The Glidd of Glood Blog

The Donald Trumpet meets The Spluttering Sofa - Triumph Speed Twin 2019 review

Nearly four years now. Four years that my Ducati 999 has been at the erstwhile witchdoctor’s to cure a running fault that makes it stall and impossible to restart when hot. It’s bound to be some crappy little sensor relay or something, but so far, the fault has remained elusive. Of course, four years is a ridiculous amount of time to wait to have a bike fixed, moreover a bike that was actually running and which you could use. But there you go; the witchdoctor is a friend and he is now retired from his Ducati dealership and he doesn’t want to do the job (evidently) and I don’t, or didn’t, have the money to pay him for all his time, so I’ve let him do it as and when it’s suited him. Apparently, this isn’t often. Will I get it back this season? It was looking that way, and he said I would, but then he contrived to get rear-ended on a racetrack and put a 12-stitch gash in his leg. He couldn’t walk. So, I stopped holding my breath and went in search of a new bike.

The Ducati is a 2006 model that I have had from new. It’s not unreasonable to get a new bike after 13 years. The 999, when it is working, is a fine motorcycle which is why I have had it for so long. I’m perfectly happy with it and as I have probably already written, I can’t see really what benefit I would derive from a faster, better-handling, more modern Ducati on the road. But it has a drawback which it shares with its superbike Ducati brethren: it is unsuitable in the current Swiss regulatory environment. If you read my post on Via Sicura, the traffic laws we now have, you will understand this. In a nutshell, the Ducati starts to make sense at about 120 kph on the open road. Sadly, this is a speed that will ensure you lose your licence and that will land you with a multi-thousand franc fine. The 140 kph that the Ducati will amble along at cheerfully, and which makes perfect sense when you are riding it, will land you in jail and probably result in the Ducati being confiscated. I have ridden for over 30 years at these speeds with no ill effect for me or anyone else. This might seem irresponsible to the casual reader, but if you’ve actually ridden a modern superbike, you will see how normal it is.

Anyway, if I am to continue to enjoy motorcycling without living in fear of what may lurk in my letterbox, I reckoned I needed a new bike that would provide fun and amusement at speeds closer to the legal limit. Hence, I found myself test-riding and subsequently buying this 2019 Triumph Speed Twin.

Triumphs are known as Trumpets, or at least the old ones were, so I have dubbed my bike the Donald Trumpet. It’s a strange choice of nickname as I can’t stand the guy, but there you are. It amuses me.

The Trumpet is a 1200cc parallel twin and it looks very retro. It was designed for people like me, people who can remember riding motorcycles that looked like the sorts of things that rockers took to south-coast beaches in the UK for a weekend of argy-bargy in the 60s. A big comfortable seat, a simple elegant motor, flat bars and no fairing. But in the 2010s, we want reliability, superb handling, oodles of stomp and brakes that work. None of these things were on offer back in the day, but now they most definitely are. The Speed Twin kicks out about 100 bhp which would have been huge in the 70s and early 80s, but is nothing to shout about these days. Its great strength, however, is the monster torque that is delivered by the engine. 1200cc is no small motor and you can expect it to produce the goods when you twist the throttle. For comparison, the bikes it is modelled on would have been about 650 or 750cc and would probably have made half the power.

As I pointed out, however, it isn’t really about going fast all the time. That is no longer the aim. The goal is to bumble along peacefully, but to know that you could wind the thing on should you so desire. It is the lack of fairing that makes it all so reasonable. On the Ducati, the fairing and the clip-ons that have you doing constant press-ups conspire to make you think that you are ambling along when you are really doing 140 kph. On the Speed Twin, it feels quite fast already at 100 kph, and you find that on motorways you are quite happy doing barely 120 kph, the legal limit, while all sorts of other vehicles whizz past you. This would be suboptimal for a long, Europe-crossing, continental trip but for going to work in a radar-littered country, it makes a lot of sense. I don’t know what the top speed of the thing is – probably about 200 kph, I would imagine – but it’s irrelevant as there would be so much wind-blast at this speed that even if the bike could do it, you couldn’t, for very long.

The Speed Twin is an undeniably handsome bike and you feel oh-so-cool riding it. Check out all those little details and just the sheer emptiness of it – you can see right through the motor. But you get proper 4-pot Brembo brakes on big rotors for stopping – probably not too dissimilar to what are on the 999. These aren’t cutting edge brakes these days but they are plenty powerful enough for the road and I have never had any complaints about the Ducati’s braking. The Speed Twin, or at least mine, will not be going round any racetracks. You now get ABS in any case, of course, which is new to me. The rear tyre is an unfashionably small 160 section, but it comes as a Pirelli Rosso Corsa III, so it is super sticky. Put it this way, if they thought you needed more tyre, I’m sure they would have put it on and in any case, you’ve got traction control now so if the thing starts slipping, you shouldn’t end up in a hedge. The suspension is non-adjustable, but if seems fine as it is. It’s not as if I am consumed by a desire to fiddle with it, so the fact that I can’t is no hardship.

The dash looks old-school, deliberately, but it provides a lot of info. You’ve got an electronic display as well as the analogue clocks and that includes two trips, gear indicator, fuel gauge, amount of kms you can ride before you run out of fuel, fuel consumption, both instantaneous and average, and a clock. Strangely, what it doesn’t seem to have is a motor temperature indicator, nor an outside air thermometer, both of which the 999 has. I quite like knowing the ambient temperature and it can be good to know your motor’s temperature, even if ignorance of this fact gives you something less to worry about. I’m always worrying that the 999 is running too hot (which it probably is). There is a button which allows you to scroll through all this info on the go and it is easy to reach and simple to understand. You also get three riding modes, Wet, Road and Sport. I’ve only tried Road so far, as I’m running the bike in, so there is no point in trying Sport. And I have yet to try out the bike in the rain. I shall be avoiding rain as far as is possible, as I loathe washing bikes, although I hate having them dirty. This means that any kms done in the wet always results in long cleaning chores. Anyway, it seems fine to me in Road.

The riding position suits me down to the ground. The pegs are reasonably high and rear-set and apparently will not touch down in corners. I hate it when stuff grounds in bends. Ducatis don’t have hero blobs on the pegs as you won’t be getting them down, and nor does the Speed Twin. The bars are flat and quite wide. They are even wider with the bar-end mirrors that look cool and work really well. Nonetheless, they do make the bike quite wide which is not so good for filtering in traffic jams. You are leaning slightly forward to get to the bars – just enough that you aren’t bolt upright into the breeze, but you still have a great view of the road ahead. The seat is pretty comfy, but it’s not an armchair. In fact, after sitting on it for a couple of hours on my way back from picking it up from the dealer’s, my bum began to protest a bit. This never happens on the 999, which seems to have a piece of plank for a seat, but I think that is because I am constantly shuffling around on it to hang off in the bends; not something you are going to be doing much of on the Speed Twin. So, you tend to just sit in one position and this can be a little bum-numbing after a while. Early days. I may well get used to it.

My friend Manu came by on Sunday on his Triumph Thunderbird and we went for a ride, being careful to dodge the showers that were all around. Manu has had many Ducatis and Triumphs in his life, along with a lot of other things – old MVs, Nortons, Harleys and a Bimota. But his ride of choice for the last decade or so has been this Thunderbird with the stacked pipes. It’s a 900cc Hinkley triple and it makes a raucous sound when you open the taps. So, one more cylinder than the Speed Twin, only ¾ of the engine displacement and rather fewer horsepower, if quite enough. Naturally, as biking friends are wont to do around here, we swapped bikes after a while as I knew that Manu was dying to try out the Donald Trumpet. After about a minute on the Thunderbird, I had found a name for it: The Spluttering Sofa. And I had also found out a lot more about the Speed Twin.

The Sofa’s saddle was immediately hilarious. You can see from the photo that it is much more substantial that the Speed Twin’s perch and it is very comfortable. The bars are higher and narrower than the Speed Twin’s and you feel that you are sitting in the bike rather than on it. The centre of gravity also seems higher, so it’s all a bit disconcerting. Your legs are tucked up under you in a far more forward and a lot less-roomy position that on the Speed Twin. I know that the Sofa handles, because Manu hustles it about at a great rate, but I certainly didn’t feel inclined to. It doesn’t inspire the same level of confidence as the Donald Trumpet. You feel as if you are sitting in a sofa and being rushed around. An odd experience, but not an unpleasant one. Then there is the exhaust note. The Speed Twin pops nicely on the over-run and makes a really good muted impression of a classic Britiron exhaust note. Must be the engine configuration, but I also suspect that Hinkley did their homework here. Some modern Ducatis, despite being 1200cc V-Twins, make a noise like a fart. I am thinking of the Multistradas. In order to comply with Euro 4, it seems, Ducati have just engineered any exhaust noise out of them. Disappointing. The Speed Twin, though, is civilised but still very much a motorbike and its exhaust is in keeping with the rest of it. A nod to the past whilst not pissing off the inhabitants of every village you pass through.

This is not so of the Sofa. If the Speed Twin pops on the over-run, the Sofa splutters, very noisily, like an apoplectic septuagenarian. Crack open the throttle and it roars in a rather gurgling fashion as if it smokes about 60 a day. This is not a bike to pass unnoticed on. The pipes are from Triumph’s own catalogue but are of course illegal in Switzerland and are now impossible to find. So, they aren’t the standard items. You can buy other zorsts for the Speed Twin too, but I don’t think that any of the others look as good as the stock items and my desire for owning a loud motorbike sort of ebbed away when I came to live in this village 15 years ago. Naturally, you don’t want a farting bike, but the Speed Twin has the right soundtrack.

It’s when you look at the Spluttering Sofa that you realise how non-retro the Speed Twin really is. Look at the back mudguard – massive on the Sofa, minimalist on the Donald. Check out the indicators: huge bullets on the Sofa, tiny little dainty items on the Speed Twin that look as if they were sourced from an aftermarket parts catalogue. The pegs on the Thunderbird are the much more period-correct, massive rubber-covered things. On the Twin, they are turned aluminium items that wouldn’t look out of place on the latest Ducati superbike. It’s as if Triumph have already café-racered your Speed Twin, knowing exactly what you’d have wanted to change on it. The result is that there is nothing to change on it at all. Suits me. I no longer really feel the need to customise everything.

