So with the rebirth of the world comes the wondrous rebirth of the motorcycle lineup for the year.  I know, journalists say it every year, but we do live a great time for motorcycles. The technology continues to improve, the machines keep getting better, and we reap the benefits.  Remember how hot the 1985 Kawasaki 800 looked in that red, black and silver paint scheme with its GP inspired scalloped out seat? Totally radical for its time, now virtually antiquated.  How about the 98’ Yamaha R1?  That machine chucked just about every test rider because of its violent power delivery and anorexic dry weight. Racebike specs right out of the box for about ten grand.  Practically unheard of at the time. Now we can look back and almost scoff at the poor beast, no fuel injection, no radial brakes, no slipper clutch.  Barbaric compared to the current model.  I could go on, but I think you get the point.  So, with all of this 2 wheeled glory available, the big problem now is choice. Allow me to whet your whistle with a few gems from Ducati that I’ve discovered this year.

The words Ducati and affordable have never really been linked together, but that’s about to change. In the wake of the 1098 Superbike comes the little brother that could in the form of the 848.  With a suggested MSRP of $12,995 you might think that the machine is still on the pricy side, but nowadays a liter class bike from Honda, Yamaha, or Suzuki runs in the same ball park.  And compared to the 996 of about 10 years ago (priced around $17K) you’re getting a serious dose of Italian testosterone for a lot less lira.  

Aesthetically the 848 looks like the 1098 complete with the twin side-by-side headlights (the beast looks like a shark in the pearl white color scheme), single-sided swing arm, radial brakes, and under seat exhaust. The 848 is meant to replace the 749, as Ducati’s middle weight sport bike, and it does so well that you could almost forget 749.  The specs indicate that the 848 makes 134 Hp and 70.9 ft-lbs of torque while weighing only 369 lbs. Forget comparing it to its target competition, the 600cc inline 4 cylinder sportbike.  The 848 pisses all over the entire class, regardless of who builds the machine.  It’s only marginally behind the 1000cc inline 4’s in terms of power and is lighter, so unless you get called out on a long straightaway, the 848 will out-handle the bigger machines. In terms of in-house comparison, the 2002 Ducati 998 cost about $18K out the door, put out 123Hp, 71.5 ft-lbs of torque, and weighed 436 lbs dry. The 848 even has a better power to weight ration than the last generation 999. My, how times have changed. Finally a superbike spec Duc that handles like a middle weight, is at home on the street or the track, and won’t break your wallet or force you to sell your first born into slavery to make the payments.

For those of you out there partial to the naked bike scene the 2008 Monster 696 redefines its class with stellar performance and stunning good looks thanks to a complete makeover from the previous generation.  Whether you’re a seasoned roadburner or an eager beginner, this bike can accommodate and satisfy. And, it’s priced competitively for the middle weight range at $8495. And with that you get a tremendous amount of bang for your buck.

One look at the Monster 696 tells you two things: 1.) the folks at Ducati updated and upgraded the beast while maintaining the visceral appeal of the original.  2.) It is built to perform.  The machine is loaded with racetrack inspired equipment. The chassis is a large diameter hybrid trellis frame attached to an aluminum sub-frame.  The swing arm is a sturdy chunk of aluminum as well.  All derived from Ducati’s 2007 MotoGP winning Desmosedici GP7 machine. Up front you’ll find probably the best brakes in the class.  Twin 320mm rotors clamped by 4 piston radial calipers bring all of the action to an abrupt halt whether you’re tackling the stop and go hassle of the urban jungle or devouring your favorite set of twisties.  Confidence inspiring for the beginner, gratifying to the expert. Sub 5’5” people take note here: the 696 has the lowest seat height in its class coming in at 30”.  That means sure-footedness at stop lights. It’s also the lightest in the class tipping the scales at a bulimic 359 lbs. That’s about the same weight of a track stripped liter class race bike, imagine that.

I know some of you out there are probably thinking that these things are all fine and good, but what kind of performance can you really get out of a 696cc V-Twin. The specs claim 80 Hp and 50.6 ft-lbs of torque.  I spent 3 years racking up miles on a 1994 Monster 900, and whereas it wasn’t lofting wheelies in 3rd gear, it hauled my ass all over California (with a few round trips from LA to Vegas thrown in), put up with the occasional track day, and never griped about carrying a passenger and a loaded tank bag.  That bike at 900cc’s had the same performance figures as the current 696 but weighed about 400 lbs dry. 14 years of evolution, a 200cc drop in size, and a 40 lb weight loss, there art thou happy.  The power to weight ratio is much better and you get a break on insurance because of the lack of engine displacement. The beginner gets a very user friendly non-intimidating machine, while the experienced rider can be ham-fisted with the throttle and wind the engine.  Personally, I’d rather wring a bikes’ neck and work the gearbox than have to gingerly apply the gas to a machine that will do 90 in 1st gear.  Where’s the fun in that?  You’re either on your way to the hospital or jail with one good handful of throttle.  

