouted barn-door-sized fairing and enough luggage capacity to carry the entire belongings of a small third-world village; and sport bikes developed full racing fairings, complete with uncomfortable racer positions. At the beginning of the decade you could count the number of bikes made with any sort of fairing on one hand; by the end of the decade the only bikes that didn’t have plastic fairings were the Harley-style cruisers.

  As the 1990s rolled around, it seemed like no one was building an ordinary, all-around motorcycle anymore. The manufacturers noticed this and introduced what the motorcycle press called a “new” type of motorcycle: the standard. In reality, this was just the rebirth of the regular old all-around motorcycle. Like “sport-tourer,” “standard” is a bit of a garbage category. The only thing that most standards have in common is the lack of a fairing and luggage. Standards range from t
iny beginner bikes like the Suzuki TU250 to BMW’s wild K1300R, which is a type of standard often called a “street fighter” (street fighters are standards in that they have no bodywork but have the guts of high-performance sport bikes).

  Though some of the high-performance street fighters might be a handful for newer riders to control, generally speaking, standards make good choices for first bikes. They tend to have comfortable riding positions and tractable engines, and like most cruisers, they don’t have expensive bodywork to break when you inevitably drop your bike.

  WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW

  Don’t worry about what everyone else thinks; pick the bike you like.

  Custom choppers and antique bikes might look cool, but they aren’t practical to use as transportation.

  The less bodywork you have on a bike, the less it costs if you tip over, which is an important consideration for newer riders.

  © by Gene Anthony

  Chapter Three

  The Fundamentals of Riding

  You may think the next logical step would be to buy a bike. After all, how can you learn to ride if you don’t have a bike? For most of the time I’ve been riding, the answer was that you couldn’t learn to ride unless you had a bike, but over the past twenty or so years that’s changed, thanks to the Motorcycle Safety Foundation. Originally formed in 1973, the MSF started out as a trade organization that promoted motorcycle manufacturers as much as it furthered safety. In some ways it still is that; its current sponsors are BMW, Ducati, Harley-Davidson, Honda, Kawasaki, KTM, Piaggio/Vespa, Suzuki, Triumph, Victory, and Yamaha, and ultimately the MSF serves those companies.

  But early on the major bike companies figured out that one of the best ways the MSF could serve them was by helping to keep as many of their customers alive as possible. You’d be hard-pressed to find an organization that has done more to promote motorcycle safety than the MSF, not just in the past thirty-some years since it was founded, but ever. Back in the early years of the MSF, motorcycle fatalities were on the rise, and they had been for the previous decade. In 1980 motorcycle-related fatalities in the United States peaked at 5,144 deaths. That same year the MSF sponsored the first International Motorcycle Safety Conference. This marked the beginning of serious research into the causes of motorcycle-related deaths. The following year the government published Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures, which is usually referred to as the “Hurt Report,” in honor of its primary author Harry Hurt.