I have now done my first 450 kms on the Donald Trumpet and I have liked all of them. It gives you a feel-good factor which is different from that provided by the 999. The Ducati is really all about experiencing the road as a racetrack, the fun you get from picking a line, or hitting an apex and nailing it out of the corner. I love it. It’s how I’ve experienced biking for 30 years. The Triumph is more about taking in the atmosphere and scenery whilst being wafted about on a magic carpet. There are other magic carpet bikes available but you suspect that with them, if you do feel like upping the ante, they will quickly fray around the edges. The Speed Twin, on the contrary, feels small, capable and fast but in a relaxed manner. It is just what I was looking for. And if the Ducati ever makes its way back to my garage, like a lost cat, then I’ll have all bases covered. It’s not as if I have cured, or even attempted to cure, my sportsbike addiction. In the meantime, I am perfectly happy spending my summer with the Triumph Speed Twin – an awesome example of a motorcycle.

Swiss motorcycle pass fiasco

I could almost guess how this would work out when I heard the original idea. The highly entertaining YouTube bike magazine, 44 Teeth, bought a couple of second-hand Italian bikes and decided to find out which was the better by riding them across Europe to the racetrack at Mugello in Italy. On the way, we the viewers would have plenty of laughs as well as finding out something about the two Italian thoroughbreds (©bike magazine clichés) and how they stack up as Europe-crossing steeds, not something they were necessarily designed for, but something that many owners, including myself, want to use them for.

The route was across a dull bit of France (motorway) to the Black Forest in Germany, and thence through the Swiss Alps to northern Italy. And therein lies the rub: the Swiss Alps. A decade ago, this would have seemed a wonderful idea – indeed it would have been pretty stupid and even sacrilegious to have done anything different. Switzerland was the biking mecca, an almost obligatory pilgrimage for anyone who wanted to experience the ultimate biking roads. Motorcycling is all about corners and if you can corner on well-maintained tarmac surrounded by the most stunning scenery, there can be no better two-wheeled experience outside of a racetrack. One of the reasons I ended up living in Switzerland was to have this motorcycling nirvana on my doorstep. Bye-bye the clogged, Gatso-infested roads of the UK with their endless urban sprawl and 30 mph limits and hello the sweeping blacktop of the Grimsel, Furka and Susten passes, to name just the most well-known three of a seemingly endless list of mythical Alpine roads. And I made the most of them. I have done most of the Swiss passes on my bike, and some of them I have done many times. I even once did 12 of them in a single day and had the aching forearms to prove it from braking for hundreds of hairpin bends.

But that was then and this is now. Since those days of fun, the Swiss have passed the Via Sicura laws, their absurd and almost Stalinist take on how to behave on the road. The idea, of course, is to save lives and reduce accidents, but there is also a hidden ecological subtext which implies that simply using a petrol-powered conveyance for fun is in some way reprehensible and antisocial and anyone who gets their fun that way can be treated like a second-class citizen. Via Sicura came into force in 2013 and introduced a whole raft of repressive measures designed to make speeding, not to mention driving under the influence of alcohol, so financially painful that no one would ever do it.

Once you have voted in such laws – and strangely, and for reasons I have still not ascertained, these laws were never submitted to a popular referendum as just about any laws in Switzerland are – you can react in different ways. The normal way is to know that they exist but only enforce them in the case of stupidity or negligence on the part of motorists. This is how traffic laws were enforced for decades. The overriding cause of traffic-relate death occurs in built-up areas where there are many people around whom you might injure or kill if you misbehaved. And who really complains about speed-traps in town? No one that I have ever met. But out of town, where accidents involving injury or death are far rarer, the authorities used to let people get on with it, to use their own judgement, really.

Not anymore. Not only are the fines and sanctions absolutely iniquitous for such benign infringements, but the police do their utmost to use their insidious robotic speed traps absolutely everywhere. It’s a bit like being spied on by the Stasi the moment you get behind the wheel or clamber aboard a motorbike, and then being sentenced to the Gulag for a chance remark.

Try this. There is a long, straight road near me between two villages. It’s about a kilometre long and goes past no buildings. There are fields on either side with perfect visibility. It is in the middle of the countryside. How many accidents occur on this road? I can’t think that there can be any. Your biggest danger would be falling asleep at the wheel. In June, however, on a cloudless summer day, the police installed a speed-trap on this road. They hid their little tripod speed camera under a black net, laid out a long cable and hid their van on the edge of the forest some 75 yards away from the road. The radar was very hard to see as it was almost entirely hidden in the wheat field. As bad luck would have it, I had an errand to run that day. I drove past the camera in one direction and unbeknownst to me, was clocked. Then, 20 minutes later, I drove past it again and was clocked again.

The speed limit in Switzerland on the open road is 80 kph or 50 mph. Compare this to the 100 kph or 60 mph in the UK. As letters in the post later pointed out, I was recorded at 98 kph on the way out and was awarded a CHF 250 fine – about £193. Were I to have done this in the UK, I would still have been driving legally and incurred no fine at all. Then, on the way back, I got caught at 108 kph. They kindly subtracted 6 kph to leave me with a recorded speed of 102 kph. For this offence, I was given a CHF 400 fine and CHF 50 costs. I was also the subject of a criminal enquiry which finally stipulated that the offence was not a severe one and that no further action would be taken. I didn’t lose my licence, even for 3 months (the Swiss minimum). Nonetheless, this little bit of paperwork has engendered another CHF 70 of costs. So in that direction, I got hit with CHF 520 of expenses, about £400. Thus my little excursion to the neighbouring town cost me nigh on £600, for a speed that wouldn’t even have caused UK law enforcement to blink. How guilty do I feel? Not very. I’ve been driving along that road almost daily at similar speeds for about 15 years. That is not a dangerous speed. It’s not even an uncommon one.

Ah, you say, but the proof is in the pudding. No doubt Swiss accident rates are hugely inferior to UK ones. Wrong. They’re not. As this graph shows, all countries in Europe reduced traffic fatalities between 2010 and 2017 without resorting to such ridiculous measures. The UK didn’t make much progress, but then the UK was already about the safest country to drive in. Short of banning vehicles on the roads, you will never reach a zero-fatality accident rate. So it appears that the ludicrous Swiss legislation has simply criminalised the populace, destroyed lives, caused people to lose their jobs and created misery and unfairness in spades. As if the non-car-owning bicycling denizens of Zurich cared.

Back to the unfortunate journalists of 44 Teeth. Having spent a superb day whisking along the bends of the Black Forest road in Germany, they inevitably fell foul of a Swiss Alpine speed trap, cunningly designed to fleece tourists. The result? A CHF 4000 franc fine, payable on the spot and an instant driving ban for doing 140 kph, reduced to 138 kph. Just as well it was: over 140 kph can put you in prison. As I pointed out in my previous Via Sicura post, travelling at 140 kph is not only easy on a modern motorbike, it’s almost obligatory. That is the speed at which they work and the suspension, brakes and motor are easily up to the job. Is 80 kph really that much safer on the open road? Not in my experience. You just lose concentration and start looking at the scenery, of which there is much.

So let’s be honest here for a moment. Most motorcyclists will not even take their bike out of the garage if they really have to ride it at 80 kph. They aren’t designed to travel at these speeds and the experience is no fun. You might as well do something else. And no motorcyclists are going to visit Switzerland if they think that they are going to be entering a lottery whereby they stand to go home CHF 4’000 poorer or worse. The comments to the video are unsurprising. There are currently 1’260 of them and the video has been seen 52’000 times. In 24 hours. If Switzerland wanted to torpedo its tourist industry, they wouldn’t go about it any other way. You might think that no one needs a load of speeding motorcyclists to keep their tourist industry afloat, but visit the Alpine passes in the height of summer and you will find the roads seething with motorcyclists. These same motorcyclists are eating dinner and staying in hotels and buying petrol. A CHF 4000 franc fine says “Fuck off and don’t ever come back!” and most people will read this message loud and clear. Swiss hotels and infrastructure need two-wheeled tourists. God knows that with climate change, the day of skiers filling Alpine hotels are surely numbered. There won’t be any snow soon.

And that’s pretty much the only hope we, the motorcyclists in this country have, namely that money talks. When the bikers have all been driven away, and surely it won’t take too long now, then maybe there will be political pressure for Via Sicura to be scrapped. Via Sicura, the raft of legislation that other countries have done without and still managed to achieve the same results.

Riding with John Berger - virage dangereux

To complete my story of my friendship with John Berger, I thought I would post this other story. I wrote it, I see, 20 years ago on the 4^th of November 1996 on a day when I had just been riding with him. I wrote it because I felt the need to write about the experience; there wasn’t any other good reason to do so. I didn’t know what to do with it, although I did send it to John. Otherwise, it has just sat on my computer for 20 years along with a few other things. There were no blogs then. Now seems like a good time to dig it out, perhaps the only time.

 

VIRAGE DANGEREUX

I fell off my bike again today. I fell off on a dangerous bend. That’s not a mitigation, it’s actually a condemnation. Quite apart from it proving to be a dangerous bend in that my failure to negotiate it resulted in my falling off, it had a sign marked ²Dangerous Bend² stuck up before it. I can’t say I wasn’t warned. But then motorcycling is all about ignoring perfectly sound advice. This starts before you even buy a bike. Umpteen people advise you not to. But you ignore them. They then try to discourage you from using it: "Aren’t you getting a bit old for this sort of thing?" No. "You will drive carefully, won’t you?" Yes, of course. Once you hit the road you are constantly advised on how to behave by a litany of thoughtfully placed road signs imposing speed limits, warning of corners, road works, villages, places not to overtake, humpbacked bridges, wild animals, low-flying aircraft, frogs, even. Clearly, these things all have to be taken into account - before you make your decision as to what extent you are going to ignore them. Motorway intersections signposted at 80 km/h are great fun and seem perfectly safe at about 140. Sections of mountain road limited to 60 km/h come alive if you accelerate to 160 between the bends. Double white lines before blind bends may make sense if you are in a wheezing, old 2CV, but on a bike you have aeons of time in which to make your manoeuvre before slamming on the brakes for the corner. It’s all a question of degree. Motoring, then, once it transcends creeping about from A to B, presupposes a certain amount of arrogance. You choose not to do what you are being told to because you think you know better.