If you want a bad-ass naked bike that has real world ride-ability with an attitude all of its own, look no further.  All you have to do is choose the color. And if you get bored with it one way, the gas tank has a removable outer skin so you can change its personality to a new color in a snap. All the better for police evasion …maybe I shouldn’t have said that.

Archives:

The Greatest Stuntman Ever

By Ray Hryb 12/8/07

Evel Knievel was the greatest stuntman ever, period.  He was the toughest guy on a motorcycle, period.  No one has ever come close and no one ever will as far as I’m concerned.  Unless someone out there wants to take a Honda Goldwing, the proverbial boat anchor of the motorcycle world, and attempt to jump Caesar’s Palace or some place similar, fuggeddaboutit!  To those out there who are brave and/or crazy enough to compete in the X-Games or ride motocross and reach for the stars with every jump, I do salute you.  Absolutely.  You’re all fucking crazy and have my utmost respect, but give it up, The Man set the tone… big time.  Sure, guys jump further now, and some even do back-flips (another thing I can’t get over), but modern technology has given the new generation an advantage.  Comparatively speaking, it’s like bringing a Gatling gun to a knife fight.  The modern stunt jump bike weighs about 200 lbs and has the suspension to practically be dropped out of an airplane.  EK took it upon himself to use a machine that weighed 5 times as much, had less than half the suspension travel, and about the same amount of horsepower.  Do the math- it should never have been attempted!  Talk about courage.  Figuratively speaking, the man should have had an assistant carrying around his balls in a giant wheelbarrow.  I know what you’re thinking, all of this just means the man was crazy or had no ability to reason.  Maybe, but more times than not he knew what the consequences of his actions would be, and chose to live up to it and do it anyway.  At one point in his illustrious career he and his crew had tested the ramp and the jump and it was determined that there was no way the stunt could be completed.  His people urged to cancel the stunt and the sold-out show.  The Man basically said, “What do you want me to do, give them all their money back and tell them to go home?”  He knew that he had given the world his word (something most people today can’t live up to) and that most of the time they came to see him crash. They came to cheer for the crash, the sick bastards!  But when he made it, they cheered even harder.  He had the absolute bravery to go through with the stunt, even if the probability was greater that he would be seriously injured or killed in the process.  He wouldn’t be Evel Knievel and we wouldn’t be having this conversation right now if he wasn’t ‘That Guy.’  

As they say, broken bones heal, but trophies last forever.  As a kid, I got on a bicycle, hell I even bought red, white, and blue cans of Rustoleum and painted my Huffy Thunder Road in that scheme right down to the tires because of EK, and tried to jump anything my friends thought I couldn’t, just to be like that man.  We even filled my father’s wheelbarrow with gasoline and set it on fire just to jump over because we thought Evel Knievel would approve.  The statement “home of the free, land of the brave” applied to this man in a big way.  Free to choose your own path in this life, and brave enough to risk death to achieve what no one else could.  He truly was a hero, one that never had to fight or kill anyone to become so.  His nemesis was the grim reaper and he put up a hell of a fight.  Thank you for your inspiration and your courage.  The Red, White, and Blue never had it so good.  You will be missed.  “Viva Knievel!”

If anyone is interested in seeing the best possible material about this legend, find a copy of “The Last of the Gladiators” on DVD or VHS.  Not to be missed for any EK fans.

Beauty and the Brutale

By Ray Hryb 11/6/07

I hate to start with what sounds like a movie quote rip-off, but at what point does what you own, own you?  (Feel free to write in about this because I’d love to hear the stories.)  What I’m getting at is that dream of the perfect something (ie motorcycle) that you would build or buy if you could somehow have IT. Whether you first lay eyes on IT in a magazine or on a showroom floor, or even when you just close your eyes, there’s something that reaches into your soul and grabs you.  And it doesn’t let go until you own IT. Drooling over ITs glossies in the latest mag, websurfing compulsively until the perfect pics can be downloaded for wallpaper (maybe even a video clip if you’re lucky), refusing to leave the dealership until getting escorted out by the management, muttering ITs name in your sleep.  These are all symptoms of this obsession.  After months, sometimes years of this compulsive desire, by fortune or folly, you find yourself in possession of your dream.  Absolute gratification is finally yours.  IT’s everything you dreamed it would be.  Or is it that, and a whole lot more.  Allow me to explain.

