Tech Special: Carbon fibre is coming to the masses
The Missenden Flyer is a motorcycle vlogger and blogger with 64,593 subscribers on YouTube – and he’s well worth sixty seconds of your time
On any given weeknight, there’s little I enjoy more than sitting down to a chicken balti and peshwari naan down at my local curry house. Last week as I tucked into my latest Indian feast, I got thinking about how much of my Indian supper was actually Indian. My conclusion was: not very much of it. The recipe was presumably Indian, the food however was cooked by Pakistanis, using ingredients bought in England, and cooked in a kitchen in Buckinghamshire. And I enjoyed it very much.
In a similar vein, I was interested to see the recent MCN article entitled ‘Rule Britannia – Why the UK motorcycle industry has never had it so good’. The piece caused some of my YouTube viewers to ponder the question of whether British bikes are actually still very British. It transpires 80% of Triumphs are now made in the company’s Thai factories, while Ducati and HarleyDavidson have manufacturing units just down the road from them. Royal Enfield are famously now an Indian brand and have been knocking out motorcycles in India for decades while trading off their British ancestry, and the BSA mark is now poised to be brought back under the ownership of another Indian manufacturing giant. Of course, this geographic identity problem isn’t restricted to the motorcycle industry – or the Prince of India in Wendover, for that matter. iPhones aren’t made in America, Hollywood movies aren’t all made in Hollywood, and not all tulips come from Amsterdam. But Beethoven played by the London philharmonic is still Beethoven. A chicken vindaloo served in Wolverhampton is still a vindaloo. Next time you tuck into a chicken dopiaza, consider whether you’d enjoy the meal more if it had been prepared by Indian peasant cooks in Jaipur rather than British Asians in Blighty. Or does the fact that it’s cooked within strict hygiene standards, served at a clean table and charged at a reasonable price actually make it better? So should the country of manufacture be important if the bike still satisfies the requirements for which it was purchased? I’d argue that as long as a HarleyDavidson has a thumping potatopotato soundtrack, mahoosive V-twin engine and acres of chrome – then it’s still a Harley. And as long as a Ducati is red and has a V-twin (ok, or a V4) Italiodromic engine, then it’s still a Ducati.