The police take a dim view of this attitude, but that’s only normal. They are paid to perpetuate the myth that most people abide by the rules. The myth is necessary to ensure that driving in Geneva is a safer experience than driving in Cairo. In any case, it’s easy for the police. For a start, they’re not driving around for fun, so it doesn’t much matter if they’re not having any. Secondly, they don’t have anywhere to go, so it’s fairly irrelevant how long it takes them to get there. Thirdly, if they have some pressing need to be somewhere fast, they start flashing blue lights and promptly ignore all that sound advice...

So what makes a corner dangerous? Would it be dangerous if you walked around it? Obviously not. Is it dangerous because it’s sharp? Not necessarily. If that were the case, I’d fall off every time I tackled a mountain road with switchback hairpins. No, a corner becomes dangerous when it lulls you into a false sense of security, when it appears to be that which it is not, when it’s out of synch with what you reasonably could have expected, bearing in mind the last half-dozen corners. It could be argued that instead of trying to second-guess the road sign and ask oneself "In what way is this corner going to be unlike its brethren?", it would be handier if the sign let the cat out of the bag and told you what was so special about it, viz. : " Corner Tightens Up Savagely " or " Gravel Everywhere ". In the Isle of Man, they have a sign with a Blind Pew-like black spot in the middle of the warning triangle. Whilst being no more explicit, the meaning is obvious and immediate: accident black spot - a lot of people have regretted the levity of their decision at this point. This is a sign which definitely slows you down.

It’s a warm-for-November, Sunday afternoon. We’ve just had a good lunch. John is riding behind me. He is a prudent motorcyclist. Not slow, but careful. Following him earlier, I have noticed that he could lean over further in the corners. Leaning is the very essence of biking for me. Straight-line acceleration is fun, but the real thrill comes from that equilibrium of forces which keeps you suspended in mid-air as you corner. The further over you lean, the more intoxicating the feeling. To lean over far, you have to ride fast; it’s nothing to do with being in a hurry. I want John to see that his machine will allow him that swooping, pendulum flow when you loop together one corner after the next on a thread of acceleration. I don’t want to impress him, just impress upon him.

An empty country road. It’s damp beneath the trees in places, but so long as you know that and allow for it, there’s no real problem. I approach a bend. " Virage dangereux ". So what. It doesn’t look that " dangereux " to me, just another 90°, a corner like so many others. The chevrons mounted on a sign before it don’t look particularly forbidding either; it’s nothing the Ducati won’t handle. I brake sharply and tip the bike in. From my new vantage point, I see that instead of 90°, it’s more like 140° and I’ll have to scrub off more speed or I won’t make it round. I’m braking with the back and the wheel is locking up, the bike snaking around its axis. I lift it up and hit the front brakes for a split second before hopefully laying it down again. But the front wheel locks on the gravel at the edge of the road and the bike heads straight for the verge. I’m off. I’ve just run out of road.

I’m back on my feet instinctively, I don’t even remember being on the ground - impossible to say which part of me hit it. The Ducati is lying on its side with its front wheel under a wooden fence, in the mud. John arrives and parks up, concerned. "Are you all right?" I’m fine, physically. I’ve got some species of bruise on my left knee, but my heavyweight leathers have kept everything intact - my portable health insurance. All I feel is a sense of shame and regret. The Ducati looks like a stricken animal there on its side. No, not even that - a carcass. Its bellow has been silenced. Smashed bits of plastic are lying in the road. Offal. A motorist stops and we drag its dead weight from under the fence and heave it upright. Shall we lean it up against the fence on its other side? It’ll probably scratch the paint, but does it matter? Nothing much seems to matter now. A scratch more or less - who gives a toss? It's impossible to know what motorists think on such occasions. Is it genuine concern they feel at the proximity of a possible death? Just good neighbourliness, perhaps. Or is it a secret vindication? Watching wistfully from their metal enclosures as the helmeted, leather-clad, latter-day knights flash by in a blur of noise, they are reduced to the roles of mere serfs, suffering humanity whilst the motard cuts a swathe through it and rushes on towards the horizon. Don't they feel somehow diminished, aware of their powerlessness? And now the tables are turned, the biker confounded in his arrogance, powerless to redress his bike like an unhorsed jouster in the dirt. They were right - it will only end in tears.

For aside from the sheer fun-fair pleasure of motorcycling, it’s a myth we’re living out. We encase ourselves in armour, we dehumanise ourselves in our helmets, invisible behind smoked visors. We wield the force of heroes, one-hundred horsepower in our grasp. We attain a mythological stature, flirting with death. In all our gear, we are no longer people at all. Why don’t bikers wave at scooterists? Because they are still human in their city clothes on their anaemic, little machines. They are borne on the tide of humanity instead if cutting themselves off from it. Is this why motorcycling is seen as a lower-class pastime, the disenfranchised attaining an animal power which unsettles those who are only cloaked in their money? This is why falling off is the ultimate sin. It’s the shattering of the illusion, the nemesis of arrogance, the reduction of the biker to mere mortal status, the stripping away of that magical power. That’s why I feel such a prat.

" Don’t worry ", says John. "It could have happened to anyone." These are kind, comforting words. But I have betrayed us. It’s not the stricken bike that worries me. Closer analysis will reveal the damage, such as it is, to be purely superficial and nothing that a few francs and the lavish attention of "Bernard le Costard" won’t be able to sort out. It’s certainly not the minuscule, physical hurt of a couple of bruises - squash as per usual next Thursday. The sadness comes from having your bluff called and revealing that your hand contains nothing but a meaningless series of disconnected cards. Coming back to earth with a crash, I am so patently not what I was pretending to be.

With Stalinesque thoroughness, I will repair the illusion. History will be rewritten. The event will only be revealed in future times when it will be nothing more than a heroic scuff on the leathers, accrued to the bravado of biking like a notch on a stick. The bike has been stashed in the garage, the mud surreptitiously removed from my gloves and leathers. At some future date the Ducati will be spirited away, incognito, from under its tarpaulin to Bernard’s elfish workshop to be restored to pristine condition. I’ve done all this before.

You learn from your mistakes, apparently. You can also learn from other people's. Maybe John will get more out of this than me. Ironically, I have set a wonderful example. Now he knows not to go rushing into corners as I like to - he probably got all that out of his system years ago, anyway. I haven't. I'm going to have more crashes in the future, no doubt. Why stop now? But don't get me wrong, I only make a very infrequent habit of this, like a man who allows himself a cigar once every couple of years. The rest of the time, amazingly, the bike always returns to the vertical after my forays into the horizontal. In some of the circles whose outer edges I frequent I am tacitly viewed as someone who is just too reasonable to ever be a good motard. In these circles, good means fast and fast probably means unconscious. I was at a race-track once with Bernard. "Have you got fully comp insurance?" he asked me. Yes. "Then what are you afraid of falling off for?" He didn't offer this aggressively, as a challenge, but with genuine incomprehension. Bernard is fast. Insurance assessors don't frighten him, nor do hospitals. He had pins put in some part of his anatomy on some occasion. But I look at it this way: you look a bigger fool with a drip in your arm than you do being stuffed up the inside by two-wheeled madmen. You have to know when throw in your hand if the stakes get too high.

It's all just a question of degree.

John Berger: friend, motorcyclist, writer, painter, art critic

In the mid 1990s I had a couple of Apple Mac shops on the shores of Lake Geneva and a subscription to the magazine Motorcycle International. I used to read the magazine cover to cover when it was delivered every month. In one issue in the early 90s they asked John Berger to write a piece on the Bol d’Or 24 Hour bike race. I had never heard of him, but it transpired that he was a Booker Prize-winning author, painter, keen motorcyclist and lived in the French Alps. I remember his article, illustrated with arty pencil drawings, and written in a very literary, non-journalistic fashion. It was all the more interesting for me as I went to the Bol religiously every year. I was bound to have been to the race that he attended.

I few years later in, I suspect, 1996, I was working in the Nyon shop, where I went once or twice a week, when I got a call from someone who wanted to buy a new Apple computer system. He was obviously English, his French was quite heavily accented. He explained that he lived in Haute Savoie in France on the other side of the Lake and wanted a computer, screen and printer. I spent a little time advising him over the phone. There were two different screens he could have, a more expensive Sony Trinitron one and a cheaper one. The colour was better on the more expensive one, but it only really made a difference if you worked in the graphic arts. For office stuff, the cheaper one was fine. So I asked the prospective customer what he was going to use it for. He said he was a writer. That sparked a little interest on my part. We didn’t have any English writers as customers. So I took his order and asked him for his name and address. He said he was called John Berger – “comme les moutons”, he said, “berger” being the French for “shepherd”. We had been talking in French. I normally offer English speakers English, but they often decline as they don’t seem to notice that they are talking to an Englishman and feel they should be speaking French.

I thought back to the Motorcycle International article. Surely this was the same bloke? Wasn’t he called Berger? So I said to my customer, in English:

“Have you still got the CBR 1000?”

“How do you know that?” He was quite taken aback.

“Because I remember from that article you wrote in Motorcycle International,” I explained. We then inevitably chatted bikes.

I made up my mind that, whether it was my day to be in Nyon or not, I was going to be there when he came to pick up his system. I wasn’t going to miss meeting a Booker Prize-winning motorcyclist. 

He appeared on the appointed day in an old Citroën 2CV and we put his stuff in the boot. He didn’t want the boxes – he had to go through customs – and the boot was full of bits of straw and old tools. He wasn’t precious about his new equipment. He wasn’t a precious sort of person. I said I was often on rides in the Alps, and he said I should drop in some time.

It was summer and the weather was perfect for biking that weekend. I thought I’d give him a ring and find out how he was getting on with the computer. He said he was having trouble getting the printer to work, so I said, “Why don’t I ride over to see you and give you a hand on Saturday?” He thought this was a great plan. So I did. The ride over to his place is either flat and boring via motorways to Geneva and then near to the hamlet where he lived, or wildly exciting over the Alps on switchback roads and through gorges. I naturally chose that route for the Ducati.

