EACH MONTH WE GIVE AWAY A CABERG DUKE II HELMET AND A YEAR’S SUBSCRIPTION TO BIKE FOR THE MONTH’S STAR LETTER. ON YOUR MARKS
Team Bike offer
Does Ian Martin, or whoever operates Team Bike, have a team bank account? I ask as I would love to offer financial support.
Also, I bet if you asked a thousand readers ‘does the Team Bike RC30 get sufficient space in each issue,’ you would get a 90% resounding NO. Only my opinion of course.
Geoff Homer, email
PS: Bike fan since day one.
Carry on additives
With regard to Eric Green’s E5 ‘fuel range anxiety’, are there not additives available which he could carry with him and use with E10 in the event of not being able to fill up with E5? If so, perhaps you could do a small feature on them as I’m sure it would be of interest to many, myself included. Mike Mccrindell, email
Regards your all-rounder group test (Bike, April).
I test rode each bike in this test before buying a Ducati Multistrada V2 S (not mentioned in your feature, despite scoring 9/10 in your ratings). Ok it’s the most expensive but offers the best all-round package. The Tiger is nice, with a great triple and handling. But the dash,with the expanding rev counter, is daft. The XR is great to look at and has all the toys, but the seat is like a plank. And finally the Tracer. Again a great triple engine but with stupidly small instruments, the heated grips switch is a complete faff and the buffeting from the screen will drive you nuts.
I have owned my V2 for 12 months, done 7500 miles including a trip over to Europe and down to Italy in comfort. The handling is great when needed, in a light and compact package. What more do you need? I think you missed the best bike out, otherwise great work as always. Andy Adams, email
Trying to choose which bikes to put into a test is even harder than deciding the order to consume all the frothy delights at Melton Mowbray beer festival (it’s on 15-16 September, if you’re interested). So many great bikes, only so much space. And you’re right, the V2’s a cracker. MA
Dealers take note
I was dismayed to read the dealers’ warning that test rides are, ‘likely to be phased out,’ as, ‘it’s not like when we all made a shortlist of three and
rode them all. No-one does that any more’. (Bike, April.)
That’s exactly how I buy bikes and I currently have nine (down from 12 last year – we live in difficult times). When I have bought a new bike without a test ride (several times in the last few years) I have invariably ended up trading it in shortly afterwards at much expense and have vowed not to do it again.
At a time when we are trying to attract new riders , or existing riders to new types of bikes, I think the industry would be foolish to remove test fleets or dealers may find themselves reading a ‘customer warning’ giving notice that further new purchases are, ‘likely to be phased out’.
Edward Hanrahan, email
PS: I have read Bike since the 1980s and been a subscriber for many years. Keep up the good work. I would like to see more reprints of classic tests from the 80s/90s/00s: TZR/TDR/ original BLADE/CBR600F and that big trailie test on the Fosse Way all stick in my mind.
Sitting uncomfortably?
This one is for your John Westlake: I have just read your article on the Harley-davidson Nightster (Bike, March) and I couldn’t help but chuckle at your description of the challenging sitting position.
I first experienced this when I took delivery of my CCM Bobber and realised the limitations of the seat and the lack of wriggle room.
My next experience was a test ride on the BMW R18 and the low back pain/bicep fatigue from the seat/ pegs/bar arrangement.
I’m sorry to hear you suffered, but I’m relieved I wasn’t the only one. All of which makes me wonder: who will buy these? Surely the discomfort is the same for everyone? Is that why BMW are offering such good deals on R18s? And what were their test riders doing?
As an aside, I got an engineer to extend the seat subframe on my Bobber and rotate the back of the seat slightly down. It’s still a sculpted seat but now at least I can slide backwards and forwards a little more. It has improved the comfort a bit.
Love the magazine, keep up the good work.
Christophe Vever, email
What goes around…
All the bluster around Kawasaki’s coming-soon ZX-4R is very interesting (Bike, April). I bought a new ZXR400 in the spring of 2003. It made 60bhp or so they said, and it cost me £5745 – that’s almost ten grand in today’s world. Most manufacturers had given up on 400s years before, so it was one of the last ones, and all my riding mates took the piss – they had 120bhp 600s and 150bhp 1000s, and thought my ZXR was thrashy, gutless and overpriced. I sold it 18 months later (peer pressure) and lost a fortune.
Now there’s a new ZX-4R that’s going to be even revvier and probably cost that ten grand, and everyone’s clambering over each other to be first at Kawasaki’s door. Funny old world. Mind you, I’m not complaining – I’ll be in the bunfight. And I think they should import the ZX-25R that’s sold overseas too. In the mid-1990s there was a lad in our village with a grey import FZR250R that wasn’t as fast as a derestricted 125, but it revved to 20,000rpm and sounded sensational with a race pipe on. Chris Sankey, email
The field on the left
Thank you, Bike, for the monthly Overlooked feature. The magazine is always full of tantalising machinery, but it’s always the bike in your simple feature that gets under my skin. Always different enough to be interesting and eye-opening, without being oddball and strange, and bikes you can genuinely consider owning. In a world of all-the-same adventure bikes I find them a breath of fresh air. Scott Armstrong, email