HERE’S TO NEW GENERATION OF BIKERS
The kids are returning to motorcycling’s roots, singing a song of simple style and spartan performance, writes David Booth.
It’s a page right out of BMW’s social media playbook. Take one cool car — oops, bike — add a couple of semi-famous actors, create some tension, throw in a few plot twists, load it up on YouTube and consider your Bimmer — oops, Ducati — socially marketed.
As with BMW’s now famous mini-films, Ducati’s The Getaway is a familiar story. Gorgeous guy (David Hardcastle, stuntman extraordinaire) rides a cool car — oops, bike. Hot chick (Imogen Lehtonen, also known as Imogenocide, jeweller, model and sometimes actress whose credits include AMC’s Ride with Norman Reedus) admires said cool car — oops … (Enough, Dave. We get it’s a bike already – Ed.), and then eludes guy. Guy then jumps on cool bike, and — well, what do you expect considering it’s a guy, a girl and a cool bike — chases girl. Oh, The Getaway, being thoroughly #MeToo modern, does have said girl borrowing guy’s bike for a moment and robbing a bank with it, but essentially, it’s still the same old story of guy, girl and cool car. Oops, bike.
This is what’s called “positioning ” and is to Millennials, Gen Xers and Hipsters what Bullitt, the Mustang GT 390 and Steve McQueen are to Boomers. Be it accidental (Bullitt/Mustang/ Steve McQueen) or deliberate (pretty much everything about social media, no matter how supposedly unscripted), the end game remains the same: the creation of an icon so striking, so dramatic, that the victim, once bitten, can never, ever shake their loyalty to that product.
Ask any red-blooded gearhead between the ages of 45 and 65 what the best car chase scene ever filmed is and you can be pretty damned sure it’s going to be Bullitt. The Mustang has been pretty much living off the notoriety ever since.
That is what Ducati is after with its Scrambler, now that the whole custom/chopper/1950s bob-job fixation is dead. Or, more specifically, is dying as its Boomer adherents pass their sell-by date. The kids are in charge and big Milwaukee twins don’t seem to interest them. Indeed, they don’t want anything to do with our — as in me, the aging Boomer writing this — bikes. Where Boomers have done to bikes what they’ve done to cars — turn them into gaudy tributes to excess — the kids are returning to motorcycling ’s roots, the song they sing being stylistic simplicity and spartan performance.
It’s a refrain Ducati chief executive Claudio Domenicali knows well.
To Boomers, Ducati is all MotoGP and rip-roaring Panigales. To our bearded offspring, though, the first model that pops off their tongue is Scrambler. Since it was introduced in January 2015, Ducati has sold more than 46,000 of the little retro rod-cum-street scrambler, almost a quarter of its North American sales these past three years.
More important, says Domenicali, is “who we’re selling these Scramblers to.” Not only have 75 per cent of those 46,000 or so Scrambler buyers been new to Ducati, 21 per cent of them were completely new to motorcycling. Another 18 per cent are Rubbies — rich urban bikers — returning to the sport after a prolonged absence. Think about that for a second: Nearly 40 per cent of Ducati’s customers for its most popular model are essentially new to the sport. No history (at least, recent) of biking. No brand loyalty. More importantly, they have paltry interest strafing apexes, grinding foot pegs or touring the Grand Canyon with hard cases loaded to the gunwales.
What they do want is style and individuality, what Domenicali calls “approachable” customization, the antithesis, it would seem, to the outrageous and largely useless modifications common to the mainstream custom crowd. And if approachable means simplified in Domenicali’s design language, then Ducati has certainly played that violin well. The 1100 Scrambler — which I tested this week — may have the latest cornering ABS and computerized Inertial Measurement Unit, but it looks for all the world like a recreation of the first Scrambler that invaded North America in 1962.
The odd thing is that this latest trend has its roots in the very same demographic that spurred the chopper craze: broke kids looking for a cheap motorcycle to customize. Thus did the early Millennials try to turn things like Honda CB450s and Kawasaki KZ440 LTDs into café racers, their prime attraction simply that Boomers hated them, making them cheap as borscht. Ditch the ape-hanger handlebars, slap on some clubman bars, wrap the headers in ceramic tape and voila, you had your own bargainbasement café racer. Hell, some of the abominations they created even retained the King and Queen seats, not for some crazed stylistic motif, but mainly, one suspects, because it was simply too costly to replace.
What Boomers forget is that the original customs, choppers and bob jobs we old farts worship are the product of the very same frugality. It wasn’t that Harleys — or Indians and Triumphs, for that matter — were endemic to customization, it’s just that at the end of the Second World War, there were plenty of surplus army motorcycles going for a song. And guess what? They had a whole bunch of unnecessary crap the founding fathers of the chopper movement decided was unnecessary.
For those of us who take pains to denigrate said Hipsters (and, Lord, do they make it easy with those silly Civil War-era beards) know this: their customs are way better “motorcycles” than ours ever were. Take any Scrambler — or Triumph Bobber or BMW RnineT (OK, not the RnineT Racer because it really is crap) — load it with every imaginable accessory, and it will still handle, accelerate and stop like a motorcycle should. Even most of the professionally built restorods can manage a twisty road or a bumpy boulevard. Try that on your slammed, 23-inch-wheeled “Bagger.”
So, here’s to the new generation of bikers and the motorcycle manufacturers serving them. May they not make the same mistakes we made.