And so began our friendship. Every now and again but normally at least once a year, I’d ride over to see him at his farmhouse. We talked books and bikes, naturally. He lived with his American wife Beverly in an old farmhouse in this tiny village. Barely a village actually; there is only a handful of old houses. We used to chat at the big table in the kitchen, or frequently outside in the garden at another table. I was always offered several glasses of a superb blackcurrant syrup which he made according to an old Savoie recipe. He then used to give me a couple of bottles to take home. He also gave me copies of his books. Once we went for a ride together on the twisty local roads, just for the fun.

John never took his old car anywhere if he could go by motorbike. He didn’t like driving, but he loved riding. And he had quite some bike. It was now a Honda 1100 Super Blackbird, the fastest production bike of the time, which Beverly had given him for his 70^th birthday. An unusual present for a 70 year-old. But he was very admiring of my Ducati or Ducatis. Sometimes I came on the 916, sometimes on my 907ie and in later years on my 999. He clearly considered them the Ferrari of motorbikes and I had a certain kudos with him, I think, from owning them.

John was a quite remarkable man. He was constantly communicating with all sorts of intellectuals from all over the world – writers, playwrights, artists – and was always being invited to give talks, attend conferences or intellectual chinwags. You were aware that his address book was quite enormous and that his friends must number in the hundreds. And yet, when I arrived he would beam with pleasure and give me a big hug and say how pleased he was to see me. He made me feel like a king, as if I was really important to him. There was no hypocrisy in this, but I was aware that he must have had any number of much closer friends. It was just the way he was – very warm and affectionate and hugely giving of himself. Despite our 35 year age difference – he was the same age as my parents – he was always interested in what I was doing, or what I thought about things. He was a fantastic listener. He would never pontificate on subjects, but you couldn’t help but notice how he saw things from a painterly and intellectual point of view. He would see references in things which completely escaped me. A picture in a magazine might put him in mind of a painting by Raphael, or a piece of wood or tree might make him think of another artist.

At the same time, he was completely down to earth. He helped the local farmers get in the hay every year. The house had an outside loo, a sort of composting toilet which he cleared out yearly. He even wrote about this in a piece called “A Load of Shit” in one of his collections of essays. He had an unusual energy and vitality about him.

I tended not to announce my arrivals in advance. My view was that the ride over was already worth it and if I could see John and Beverley, it would be a bonus. Biking is very weather-dependent too; I might feel like going over to France at the last minute. It was a system which worked pretty well, although it did mean that I often saw more of Beverley than I did of John. John would often be in Paris, or in Madrid, or Prague. Or, as on one occasion, he was shut away in a small room of the house writing his new novel and couldn’t be disturbed. He told me that he found writing very difficult and when he was penning a novel, he’d work more or less non-stop at it with no distractions to get it over with.

I hadn’t seen him for a few years as he had more or less moved to Paris and I wasn’t likely to take an impromptu trip to Paris. I did phone him at the beginning of last year but heard not only that Beverley, who I had been expecting to talk to, had passed away, but that he was in hospital although it wasn’t life-threatening. So I wrote him a letter and he answered with a postcard which is still on my mantelpiece. It is a plain piece of blue card and John has written on it: “Alex! Great to hear from you, Ducati Whirlwind. Abrazos, John.” Abrazos is an affectionate way of ending a letter in Spanish. I doubt at the time he was feeling up to writing a whole letter. He probably had a lot of people to reply to.

I saw the BBC documentary on him to celebrate his 90^th birthday a couple of months ago. He seemed in good health and it had clearly been shot very recently. So I wrote him another letter which was supposed to accompany my book which I had published electronically and which I thought might amuse him. But as no paperback version was currently available, I thought I would have to print it out. John wasn’t likely to be downloading anything from Amazon, and he didn’t really do email. But I would also have to get his son Yves to forward it, as John’s Parisian whereabouts were mysterious. I think he tried to keep visitors to a minimum, or he would have been inundated with them. And that meant writing another letter, in French. And then the paperback version of my book appeared and I thought I would ring Yves to see if I couldn’t get Amazon to just deliver him one, or should I put it in the post?

I thought about this over the last few Christmas days, but did nothing. And now it is too late. The unsent letter is still on my computer.

I am naturally very sad about John’s death, but on the other hand, I try to see things positively. He did seem to have a great life and achieved much. He lived to a “ripe old age” and generally enjoyed great health. I don’t know what he died from, but whatever it was, it didn’t seem to be debilitating him particularly, from the little I could see. I wouldn’t mind living until 90. I wouldn’t mind being given a shiny new motorbike for my 70^th birthday either.

What a top bloke.

Bye, John.

 

 

Shark Race-R Pro Dark Smoke Visor Review

Let there be night… and there was night. To borrow a similar phrase from a famous book. That’s what it’s like when you close your Dark Smoke visor wearing a Shark Race-R Pro. I have written a glowing review of this helmet already on this blog and it really is a helmet that justifies this praise. It is wonderful in every respect. With over 35 years of motorcycling behind me, I know a good helmet when I wear one and the GP Pro is the best. But that visor… it’s a real problem.

Let’s begin by clearing up why you’d want a smoked visor in the first place. There are two reasons for this, one practical, one aesthetic.

In a car, you can often drive in quite bright sunlight without needing sunglasses. That is because the sun isn’t directly in your eyes most of the time; it is shielded out by the roof of the car. When it gets lower, you can often block it by lowering a sun flap. This is not the case on a bike. Most helmets don’t have a peak, so any sun shines directly on your face. This doesn’t bother some people and they ride all the year round in an untinted, clear visor. But most people seem to favour some sort of tint to their visor to prevent discomfort from having to squint into the sun all the time which is very tiring and potentially dangerous.

The other reason is that tinted visors look good in a way that sunglasses look good. It disguises the rider and we often quite like being disguised. It’s not an unimportant consideration. You generally choose your bike and your riding kit just as you might choose your car and your clothes. They say something about you. It is no more unreasonable to want to ride in a tinted visor than it is to own a stylish pair of sunglasses or a decent pair of shoes. This much is tacitly recognised by many helmet manufacturers who produce various iridium tinted visors in gold, silver, blue, rainbow and no doubt other hues. They look cool, although the iridium coating produces no optical advantages and in some cases actually causes distracting internal reflections in my experience.

For these reasons, I have covered by far the majority of my 35 years of biking miles whilst wearing a tinted visor and I’ve never had a problem with it. Obviously, you don’t want to be wearing one at night or on dark, dank days any more than you’d feel comfortable wearing dark glasses at such a time. Seeing where you are going is still the primary consideration which I why I have always insisted on a quick-change visor mechanism so that I can slot in the clear or lightly smoked visor on such an occasion. I’ve had Shoeis, Arais, other Sharks and even less prestigious brands over the years. They have all had perfectly reasonable tinted visors that were comfortable on the eyes to wear and allowed me to ride incognito.

Not so the Dark Smoke visor that I have bought for the Shark Race-R Pro. It is ridiculously dark.

Can I not buy a visor from Shark that would be more suitable? In a word, no. Not really. Shark offer a variety of visors for their top of the range helmet. There is the clear visor that comes with it, naturally, but there is also a Light Smoke, a blue tint, a yellow tint, gold, blue and chrome iridiums in addition to the Dark Smoke. You can’t say that they aren’t providing choice. Sadly though, from what I have been told and read, all the iridium visors are every bit as dark as the Dark Smoke. The Light Smoke is barely tinted (see photos below) and I don’t want to view the world in yellow or blue. What annoys me the most is that on my previous Shark, the tinted visor was perfect. Why change a winning formula?

You’d have thought that with 8 different choices for a visor Shark would be able to produce at least one which would do the job, but sadly, not any more.

I’ve given the Dark Smoke a good test. I’ve ridden about 1’000 miles in it and although I still think it is way too dark, it doesn’t bother me quite as much as it did, but it’s still sub-optimal. If there is very bright sunshine, it’s not too bad. It still transforms a dazzling July day into an autumnal September one and makes the world a sadder place, but at least I’m not squinting all the time which I would be with any of the lighter tints available for this helmet.

Of course, I’ve tried to contact Shark to get things changed.

To begin with, I tried to email them via their website to find out if they really didn’t produce a more suitable tint. I got no answer of any description (that was a year ago). I tried to ring them up, but if you are a simple consumer, they won’t take your call. So then I turned to Linked In and found the details of the marketing director and wrote him a long letter, in French (seeing as they are a French company) setting out the problem and asking why they had abandoned a perfectly good level of light reduction in favour of inky blackness. He was good enough to email me back which I appreciated as marketing directors are busy people with a lot to do. That is why companies normally have staff to deal with consumers. His email, though, wasn’t very helpful. He simply pointed out that all their smoked visors were for track use only and unsuitable for the road and with EU regulations, blah, blah.

Well, let’s consider that for a moment. Of course the Dark Smoke visor is stamped with a “racing only” admonishment, although at this point I may point out that on my Arai smoked visors it is simply marked “daytime use only” which seems more reasonable. Still, Shark have to cover themselves. But look at any passing motorcyclist and you will see that dark visors are the norm and that the huge majority of them are worn on the street. After all, if we were all that bothered about legality, we wouldn’t be motorcycling in the first place, or at least not on a bike making 120 bhp or more. We might also pause to consider why, in that case, produce 3 different iridium visors for track use. I have yet to see a racer wear an iridium visor. On the track, it’s your lap times that tend to do the talking for you, not the tint on your visor. I struggle to think that the market for visors that are going to be worn exclusively on track justifies the need for 50% of the available Shark Race-R Pro visors to be produced just for this purpose. In any case, what is the advantage of having a pitch dark visor on track? At the end of the day, you still need to see where you are going, even if you won’t meet nearly so many unexpected hazards as when riding on the road.

And here’s the thing: I have been looking at Jorge Lorenzo at the races this season to see what choices he has made. This year he has become a star Shark signing and is sporting the Race-R Pro, like several other racers. Unless it is raining, racers always ride in tinted visors probably for the comfort, but also so that other racers can’t see their expression (and perhaps because they look good too). But the multiple championship-winning Jorge has often been seen not wearing the Dark Smoke but opting for the Light Smoke instead where his face is quite clearly visible. Could it be that even he finds the Dark Smoke unacceptably dark? At the Aragon round this weekend, despite it being a sunny day with all riders wearing face-hiding tinted visors, Jorge was out once again in the lightly smoked visor. This was not something you ever saw when he was riding with his X-Lite helmet.