If you don’t already know, I’m a two wheel addict.  Anything that involves a motorcycle (or hopefully, many of them) has my interest.  I’d ride anything, too.  You could nail a motor and two wheels to a door and I’d ride it.   I guess I just the love the machine for the sake of the machine. Dirtbikes, sportbikes, cruisers, tricked-out choppers, touring bikes (I bet you didn’t think I’d even mention them, but they’re a @#$*ing blast to take long trips on.), I think there’s a place in the garage for all of them.  However, I’ve found that I consistently fall for the same type of machine.  The naked sportbike.  To me it’s a supermodel that doesn’t freak out about breaking a nail.  Wide bars, comfortable upright stance, and nimble like a dirtbike around town, but with the corner carving performance and handling of a sportbike.  Two great tastes that taste great together.  There’s something to be said for zipping to work while dodging traffic in the morning, and then stretching your legs and taking the long way home at the end of the day.  I subsequently fell in love with the Honda NT650.  You may know it as the Hawk GT.  Lightweight with a torquey V-twin engine, single-sided swingarm and an RC30 frame.  I found one cheap, and in stock form (except that the previous owner painted it a really slick Ducati yellow.), and decided to garage the FZR I had been riding.  I then proceeded to tinker with the Hawk to make it mine.  First went the stock exhaust in favor of a lighter titanium can. That not only dropped some weight and improved the power, but exited the bike on the left side exposing the rear wheel and gave it the sweet sound of V-twin thunder…just a little smaller.  Then went the stock signals and race clip-ons were installed to make it more narrow for slipping through L.A. traffic. At about 40 Hp it moved pretty quick around town and in the canyons, but ran out of legs at anything over a buck-twenty.  The beauty was that, unlike something with 150 rear wheel horsepower, I could wring its neck and really get hamfisted with the throttle.  Much more fun than only cracking it open 1/10 the way to keep from spinning the tire.  This type of Tomfoolery proved to be my undoing and I ended up high-siding the thing on a twisty road that turned from smooth asphalt to jagged corduroy without warning. (The part of Palos Verdes called Portuguese Bend-- dangerous, trust me.) The details of this little adventure are best saved for some other time (the article will be titled “Don’t Be A Dick”), but suffice to say, the bike went home in a couple of milk crates, I got treated for a broken collar bone, and I earned the dubious distinction of being the only idiot to high-side a Hawk GT.  Brilliant! (As a side note to that experience, for an encore performance a few years later, I broke the same collar bone again high-siding a Yamaha R-1…in a parking lot!  That story will also be in the above mentioned article “Don’t Be A Dick”).

Before I was even allowed out of the figure-8 brace, I was eyeballing a replacement for my fallen steed.  The naked bike thing wouldn’t let go of me and I happened to find a Ducati Monster 900 for an offer I couldn’t refuse.  Stock, bare knuckles machine, not even a tach on the thing.  It was love at first sight.  I stopped driving a car for 3 years because of that motorcycle, and put almost 40,000 miles on it in the process.  I dreamt of all the things I would do to modify it and never really got around to it.  It was enough of a leap from the Hawk that I could live with it stock.  Hell, it was a Ducati! Then, in 1999 something really bad happened that would forever deflate my opinion of the Monster.  An Italian company called MV Agusta (who had hired the individual responsible for designing the Monster, a man by the name of Massimo Tambourini) released drawings of a naked bike that would be called the Brutale.  My heart stopped beating for a few moments, I couldn’t breathe or swallow, and I wanted to go outside and set fire to the Monster.  I couldn’t believe what I had seen.  The name alone was pure sex!  I waited to see actual photos, but the bike never got built.  I went to every bike show like a religious zealot looking to be saved by merely touching one.  No such luck. Years would pass and the bike did not get made.  That bike haunted my thoughts day and night for almost 5 years, until in late 2003 when the first ones finally rolled off the production line.  I called the dealership that was supposed to get them every day for months.  I was on a first name basis with everyone in that shop by the time the bike arrived.  I stepped into the showroom and nearly broke down in tears when I saw it sitting there. I should probably be taken out back and shot for loving a machine this much.  If that wasn’t enough, they gave me the keys and let me fire it up right there.  The sound, that glorious trumpeting sound (even through stock pipes), was like a Ferrari on two wheels.  I don’t think there’s ever been a deposit check written faster.  I know what you’re thinking, impulsive, right?  Not after almost 5 years of waiting.  My girlfriend took one look at the bike and agreed.  A bike loving chick named Tomi, to know her is to love her.  She told the guy in the dealership, “That thing is so sexy, if I had a dick I’d fuck it.”  At least there wouldn’t be any dispute over the purchase.  I thought my obsession with the bike would end now that I could call it mine.  Here’s where that part about “it’s everything I dreamed it would be and a whole lot more” comes in.

