3 WHEELS... COOL BUT I LIKE IT HOT
Trikes. I’ve always wondered what the point of them is, since they have the worst of both worlds, of cars and bikes.
Since they’re almost as wide as a car, you can’t filter through slow traffic, which is one of the great things about a bike – threading your way through gridlock, past rows of glum drivers.
But because you’re out in the open air, if it rains you get just as cold and wet as if you’re on a bike.
Yet they attract a small but passionate following whose name in itself is cool enough to almost make you venture out and buy one – the Brotherhood of the Third Wheel.
It wouldn’t be hard to fall in love with the Freewheeler even before you rode it, since it looks stunning, squatting there like a steel and chrome praying mantis waiting to pounce.
The seating position is the same as a bike, but there the resemblance ends. Once you start moving, the steering seems incredibly twitchy and sensitive, yet at the same time heavy, so that you feel as if you have to wrestle it around corners while feeling as if you’re going to slide off the seat in one direction as the trike tips over in the other. Which of course it won’t.
The answer is to stop fighting it and, most of all, stop riding it as a bike and start treating it as a quad bike or a small car. With handlebars.
The good news is that although it weighs a whopping 515kg, more than 100kg heavier than Harley’s flagship Ultra Limited, acceleration is punchy thanks to the engine – the all-new Milwaukee-Eight – now available on Harley’s entire range of big tourers and producing 11% more torque, accompanied by a fabulously rorty symphony from the exhaust.
Braking’s just as good – it’s even got a reverse gear should you need it, and I eventually even managed to stop putting my feet down unnecessarily whenever I came to a stop.
The more I rode it, or possibly drove it, the more I liked it, so I’ve stored that thought away for when I become too old and frail for two wheels.
But until then, I was glad to hand it back, climb on my long-term Triumph Tiger 800 XCA and go for a blast home through the corners – then filter through the rush-hour traffic with the grin on my face that only bikers know, and that is forever denied to the Brotherhood.
Geoff Hill’s new novel, The Butler’s Son, is out now on Amazon
Test bike supplied by Belfast Harley-Davidson, belfast harleydavidson.com