Full circle
Standard scooters evolved into tuned ones, but are we now seeing a new trend? A Are we returning to our roots?
Ihazard a guess that most of us started our scooter careers on a standard machine. Until very recently budding Vespa owners could walk into a showroom and emerge with a shiny new or nearly new PX, but even back in the 1980s Lambretta owners were faced with buying the best second-hand machine they could find. This wasn’t usually a problem as there were always plenty of used Lambrettas to go around, many laying idle since the 1960s and just waiting to burst into life once again. Thankfully they were well built and with new fuel, points and a plug would happily burst back into life well after a couple of decades’ rest.
Whatever route was taken, these machines allowed thousands of 1980s teenagers to experience freedom for the first time and all were happy to do so regardless of how fast they were going. Unfortunately that first adrenaline rush usually lasted around a month but being overtaken by an old man in an Austin Maxi instantly brought home the standard scooter’s lack of speed. That was when it all changed and we became desperate to make them go faster by whatever means necessary. Thanks to a growing number of scooter tuners help was on hand. They could feed your fantasies with various stages of tuning coupled with a huge Dell’Orto carburettor and Fresco expansion pipe. It was so easy to be lured in by the promise of great speed, better acceleration, and the belief that no one was going to be as quick as you on the road.
In truth there were only two things tuning would guarantee; years of financial hardship and many hours spent pushing the bloody things as they broke down on a frequent basis. Cost and reliability almost worked in unison; the more you spent on them the more they broke down. Despite this it was easy to become addicted. A new and expensive part would be fitted and give a boost in performance but within a matter of days the euphoria had worn off, being replaced with a need for more speed. That meant ditching the kit you had just bought and buying new components. All in the quest to break the land (or at least local) speed record on a Lambretta.
While bump-starting and pushing them became standard practice, so too did bits vibrating and falling off. As a result the world’s supply of head and fan cowls quickly diminished. Tuning also introduced another new phenomenon, running out of fuel. The huge Dell’Orto carburettors guzzled fuel like a Formula 1 car, reducing the range of the tiny petrol tanks fitted at the factory to around a quarter of that intended by the designers. Thankfully these were the days when there were plenty of petrol stations around. Being caught out usually only meant pushing for a couple of miles to get refuelled.
The thing was that none of this mattered: the cost, unreliability and breakages were all accepted so long as we could go faster. As we got older and wiser the knowledge gained by constantly rebuilding broken engines would come into its own with many owners being capable of building tuned engines that were reliable. However the performance kit revolution that started with the introduction of the TS1 has never abated. Since that time it’s grown to hundreds of products, all designed to improve the engine’s performance. The problem is that while a bigger degree of reliability has been built in, tuned engines aren’t bulletproof and never will be. Fuel technology is the new enemy and the utmost care is required to prevent problems from happening.
There’s another consequence to the pursuit of speed, in that everything else needs upgrading to cope. Better brakes, suspension, tyres, you name it. All these need changing and that means constant development. There comes a time when you wonder if it’s worth the time, trouble and expense. This is where I see a gradual shift among some owners who it seems have had enough. They’re turning back the clock and going back to their very early scootering days, creating a resurgence in standard engines with very little, if anything, in the way of tuning.
Whether it’s the increasing cost of fuel or having to perform major servicing after riding for a relatively low number of miles, there are many disadvantages to a tuned engine. Perhaps owners are also opting for an easier way of life when it comes to the overall experience of owning a scooter?
The way many scooterists use their machines is also changing. More and more riders are opting to go on shorter rideouts as groups, where the speed is governed by those within. If some are on slower machines, blasting off into the distance to get some use out of a tuned engine becomes less fun and it certainly diminishes the experience of a group ride.
Not for one minute am I suggesting that tuned engines are wrong, far from it. The desire of scooterists to go faster will never go away, but it seems that to keep enjoying what they do, many owners are returning to standard machines. Their scootering experience has gone full circle back to where they first started from and that’s no bad thing. A standard scooter was fun back then and it can still be fun now.
Whether it’s the increasing cost of fuel or having to perform major servicing after riding for a relatively low number of miles, there are many disadvantages to a tuned engine.