You might think that I am the only person to have a problem with the Dark Smoke, but reading between the lines of the reviewers on the Revzilla website, it is clearly surprisingly dark for many people, not to say just too dark.

I pointed all this out to the marketing director but all he did was thank me for “contributing to the debate”. Ah, I thought. At least there is a debate that Shark is aware of.

This spring, I tried to contact him again to see if he had changed his mind, but instead of that, he’d just changed companies and no longer has anything to do with the motorcycle business. So I tried to contact his successor, but couldn’t find any details for him or her. I did find, on Linked In, the next best thing, a woman in product development, so I wrote her another long letter setting out most of the points I have made here. Once again I went to the trouble of writing it in French. If she wasn’t the right person, maybe she could pass it on? But this time no answer at all. Nada. Nix. Niente.

OK, then. If Shark won’t talk to me (amazing customer service I must say), maybe they will talk to someone with more clout, I thought, and contacted the on-line biking magazine 44 Teeth. Al Fagan was kind enough to answer. He said that the Dark Smoke was indeed too dark, even for the track, and that he used some different tint which he thought Shark had produced (though he didn’t know if it was generally available for non-racers). If it is, it doesn’t seem as if anyone has told Lorenzo about it. He said he’d get back to me but despite a prompting email from me, he hasn’t. Well, I am sure he has other things to do so I won’t hassle him further.

And that is as far as I have got. A complete impasse. If a company refuses to respond to any contact, what can you do? If they persist in maintaining a poor product decision ditto. I am only writing all this in the vain hope that someone at Shark might read it.

I have taken some photographs as you will see below. I wanted to show what it was like wearing a Dark Smoke visor, but it was so dark that although my camera would take a photo at 1/400^th of a second without the visor, when I put it in the helmet there was so little light that it refused to take a photo at all. So I changed strategy and have taken a series of photos to show you what effect different visors have on light levels and also how much you can see of a rider when wearing them. Note that the iridium visor on my previous Shark is so dark that I almost never used it, but even that is not so tinted as the Dark Smoke. In order to fool the camera I have taken the photos half through the visor and half without. I’m sure you get the idea.

No visor in this photo. Just the scene as the camera sees it.

 

Through the dark tinted visor of an Arai  RX-7 GP

 

The Arai RX-7 iridium visor. It is a fraction darker, it seems than the tinted one, not that I noticed while wearing it.

 

Clear visor of the Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend

 

Light tint visor of the Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend. As you can see, there is minimal tint. Only good for cloudy days. I bet the new Light Smoke for the Race-R Pro is like this, which is why I haven't been in any hurry to get one.

 

Through the smoked visor of the Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend. Great for most riding conditions.

 

The noticeably darker iridium visor of the Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend. Too dark really. I almost never used it even if it did look cool.

 

The Dark Smoke visor of the Shark Race-R Pro. Here's the problem. It's super dark.

 

The untinted clear visor of the Shark Race-R Pro. Not surprisingly, very similar to the first photo without a visor at all.

 

 

Here's what you look like in an untinted Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend visor. The neoprene mask is not a Shark item. It stops the visor misting up in the cold and keeps you cosy. Rather too warm for the summer, though.

 

The lightly smoked Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend visor. As you can see, not a whole lot of tint. No hope of going anywhere incognito.

 

The ideal tinted visor of the Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend. You've become pretty much invisible. You don't need anything darker than this.

 

The Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend iridium. I like the look, just not the look through it. Sombre.

 

The tinted Arai RX-7 visor. Quite anonymous enough. I've done many miles happily in this.

 

Arai RX-7 iridium. I actually bought it because the tinted one steamed up continually on one side in coolish weather. This didn't help. The problem was with the helmet. A good look and optically not bad at all, although not as good as the normal tinted visor which I wore more (some internal reflections).

 

The standard Race-R Pro untinted visor. Poor light use only.

 

The infamous Dark Smoke for the Race-R Pro. It looks good, sure. You can't see me, but then I can barely see you.

 

 

Moto Morini Corsaro review - Different but not that different

My Ducati 999 is going to be spending an entire year at the garage. The reason for this is too tedious to go into and you don’t care, so let’s skip it. But in order to make some amends, and conscious of the fact that I haven’t done any motorcycling so far this year and probably won’t be doing any on my own bike, my Ducati witchdoctor has lent me his Moto Morini Corsaro to play with for a few weeks. I’ve just been to pick it up and put 200 kms on it riding it back home and this is what I think of it.

I took the scenic road back. This still starts off with a few miles of motorway into the teeth of a gale. The Valais, as a canton, is essentially the Rhone Valley with a lot of mountains and smaller valleys running off it on either side. The motorway runs along the valley floor. On hot summer days a fearsome warm wind gets up that blows up the valley from west to east - think in terms of the French Mistral. This makes your first few kilometres on an unfaired bike a lot less fun than they could be. 

After the motorway, I headed up the pass to Les Mosses which is a typical Swiss mountain road with plenty of switchbacks and tight corners, bends galore and some variable road surfaces. Then I took the valley road which is also twisty but wider and generally very smooth and fast. Finally, I finished off with more curvery local to where I live and which I know extremely well, over hills and through forests.

The Corsaro is a fairly handsome bike, but nothing that special or, to my mind, droolworthy. The tank looks very MV-like, the front as if it has come off a Triumph. Take the name off the tank and you’d not be sure who made it, but it looks European. The huge underseat silencers are not very lovely (slimmer Termignonis exist) and the swingarm is also not a thing of beauty – very similar to the ones on recent Ducati Monsters (I’d be prepared to bet they are made by the same firm).

The riding position is very natural with quite wide, flat bars (good for leverage), a comfy seat and reasonably high, rearset pegs. The pegs may seem surprising for a naked bike, but if you are used to sportbikes as I am, they feel perfectly comfortable. At least you probably won’t be grinding your boots, although your legs may get a little cramped after several hours in the saddle. So you are sitting comfortably and although you aren’t that high up, if you’re much smaller than my 5 foot 10 (1m 78) you’ll have difficulties paddling the bike around; it’s all a bit tippy-toes.

You can tell from the dash that the bike wasn’t released yesterday and indeed, this one is a few years old. The tacho is large and analogue, similar to the set-up (if less beautiful) than the one on my 999. The rest of the info is on an LCD display which is highly readable (a lot better than the one on the MV which I also tested and wrote about on this blog). There is a menu somewhere but no riding modes or much to fiddle with, so you don’t have to use it. At least the trip is easy to reset and that’s about the only thing I bother with.

Again, unlike the MV Rivale, all the controls are where you expect them to be and for a Ducati rider it all felt very familiar.

You get sticky fat tyres and a beefy Verlicchi trellis frame and superb Brembo brakes. There may be more powerful brake options these days, but these ones seemed to be very good with lots of feel. Very similar to the ones on my 999 in fact. I thought the suspension was well set up. It might not be a magic carpet ride but it’s pretty damned good with a nice compromise between road feel, so that you know what is going on underneath you, and comfort. The front is supposedly Marzocchi, the rear Ohlins. At least, I think they are. Handling-wise, there are no unpleasant surprises. There may be a hint of understeer and you don’t quite get that “on rails” Ducati feeling, but I bet with that chassis and those tyres you could corner harder than I was (even if I was displaying not a little of my customary enthusiasm).

I’m not a huge fan of upright riding positions. I prefer to be lower and more over the front wheel, but the price you pay for that is sore wrists. The Corsaro will not give you sore wrists. In fact, for Swiss mountain roads (and most of them are), the Corsaro makes a lot of sense. It’s comfortable in this sort of territory. You have essentially got a comfy sportsbike, but you’re perhaps not sitting in the best position to exploit it. Probably depends on what you’re used to.

So then there’s the motor. It’s a 1200cc V-Twin lump and it makes a decent amount of power. Riding it, you can see that it doesn’t have the top-end of the 999 and is almost certainly a few horses down on that bike, but it is hugely torquey and for blatting about, there is plenty of fun to be had. Some reviewers have described the engine as a beast, difficult to control and prone to wheelie everywhere. I have no idea where they got that from – probably just the product of journalists trying to inject some excitement. No, the Ducati 1098 Streetfighter is like that. The Corsaro is not. It’s very civilised, I found. Of course, you have got a big V-Twin on your hands, so it’s not going to be very flexible in town, but it’s not bad at all. You tend to trundle around town in 2^nd, whereas the 999 is too brutal in town in 2^nd and needs to be ridden more in 3^rd to keep it under control. Hairpins on the Corsaro seem to have you using 1^st as 2^nd is too high, but you don’t want to be in 1^st as the bike has monster engine braking. Sadly, you quite often find yourself dropping into 1^st when encountering a very tight corner as 2^nd seems a bit too fast. Maybe I just need to take them faster.

Of course, I bet you could easily do wheelies on this thing. You’re sitting in the right position, and you’ve got an easy tug up and a big torquey motor. But it doesn’t start pawing the sky at the slightest provocation as some would have you believe. Still, crack open the throttle at about 4 or 5’000 rpm and it takes off very smartly. It’s a great bike up to about a ton (160 kph) and after that, although there is obviously plenty more, you’ll probably be cooling it because of the wind blast. This is one of the differences with the 999. At 160 kph in top on that bike, it is just beginning to ride the torque curve and wants to go faster and faster. The Corsaro doesn’t have that urgency up top. It’s a torquemeister and riding the torque is where you get the most fun. It actually made me think of my old Ducati 907ie Paso in the motor department: lots of grunt low down with not so much urgency up top, although the Corsaro is surely considerably more powerful.

The mirrors are OK, but you could scarcely say they were “designed”. They are just round, flat mirrors stuck on the handlebars. You get a smallish if adequate view of what is behind you. They look like the sort of thing that you found on Japanese bikes of the 70s. At least they are vibration free.

