Let's Ride (7 page)

More reasonable dual sports usually range in size from 400 cc to 650 cc, and these have more than enough power to keep up with traffic. They are light, maneuverable, and generally inexpensive to buy, operate, and insure. Plus they’re relatively simple so you can do most of the maintenance yourself if you have any mechanical experience at all; and if you do need to hire someone to work on them for you, the costs will be a lot less than for other types of bikes. Most of them have little or no bodywork that needs to be removed to change oil and tires or adjust valves, and because they only have one cylinder, they only have one set of valves to adjust. Since they have spoked wheels, most of them still use tube-type tires, making the repair of a flat tire a relatively inexpensive proposition, too.

If you have any interest in driving off the beaten path, if you don’t mind not having the fastest and fanciest motorcycle around, and, most important, if your legs are long enough to safely ride a dual sport, then this type of bike might be right for you.

Supermotards

Supermotard bikes were developed for supermoto racing. This is a type of racing that is usually done in parking lots and can encompass sections of track that are both paved and dirt. The bikes themselves are usually created by taking dirt bikes and fitting them with street suspension and street tires. They look like dirt bikes with road-racing tires mounted on them.

Supermotards can be a lot of fun for an experienced rider, but only for short bursts of hooligan-type behavior. If you like to do wheelies and stoppies or big, smoky tire slides, few bikes do these things better than a supermotard.

But if you’re looking for a practical all-around motorcycle, you’d do well to look at something other than supermotard bikes, because they are basically dirt bikes for the street, which means they’re extremely uncomfortable to ride for any distance at all, mostly because they have dirt-bike-style seats. Add to this the fact that supermotards are generally expensive, costing as much or more than many full-sized motorcycles, and you can see why this type of bike is less than ideal for a beginner.

Cruisers

You’ll most likely end up with a “cruiser,” as the magazines call them. This is an odd name for a poorly defined style of motorcycle. The cruiser came into existence as a response to the custom bobbers and choppers we built in the 1950s and 1960s.

Up until roughly 1970 Harley only built two main types of big bikes: the XL Sportster and the FL Electra Glide. The Sportster was a hot rod back then, a lightweight high-performance bike. Remember, this was before Kawasaki started the Japanese horsepower wars with its 900-cc Z1 and right around the time Honda released its 750 four cylinder. Harley’s other main line consisted of the big FL Electra Glide models. These were enormous 74-cubic-inch (1200-cc) motorcycles loaded down with touring accessories. Most people considered these old men’s motorcycles; we called them “garbage wagons” because of all the touring equipment on them.

Today I ride a full-dress motorcycle—you think differently when you are seventy than you did when you were eighteen—but we were young then. Because we young guys generally didn’t want to ride around on the same types of bikes that our fathers and grandfathers rode, a lot of us customized our motorcycles. Some of us built full-on choppers and bobbers, but others just rearranged the basic material we already had available. Some guys rode stock Sportsters, but most of us preferred the smoother-running and more-reliable FL platform. Still, a lot of people wanted the cut-down look of the Sportster, so they got rid of the big, heavy Electra Glide fork with its chrome-plated steel covers and mounted the sleek, light fork from the Sportster.

The people running Harley-Davidson noticed what riders were doing to the machines they built and decided to cash in on it by offering a bike from the factory that resembled the machines people were building at home. In 1971 the Motor Company grafted a Sportster fork on an Electra Glide frame and created the Super Glide, an entirely new kind of motorcycle. I got my first Super Glide in 1972, and got my first Low Rider in 1977, after I got out of prison. It was great to have a bike that looked good right from the factory, but that didn’t stop us from modifying them even more. Most of my modifications during these years were to improve a bike’s performance. For example, I’d take the hydraulic disc brakes from Japanese bikes and mount them on a Harley.

The Super Glide caused a stir, and it wasn’t long before other companies like Norton, Triumph, and then the Japanese companies—Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki, and Suzuki—started offering bikes with similar style. People didn’t know what to call this new type of bike, exactly. For a long time the magazines called them “customs,” and later they started identifying them as “cruisers,” which is the term most of the trade press still uses today. Some European magazines call them “soft choppers,” which sounds even more foolish than “cruisers,” so I guess we shouldn’t complain.

For the most part, cruisers make good motorcycles for beginners. They are relatively light, compared with full-boat touring bikes. At the same time they are full-sized motorcycles with plenty of room for a rider and a passenger. Though they can sometimes put your arms and legs in awkward positions, cruisers are generally comfortable enough for the long haul, especially when fitted with good saddles and windshields. Plus most of them have tractable engines that help newer riders develop smooth throttle control.

Cruisers usually cost more than dual sports, but for most normal-sized people who do the vast majority of their riding on paved roads, they are more practical. You can get cruisers as small as 250 cc, but the smallest you should probably consider for a first bike is Kawasaki’s 500-cc Vulcan. If you’re a big person, or if you have some riding experience, you might consider getting something as large as the 100-cubic-inch (1634-cc) Victory Vegas. Some of the Japanese companies make cruisers that range up to 2000 cc, and Triumph makes one that displaces 2300 cc, but even a lot of experienced riders find bikes that displace more than 1700 cc to 1800 cc clumsy to ride.

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.