The Brutale is essentially a naked version of the MV Agusta F4-a bike designed to rev to the moon and go really fast around a racetrack.  So, it too, wants to go really fast around a racetrack, or down a twisty road, or anything with smooth enough asphalt.  Finally, all of this beauty and performance was mine and I could live the dream.  Let’s forget about speeding tickets or getting into high speed accidents.  These things weren’t even on my list of considerations when I got riding the Brute.  All I wanted to do was take it through the longest, smoothest set of twisties I could find and listen to the symphony of its tailpipes. But after the first few trips I discovered something that would haunt me as much, if not more, than lusting after the machine in the first place.  Simply going fast enough to kick up rocks or road debris onto any part of the machine was enough to make me garage it.  Whereas the Monster, being aptly named here, didn’t mind the rain and seemed to like dirt roads and being parked outside at night, the Brutale demanded to be showroom clean all the time.  I couldn’t bare the sight of IT with even the slightest blemish on it.  If the weather wasn’t perfect, IT stayed inside.  If there was too much traffic and I thought the chances of IT getting hit were significant, IT stayed inside.  I never even gave thought to what happens to the bike in a crash before.  It just seemed like a by-product of the experience.  Hopefully you’re alright and you go get another one, no big deal. (I know somewhere out there is a Brutale with its ears ringing right now.)  But this would not be the case with this machine.  I couldn’t take my eyes off it.  Neither could anyone else for that matter. Anywhere I stopped with it drew a crowd.  I couldn’t take it anywhere and leave it parked out of sight for fear of what would happen in my absence.  I’ve had motorcycles stolen.  I’ve also had a bike get knocked over in a parking lot because some resident genius decided it was like a coin operated ride- like the ones outside a grocery store- and had his grandson on it (if there is a better reason to have someone publicly flogged I’ll never know). 

I even got to the point where the Brutale got parked in my living room on its rear wheel stand (it made a great center piece- it really tied the room together) because I shared a carport with a bunch of ex-frat guys that liked to drink excessively and piss off of balconies.  The truly excessive part of the whole relationship was that by the end, I was infinitely more satisfied sitting on the bike every morning (in my living room) having coffee, than I was riding it.  The paranoia and stress drove me a little batty.  In about a year’s time, I was only able to bring myself to put 900 miles on it.  What a waste!  A machine built to perform and win being used as a breakfast nook.  A year goes by and almost no riding, you can’t get that back. You never know when the day will be your last and you’ll never ride again, so I’ve always tried to get in as much time as possible.  Living in L.A. and not riding a bike like that was criminal.  Finally, for a number of reasons, the bike was sold.

I was miserable when it happened.  It was like voluntarily breaking up with a super-model.  Aah, to have loved and lost. The moment I sold it I wanted it back.  I ached all over and had frustrating dreams about having IT back.  To tell the truth, I’ve never gotten over that bike. But, I guess things all work out.  To get over it, I immediately went and found an old Suzuki DRZ 350S (think street legal dirtbike) for about 900 bucks.  It was like the comfort food of motorcycles.  Cheap, simple, reliable, versatile, and a blast to ride-anywhere.  It doesn’t mind the rain, or the dirt, or the snow.  It just wants to have fun and doesn’t care how dirty it gets, or how dirty it gets you.  It was like going back to being a kid again.  I don’t get the same crowd around it that I did with the Brute, and no one ever asks what it is, and my girlfriend wouldn’t f@#* the thing with your dick.  But, I get to ride every day now.  I’m never worried about leaving it parked anywhere or crashing it.  And the best part is, my dog (“Elvis”) loves to do hot laps around my property with me and the bike in tow.  At the end of the day I own the bike, not the other way around.  For the record, if I ever buy another Brute, it will be used and with a blemish or two on it, so I won’t feel guilty riding the unholy piss out of it this time.

A New Year