I was also a little surprised by the fuel consumption. The Corsaro seemed to have almost a full tank when I set off, but it had gone on to reserve by the time I reached home so I went to fill it up. It drank 16 litres. That’s pretty thirsty for 200 kms. Other reviews confirm this appetite for fuel. It apparently has an 18 litre tank. I can’t think that despite having 4 litres more tank than my 999 it will really have much more of a tank range. I wasn’t hanging around but it wasn’t as if I was redlining it everywhere. On a similar trip, I will barely use the final 4000 rpm of the Ducati’s engine, make just as fast progress on it (probably faster - I’m more used to it) and get much better fuel economy. Just goes to show how well engineered Ducati motors are. After all, mine is 10 years old. I reset the trip when I filled up, so soon I really will know just what you can expect from a tankful. The Ducati has a 200cc smaller motor, but it seems that you get just as much performance, rather more in fact, and burn less fuel having it.

So what’s the verdict? Well, it’s odd. What I found was that the Corsaro doesn’t really have many shortcomings, but for some strange reason, I don’t find it that exciting. It looks nice enough, but not that special. I can’t think of a single feature which calls out to me. It’s great to ride, but there is nothing about it that really stands out. The MV Rivale had an astonishing motor that was such fun to rev, but a lot of annoying foibles that sort of ruined it. The Corsaro has no real foibles, but hasn’t offered me many surprises. I’d sooner be riding my own bike for sure. It seems to make perfect sense as a bike, but its lack of fairing would be annoying on really long trips and definitely on motorways. In some ways it is better suited to the current regulatory environment. It is one of those bikes that gives you the impression that you are going faster than you are, whereas it is all too common these days to find yourself on a bike doing Warp 7 and feeling as if you are sitting still. That is surely more licence-friendly. Certainly you can have fun without going ludicrously fast, but you don’t quite get the same carving-through-corners feeling that you get on a Ducati sportsbike. It surely makes a great everyday bike and if you bought one, you wouldn’t see many others about. Well worth a try out.

I’ll still be looking forward to the day I get my Ducati 999 back though.

Shark Race-R Pro – a helmet review

I’ve been out and about on the bike in my new Shark Race-R Pro so I thought I’d give you a heads-up (ho! ho!) about it.

This helmet replaces both my Shark RSF2 Foggy Legend and my Arai RX-7 GP McCoy Replica. I bought the Foggy 10 years ago to replace an Arai Quantum Haga Replica that I had crashed in. A year later, I bought the Arai RX-7. The Foggy was a good helmet, but what I didn’t like about it was that the venting seemed purely for show and didn’t do anything much, open or closed. So it was fine for the winter when it was comfy and snug, and rather rubbish when the weather warmed up. I’d switched from Arai to Shark because Shark were a whole lot cheaper; I just couldn’t stomach the CHF 1000 that a new Arai cost. However, a year after the purchase, I bit the bullet and returned to Arai.

I have to say that the RX-7 disappointed. It was a draughty helmet, so much so that it was only really good in the summer when it was hot, but even then it would make my eyes water. The venting was indeed better than the Shark, but I didn’t think it was as good as the Quantums I had owned, despite the horrific price tag. I used to wear the Shark at the beginning and end of the season, and the Arai in the middle. Both had their plus points and drawbacks but the Arai was always very noisy.

After a decade, it was clearly time for a new helmet. What I wanted was a comfortable helmet with excellent crash protection (obviously), but also a quiet one, which is where the RX-7 fell down heavily. I also wanted venting which worked, no internal sun visor, a fast, tools-free visor change mechanism, fibreglass or carbon fibre, and suitably racy graphics.

After reading a few reviews, I opted for this Shark Race-R Pro.

When you wear it, you are immediately struck by how quiet it is. It is the quietest helmet I have ever worn. If you look at these pictures of the underside of the new Shark and the Arai, you can see that the neck roll on the Shark is much more padded and the opening far smaller. This is going to make for a snugger helmet, and that’s exactly what it feels like.

When you close the visor, it immediately becomes very peaceful inside. I don’t wear earplugs unless I am going to do a long motorway journey. Even without them, the Race-R Pro feels almost as quiet as the RX-7 with earplugs. There have been people who excuse the noisiness of the RX-7 with the comment that you can’t expect a race helmet to be quiet. This sounded pretty suspect when the idea was first raised. Wearing the Race-R Pro, you can see immediately that it’s a totally spurious excuse. You can indeed have a quiet race helmet – that Arai don’t make one with the RX-7 is just down to poor design.

Shark have clearly moved on since the RSF2. The new helmet is physically smaller. The RSF2 always looked a little ponderous, due to its large shell but the new Shark is much the same size as the Arai. They have also massively improved the venting. The Race-R Pro seems to vent superbly. If you open the vent at the front under the visor, you can feel air whooshing in, but it doesn’t seem to swirl around your eyes, which is a bonus. On a day where the temperature is 20°, I didn’t feel the need to open it at all. Much has also been made of all the venting going on over the top of your head. I can’t say I felt it, but what I did notice is that after 90 minutes of riding in the thing, I didn’t have the customary flattened helmet-hair, which seems to suggest that the top of my bonce is indeed being looked after.

The next thing you notice with the Race-R Pro compared to the Arai is the thickness of the visor. The one on the Shark is seriously thick. I weighed them both to get a comparison. The Arai comes in at exactly 100g, whereas the Shark visor tips the scales at 168g. It just contains about 68% extra plastic. You certainly feel that if a brick dropped off a lorry and hit you in the mush, you’d be a lot happier in the Shark. The Shark visor change system is excellent too, not that I’ve ever had a great deal of trouble with the hated Arai system. The Arai system seems mechanically insensitive, but once you’ve got the knack of yanking the visor out, it seems to work OK. But the one on the Race-R Pro is lot plusher and involves no force. Its anti-fog coating works really well too, though I have no idea how long that is going to last. The Arai visor used to fog up very annoyingly unless the temperature was in the mid 20s °C, so you’d be continually faffing about with it whenever you slowed to town pace. And it wasn’t just old visors either. I bought a new visor for the Arai on one occasion, and it fogged up immediately.

The only thing I don’t like about the new Shark is the darkness of the smoked visor. It is stupidly dark. I just can’t see who would need a visor that black. This is odd, as the Arais I have owned, the Shoeis and the earlier Shark all had smoked visors that were plenty dark enough but didn’t make you feel as if you were in a coal mine. I prefer a smoked visor as sunlight makes me squint, and I don’t like to look guilty when I pass the police… I have sent an email to Shark to find if there is a lighter tint comparable to other visors I have owned, but I couldn’t see it in their catalogue, apart from a very light smoke that I don’t think will be dark enough (I’ve owned these visors too). When you ride in a very dark visor, you tend not to see car indicators flash as quickly as you usually do, and other hazards aren’t as obvious either. I hope Shark will tell me what percentage of light is being blocked out with the different visors they sell.

As for the safety aspect, the Race-R Pro scores 5 stars in the SMART tests (the UK government helmet safety tests) – better than the RX-7’s 4 stars. You make of helmet tests what you will, but there doesn’t seem to be any reason to suppose that the Shark is a less safe helmet than the Arai, although sales people still parrot the mantra that Arais and Shoeis are a cut about every other manufacturer. This may have been true in the 90s, but two decades later, I don’t think it stacks up.

Peripheral vision is also noticeably better with the new Shark than the old Arai too - and that has got to be a good thing.

All in all, I am delighted with the Shark Race-R Pro. It’s super comfy, quiet and looks good. If I can get a lighter tinted visor for it, it will be just about perfect.

UPDATE Sept. 16 : You can't get a lighter tinted visor, so I have written another post about this sad state of affairs here.

Living in a monochrome world

I have to buy a new crash helmet for motorbiking. No, this time I really do; I just don’t think I can reasonably avoid it any longer. I have two and they are 10 and 9 years old respectively. They look OK, but it is said that you should replace them about every 5 years as the protective cushioning inside goes hard over time and is less useful in the event of an accident – which is mainly why you are wearing the thing in the first place. Of course, you don’t know how much of this is put about by the helmet manufacturers to encourage you to keep buying their products. Are they really degraded after 5 years? It could depend on whether they have had much use, or been left in the heat or light… It could depend on many factors. Mine are kept in the cool dark and not used all that much. Still, after a decade, I suppose I must face the inevitable.

It could be vaguely exciting buying a new crash helmet, a bit like buying new shoes or a jacket. Sadly though, as far as I am concerned, it isn’t much, because they are nearly all drab monochrome. Black is definitely the in colour and preferably matt black. They told me in the shop that the yoof don’t want anything to do with colour; even the girls don’t want a black helmet with pink on it. They want plain black.

Well what’s wrong with black? Black goes with everything and it looks pretty cool. That’s fair enough. But the problem with black is that it is invisible and matt black is even more invisible, which is why it is favoured by stealth operators the world over. On a bike, it’s just not that great to be invisible as being seen might keep you out of hospital, which is why I have always favoured a flasher sort of crash helmet. To be quite fair, you can still get brightly coloured crash helmets, but they aren’t legion and the options might resemble something produced by a New York graffiti artist from the Bronx.

But it’s not just crash helmets, is it? We are increasingly living in a monochrome world. I parked my bike in Geneva a couple of weeks ago and looking around, I suddenly realised that all the bikes and scooters surrounding it were black or grey.

Now, you might think that this is a case of the pot calling the kettle black (ho! ho!) as my own bike is undeniably black. In my defence, Ducati, a couple of decades ago, adopted the Ferrari colour scheme where most of their bikes were red (probably about 80%) or yellow, black or white. I opted for black because the previous model I had was red, as were a couple of other Ducatis I had owned and I’d recently owned a bright yellow one. I wanted to be different, but now, 9 years later, I am in fact just like any other motorcyclist. And motorcyclists are supposed to be non-conformists…

There was a time a few years ago when I vaguely considered changing my car which is a sky-blue iridescent Alfa 156. But then I had a look at the colours I could have the new car in and they looked something like this:

 

The only colours you can get are dark blue (safe), Alfa red (which fades poorly in sunlight over the years) or black, white, grey or silver. Where’s the fun in that?

In fact, look around you and you are surrounded by monochrome cars.

