Motorcycling fashion ancl passion
With motorcycling ever-more becoming a leisure activity for many, the real torchbearers are the hardy, young commuters.
agazines devoted to road-going motorcycles commonly feature classifications like sports, street, learners, retros, scooters and so on. Those categories may then be sub-divided to clarify whether ' sports' means sports-tourers, superbikes or track bikes. It may also be explained that ' custom' bikes include both cruisers and specials made in factories or by individuals, and that ' scooters' range from tiny twist and go jobs up to ton-up behemoths.
Then there are 'muscle' bikes with engines too powerful for their roadholding, and ' adventure' bikes ranging from restyled 125s up to 100-horsepower monsters. And of course there are classics (seen by modern bikers as anything old and overpriced) and emerging classics (anything less old which owners hope will become overpriced!).
It's bewildering, and I think it's also slightly depressing, because the emphasis on styles means many of the bikes are bought as fashion accessories or investments rather than transport. The effort needed to keep cruisers pristine ensures that few cruise beyond the nearest bike night meeting, and I seldom see a tourer looking as if it is touring further than the local beach. Large adventure bikes logically rarely venture into terrain where a mishap would result in the need for a crane and an ambulance, while using a modern sports bike to the full would probably be foolhardy and certainly illegal. Scooters bought as cheaper alternatives to a car mostly stay in the garage once owners start pining for a heater, and classics are often more likely to be seen at shows than on the road.
In fact, despite all the choice, it seems that very few motorcycles see regular use apart from miniscooters and learner bikes, mostly ridden by lads (and occasionally lasses) too young or hard- up to have a car. Despite this, many experienced motorcyclists feel superior to them on their Chinese 125s, perhaps sedately practicing for their tests, or more frequently riding trail bike versions imagining they are crossing the Sahara or crouching over cafe-racer styled variants pretending to be Valentino Rossi. But actually legal and financial circumstances have conspired to ensure these youngsters have become the true descendants of traditional motorcyclists, riding their machines day in and day out, just like their grandparents.
And we shouldn't despise the bikes themselves, either, even if we feel their pseudo-sports or make-believe off-road appearance is a bit ridiculous. After all, similar styling exercises were carried out on basic commuters by Ariel, BSAand all the other mainstream makers. And when we were teenagers, which of us didn't ride one of those and dream of the day we could emulate Sammy Miller, John Banks and other luminaries?
Admittedly, the reasons for restyling basic bikes were slightly different then. Present day small capacity jobs are legally limited in power and speed, so making them look more like competition bikes is the best way to achieve volume sales. British manufacturers, on the other hand, didn't actually want to disrupt the assembly lines by producing great numbers of sporting variants, but found them invaluable as advertisements.
Whatever we like to think now, our 'classic' bikes weren't made to very high standards - certainly most were not as well engineered as current Chinese tiddlers - so the 'Win on a Sunday, sell on a Monday' mantra made a lot of sense. Buyers might have had no intention of taking part in sport, but if the bike they saw in the showroom looked somewhat like an established winner they could be persuaded it was made to reasonable standards and had a modicum of street credibility. Manufacturers religiously followed the logic (which fortuitously saved them a lot of development money!) and ensured the cooking G3 or Model 16 looked somewhat like Hugh Viney's SSDT machine, and even managed a vestige of family resemblance between Joe Bloggs' ClS and Jeff Smith's Victor scrambler.
We might have chosen to further increase the illusion by inverting our B3l's handlebars to pretend it was a Gold Star, or fitting ape-hangers to become Peter Fonda lookalikes, but we weren't really very different from today's novices on their ready-made manufacturers' specials. And just as most of our generation switched to cars once they lost enthusiasm or became better off, I predict it will only take one cold winter or a decent pay rise for the majority of today's young riders to opt for comfort and respectability.
For the moment, though, they - not the weekend warriors - are the standard-bearers. Obviously, few of them will ever regard classics as anything other than curios, but for the future of motorcycling in general let's hope a significant number come to regard the activity as an ongoing passion rather than a temporary • fashion statement.
--Many of our 'classics' weren't made to high standards, so the 'Win on Sunday, sell on Monday' mantra made sense."
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