The monochrome theme continues in clothes. When I was in London last winter (wearing my brown Timberland jacket) I looked around me as I emerged from the Underground into Oxford Street and realised that everyone was wearing a black, grey, and for a couple of daring exceptions, white coat or jacket. Had I been at Canary Wharf, that might have not seemed quite so surprising, but in Oxford Street?

Well, what should we make of this monochrome obsession? Who knows. Fashions come and go and it’s not as if monochrome is necessarily objectionable. It looks quite classy. But what it also looks is conformist. Grey and black are non-colours – the things to wear or drive if you desperately don’t want to make a statement, or stick out from the herd. They enable you to blend into obscurity. This is surely why monochrome is the colour of school uniforms and business attire where your personality is supposed to be taking the back seat to conformity to company or school values. That seems fair enough, but why then continue to adopt this conformity in your private life?

I have a nagging suspicion that this is linked to the all-invasive corporatism. As it becomes harder to get a job in a globalised era with increasing mechanisation, computerisation and outsourcing to distant geographies, people feel the need to be continual job-seekers. University courses are becoming more career-oriented. Everything is increasingly designed to get people to fit into a mould of corporate usefulness. Dressing in monochrome and driving a monochrome car, or riding a monochrome bike implies on some semiotic level, that you are someone who is to be taken seriously, who won’t rock the boat, who is a dependable professional.

I can’t help but find a certain irony in this, in the supposed age of rampant individualism. We are now all being empowered to succeed and become upwardly mobile, but this economic success seems to be dependant on conformity in thought and outward display.

Maybe things will change in a few years, but the advance of monochrome has been going on pretty much unchecked for quite a few years now – maybe the last couple of decades.

Via Sicura - the Swiss invention from hell

This is my Ducati motorcycle. It’s a 999, which means that it is a 1’000 cm3. You might not be able to tell, but it’s not very big – it weighs in at about 200kg. It’s a twin cylinder machine; you can see the top of the rear cylinder sticking up underneath the tank. You can also notice the brakes, namely the 320mm ventilated Brembos at the front. There is one rotor on each side, and each rotor is gripped by a caliper containing 4 pads, making 8 pads at the front. The rear brake, as you can see, is somewhat smaller, and it only contains two pads. It doesn’t need to be any bigger, as the weight transfer in braking is all on the front and were the rear brake to be much more powerful, you’d continually be locking the back wheel. The braking performance, as you might expect, is excellent. You might want to compare those brakes to the ones you have on your car.

The motor is pretty powerful, having perhaps somewhere between 125 and 130 bhp at the back wheel at peak rpm, but it is not especially powerful for a large motorbike these days. I bought it new in the spring of 2006, so it is now 9 years old. Ducati have in the meantime released no end of bikes and at least two further series of more powerful, cutting edge sports bikes. You might get almost 200 bhp now for your money, though it’s probably nearer a real-world 170 bhp at the wheel. Still, that’s quite a step up from my 999. Just about any large bike produced by Ducati now makes more power than mine; you don’t need to buy an out-and-out sports bike. In this respect, Ducati is not an exceptional bike manufacturer: buy almost anything over 600 cc and you can expect performance not dissimilar to my bike. Indeed, most bikes you see on the roads these days will be capable of comparable speeds and acceleration.

Quite apart from the motor and brakes, the other things that keep the bike sunny side up are the top quality suspension, a rigid frame, and very large and extremely sticky tyres (which wear out after only a few thousand kilometres and need replacing almost every year). Motorcycle technology, in all areas, has come on in leaps and bounds in the past couple of decades and most sports bikes have been developed to stand up to the extreme rigours of track riding where you cannot have too much power, or enough brakes, or sticky enough tyres. My bike could put in very respectable track times as is – you wouldn’t have to do anything to it at all.

However, the highway code in Switzerland stipulates that you aren’t allowed to exceed 80 kph (that’s 50 mph) on the open road or 120 kph (around 75 mph) on motorways. So how well suited is the Ducati 999 for those speeds? I’ve just been doing a little test to find out what riding with scrupulous regard to the speed limit is like.

I didn’t find out anything I didn’t already know about riding around in 50 kph village or town limits, as I always stick to speed limits here. Obviously there are people and houses about and you have to respect that and ride accordingly. I don’t want people haring past my own house. In a built-up area, you won’t get the Ducati out of second gear. That equates to 3000 rpm. To put this in perspective, the motor has 6 gears and a rev limiter which cuts in at 11000 rpm. It ticks over at about 1000 rpm. At 3000 rpm, the motor is lumpy and unhappy which is quite typical for a large capacity V-twin. But you can’t ride around in town in first for any length of time, as you would be riding around on a hair-trigger throttle; the slightest bump in the road is transferred to your wrist and you will be scooting off well over the limit before you know it. As it is, in second you have to be very careful and you are only using a whiff of throttle. Anything above second gear is just impossible here.

Out on the open road, once no longer in town, you are now allowed an extra 30 kph. If you stick religiously to this limit, you will be using 4000 rpm when you change into third gear and the motor will be working at the very lowest level of its happy working range. Change into fourth, and you are now doing 3500 rpm, fifth and it’s 3000, sixth, and it’s an intolerable 2500. In practice, you just can’t ride around on the road in fifth or sixth and if you insist on using fourth, you’ll not be doing your bike any good at all. Indeed, it just isn’t designed to never exceed 4000 rpm. The motors on modern bikes are race-derived. If they have a usable 10000 rpm available, you are meant to use it on occasion, or at least a good hunk of it.

Hit the motorway, and things improve somewhat, but not as much as you might expect (or like). At the legal 120 kph limit, you can just about snick the 999 up into sixth which will show 4000 rpm on the tacho. As this will give you anaemic acceleration, should you require it to get you out of trouble, and as the motor will probably not be breathing properly were you to spend a long time never exceeding 4000 rpm, you probably wouldn’t bother with sixth. You’d stay in fifth, which is only going to be a smidgeon over 4000 rpm in any case. In fact, to be quite honest, sixth gear is completely redundant in Switzerland, and outside a German autobahn, pretty much anywhere really. To use sixth gear, you really need to be doing something like 135 kph as a minimum. Bearing in mind that the speedo is no doubt a tad optimistic, you could probably use it on a French autoroute without legal problems. The Ducati 999 is cheerful at about 160 kph where it will lope along all day, sipping fuel (it really is no more thirsty at these speeds) at around 5200 rpm. You could actually do the legal Swiss motorway limit without leaving first gear. You could, but you wouldn’t.

So the machine itself is not going to be at all mechanically comfortable at 80 kph, but then neither are you. The suspension wasn’t designed for such slow speeds and riding position certainly wasn’t. The drop handlebars are designed to keep the wind off you, but at the same time, they are supporting a good amount of your body weight. At about 120 kph, these forces come into a sort of equilibrium, so that the wind force is supporting your weight, making the 999 a very comfortable bike. Towns, of course, are purgatory as navigating them is like doing press-ups with all your weight on your wrists.

But let’s say that you put up with the discomfort (which is ruining your concentration levels and your ride), and put up with the bike’s manifest unhappiness (which will be revealed as inevitable mechanical problems in the future), how do you go about riding at these legal speeds? One of the problems you will encounter is cornering. This is because for safe and smooth cornering, you need to be accelerating through the bend, but as you are already under the impression of standing still as you approach your corner at 80 kph, you won’t be able to accelerate legally at all. Cornering at these speeds is thus a threepenny-bit affair. You won’t be leant over very far at all, which means that most of your tyre will never be used. This will entail that it will only wear in the centre, squaring it off, so that on the occasion where you might use the sides a little more, such as in a very slow corner, the handling of the machine will feel unstable and suboptimal.

We may as well be honest about this: there is barely a motorcycle on the road produced in the last couple of decades or so that was designed to be ridden at legal Swiss speeds, or legal speeds pretty much anywhere. So what was the modus operandi for the average motorcycle rider? It was to respect built-up area limits and outside those limits to ride as road and traffic conditions allowed, in other words considerably faster than the legal limit. The police are not foolish. Everyone knew this and speed traps would be set essentially in accident black spots and built-up areas ensuring that reasonableness was established. Motorway speed cameras wouldn’t even be triggered under about 140 kph (or they’d catch most car-drivers too). Police, like police almost everywhere, would refrain from putting radar speed traps on dead straight roads in the middle of nowhere. Every now and again, most people would pick up a small speeding fine – enough to remind you to not drive or ride stupidly.

But in 2013 in Switzerland all this changed. Now to exceed 100 kph on the open road (in other words the legal limit in the UK) means that you automatically lose your licence for several months. On the Ducati, you won’t be out of fourth gear. If you are caught doing 140 kph outside of a motorway, it’s an automatic prison sentence and you will have a criminal record. In reality, the sentence will be a suspended one, but woe betide you if you ever get caught doing any speeding of any description in the next two years. Even a couple of kph over any limit will have you going to jail, directly to jail. And any kind of speeding, whether jail is part of the punishment or not, is accompanied by massive fines and expenses, totalling several thousand Swiss francs.

Via Sicura, as this new regime is termed, is a package of measures with the laudable intention of further reducing road accidents and the gravity of those that do occur. The objectives of the legislation cannot be argued with, even if Switzerland is one of the safest countries in the world to drive in, according to official statistics. The question that needs answering is whether the draconian punishments are necessary to achieve its aims, and whether they are justified. After all, no doubt the incidence of theft would be reduced if thieves’ hands were amputated in Switzerland as they may be in some Arab countries. In our democracies, proportionality of punishment has, until Via Sicura saw the light of day, been one of the guides to legislation.

What is certain is that Via Sicura has effectively spelt the end of motorcycling in the country. Not only can it not be enjoyed legally – which it never could, in fact – but now your life will take a serious nose-dive if you are ever caught having the remotest enjoyment on your bike.

You’re probably a non-motorcyclist (which is why this post is so detailed as to what it’s like to ride one) and you just don’t care. I suspect that this is how most of the inhabitants of Switzerland feel. But as I look around, all I see here are large BMWs, Porsches, Audis and Mercedes, not to mention a smattering of Ferraris and other exotic cars. Cars with well over 200 bhp are totally commonplace and now none of them make any sense at all. Just owning one means that you run a serious risk of prison.

Smoking dope is illegal, but the percentage of the population that has done it, or still does, is enormous. In this respect, it’s quite similar to speeding. Most people have done it, or do it. Would it be reasonable to jail anyone who smokes a joint if you thought that you could stamp out the practice? Most reasonable people would say not.

The other interesting thing about Via Sicura is that the idea of attenuating circumstances, or judgement is entirely absent. Although a person accused of breaking the speed limit will be brought before a judge, the judge has no judgement to make. The only evidence required is that of the radar. Once the robot has established that you were doing the speed you are being accused of, it’s case closed. If you were doing more than 140 kph on the open road it doesn’t matter if you’ve never had so much as a parking ticket in your entire driving life and were hurrying to take your kid to hospital, a prison sentence is on its way.

I love Switzerland, which is why I chose to become Swiss. I also love motorcycling. I used to encourage all sorts of people to come here to ride the magnificent Alpine passes. Not any more. Via Sicura is the worst thing the Swiss have invented in living memory. I just hope we will end up getting a referendum where we can all kick it out and start to breathe more easily once again though this is by no means a given. If not, it’s 1984 in 2015.

MV Agusta Rivale 800 Review – Flattery will get you nowhere

 

My Ducati 999 had to go back to the garage post its 40’000 km service, as twice on the way home it refused to start on the button and I had to bump start it. That’s not great, though if you have a hill handy, it’s not the end of the world. But clearly, you can’t always guarantee, when you stop for petrol, that you will have a hill handy, so it had to return to the witchdoctors for them to find out what the problem was. Getting to my garage isn’t simple by public transport. It takes quite a lot of walking and three trains and requires half a day, so I asked them if they couldn’t lend me a bike to get home on. They could, and offered me this MV Agusta 800 Rivale so I spend 3 days scooting about on that.

The first thing you notice about the Rivale is that it is a handsome looking motorbike. Nice chunky trellis frame, sticky tyres, triple “organ” exhaust pipes, interesting lines and novel places to put the indicators. It’s the sort of bike that is going to make you look good riding it – and who doesn’t want to look good? It all looks highly promising. I had the pleasure of a short 20 minute blat on the MV Agusta 800 F3 a couple of weeks ago, which is the supersport version of what is essentially the same motor, and my impressions were very favourable, so I was rather looking forward to my time on the naked Rivale.

Getting on the thing is slightly disconcerting. It is very tall, so that although I am a fairly average 5’10”, or 1m78, I could only get the balls of my feet on the ground as if I were on a pushbike. Clearly, shortarses need not apply to ride or own this bike. Although it is so high, the suspension doesn’t squash down much, so there you are, sitting bolt upright, looking down on any traffic that isn’t a double-decker bus. There is definitely something to be said for this position in traffic, as you get a great view of what is going on, but there is less to be said for it in other circumstances as we shall see. The riding position is very motocross, or supermoto to be more accurate in this case. That is to say, not only are you bolt upright, but you appear to be sitting more or less on the tank, with the front wheel right underneath you and the bars in a similar sort of position to your chest as if you were about to try and bench-press 100kg. It all feels quite odd. If you have been warned in the past to “sit up straight and don’t slouch!” then this bike will be very good for you, as you can’t do anything else. It will straighten your back and press your stomach muscles into play – brilliant for maintaining a healthy posture.

It was a very windy day on the day I picked it up, and the route home requires you to instantly tackle several kilometres of motorway – into the teeth of the gale, naturally. This is when you discover that wind-protection is something that the Rivale does not do in any shape or form. Not only is this a naked bike, but the ergonomics entir­ely rule out any possibility that you will be able to dodge any wind that is coming your way. Your posture converts you into a huge sail such that you feel that you should probably be tacking into a strong headwind. In fact, this lack of wind protection is something that inevitably comes to define the bike.

I used the bike over quite a variety of roads in the three days I had it. Motorway, congested town riding, swervy back-roads on a variety of surfaces. The handling is generally excellent, as you would expect with that sort of chassis and sticky Pirelli Diablo Rosso tyres. The steering head angle is quite steep and the bars very wide, so that I found the easiest way to get the Rivale to go where you wanted was by sort of steering it from your bum – squeezing a cheek to force it into the right direction. Waving the bars around can make it all a little skittish. The radially-mounted Brembos, with surprisingly, a Nissin master cylinder, are absolutely top-notch which is reassuring. You are never going to run out of brakes on this thing.

But what is a lot less top-notch is the fuelling, which, and there is no easy way to say this, is simply dreadful. The Rivale will not run comfortably at a constant speed unless you are on the motorway in 6^th. It does more hunting in town than a pack of wolves, continually searching for a rev speed at which it is comfortable and failing to find it. You can see this just by looking at the tacho which constantly flickers between values, but more to the point, you notice it as a continual lurching and stuttering. It absolutely ruins the Rivale as a bike for an urban environment and makes it very uncomfortable. I have seen several video reviews of the Rivale, and they all say how MV have fixed their fuelling problem and this bike is unaffected by it. This is complete tosh. It may be better than previous efforts by the company, but if this is so, I hate to think what those previous efforts were like. The poor fuelling puts a damper on the whole package and severely restricts your enjoyment. If you have an open road ahead of you with no speed limits and no traffic, it’s not something that is obtrusive, but throw in slowly moving traffic or a town speed limit and you can’t fail to notice the fuelling and feel a terrible frustration that it should be so awful on what is a classy bike.

It’s a great pity as otherwise, the 800cc triple motor is superb. It’s very flexible, so that it doesn’t greatly matter what gear you are in. Give it a heap of throttle and it takes off like a bat out of hell, to the accompaniment of a satisfying snarl from the triple pipes. It is supposedly good for 150 mph, but this is entirely academic, as there is so little wind protection that you won’t be exploring anything like those speeds for any length of time. In fact, this is a hugely licence-friendly bike. The wind-blast means that you just tend to keep it to legal speeds because they are where the bike, and yourself riding it, feel most comfortable. On the motorway, you get overtaken by everyone as you pootle along at 70 mph. You could go faster, but it just isn’t…well… comfortable.

It’s good that there is a gear indicator as I have rarely ridden a bike which gave so little real indication of what gear it is in. The motor always sounds busy and it is always torquey so it is hard to say if your gear choice is too high or too low. Ultimately, on the Rivale it doesn’t seem to matter much. The gear indicator is the best bit of a very poor dash. The rev counter consists of an LCD bar at the bottom, and the figures telling you how many revs you are using are written so small that you’d need reading glasses to read them. Moreover, it isn’t linear, so that the first 7’000 rpm are compressed into about 2 inches, whereas the following 9’000 rpm (yes – it really does go up to 16’000) take up the next 4 inches. Bearing in mind that you don’t really need to rev the motor beyond 8’000 to achieve very rapid acceleration, this just seems futile. Your speed is displayed in large digits in an italic font towards the top of the dash, but its top flange obscures the very top of the digits, so that you don’t know if you are being shown a 1 or a 7. Are you doing 57 kph in a 50 limit, and need to slow down, or are you doing only 51 kph? You are unlikely to get confused between 117 and 171, but you do find yourself thinking about these things, instead of being informed in an instant.

There is apparently another screen to the dash which you could access if you read the owners manual, and it might tell you things like the time, the engine temperature or the outside temperature. And it might not. I can’t say as I have never seen it. I couldn’t even figure out how to reset the trip meter, which is also written in microscopic letters.

There are a few other quibbles as well that prospective owners should be aware of. The suspension is reasonably firm, and a lot firmer than you’d expect given the riding height. There isn’t as much suspension travel as you might like and it isn’t noticeably more comfortable than the short travel suspension on my superbike Ducati. The seat is also not exactly plush. It’s probably good for about one or two hours in the saddle, but is a bit of a pain in the bum after that. The Rivale is not really an all-day bike.

The mirrors are very funky and are sort of bar-end affairs which fold in or out. Bearing in mind that the bars are already very wide, if you were planning on filtering in traffic with the mirrors extended, you can forget it. So you can either filter with no idea of what is going on behind you, or you can stay put with a great view of the cars stacked up to your rear. I found, surprise surprise, that whilst the left mirror stayed where I wanted it, the right one sort of folded in a bit at speed, rendering it useless. Out with the allen keys, then.

You do get some gizmos with your Rivale. You get a quick shifter, though I can’t really see the point of it. The bike was doing quite enough lurching as it was without additional lurches brought about by shifter-induced gear changes, so I barely used it. It’s not a trackday tool anyway, so why add this complexity and expense? You also get TC and riding modes. There are 4 of those : Rain, Normal, Sport and Custom. Custom is not a feet-forward pootling mode, but something you can customise yourself –  again, once you’ve read the owners manual. It wasn’t wet, so I didn’t use Rain. I experimented with Normal to see if it would cure the fuelling problem, but it didn’t, so I went back to Sport. I honestly couldn’t find any difference between the two – perhaps I wasn’t riding sportily enough (or wasn’t in slippy situations). You can change riding modes on the fly, so long as you have 2 more inches of thumb than I possess. The only way I could reach the button was to clutch in and coast as I took my hand off the throttle so that I could reach the button. My hands aren’t that big, but they’re fairly normal. I also spent my 3 days hooting people. This is because the horn is where you’d expect the indicator button to be. The indicators are located beneath it. It’s probably something you’d get used to in time, but still smacks of the sort of perfectible ergonomics that characterise the whole bike.

So what’s the conclusion? The Rivale appears to be a flattering bike, on the face of it, but it’s definitely in toy territory. There’s too much wind and a general lack of comfort to go anywhere very far. As a town and commuting tool, the mirrors and the fuelling pretty much rule it out. So that leaves short café hops from one village to the next, where you can look pretty cool, and if the road is twisty, you can have great fun doing it.

As I climbed back aboard my 999, it felt impossibly long and low-slung. But I quickly readapted and was able to enjoy storming down the motorway about 50 kph faster than I would have been travelling on the Rivale, with no wind in my face and with the motor just loping along and feeling purposeful. I have no quickshifter, no riding modes, no TC and no ABS and I can’t say I missed any of them. But I do have to watch out for my licence.