The Book of Superbikes

THE BOOK OF SUPERBIKES

By Laurie Caddell and Mike Winfield

H.P. Books

P.O. Box 5367

Tucson, Ariz. 85703

160 pages.

$9.95 plus 75t postage and handling

Ever consider judging a book by its cover? There's surely a temptation here. The title is "Superbikes" and the initial reaction is, Gee, superbikes. We all know about them. Superbikes are the high performance machines as in Honda 750, and they're the road-racing cannons ridden by Freddie and Eddie and Wes. This book must be about them, with details on how to build your own racing engine or set up the suspension for Loudon, right?

Um, well, no. The cover has a big pic ture of a BMW R100RS which does go fast. Off to one side are three more pic tures, of the 1905 FN, the 1924 Ace and the 1951 Ariel; two inline Fours and one square Four and very good they were in their day but not the thing for winning at Road America.

Neither is this book. There is some lan guage confusion here and what The Book of Superbikes is, is a capsule history of the big-engined motorcycle-not always high performance, but big-through history.

The first hurdle is the title, the cover in a sense, which is innocently misleading.

After that, the capsules are not quite what we'd expected. The authors are Eng lish, it says on the cover. No harm in that. They're young, we'd guess and no harm in that either except that the combination means they've not ridden most of the 44 motorcycles in the book, nor have they any firsthand recollection, as it were, of the American machines. What we get are mostly descriptions, quotes from road tests and praise about the Vincent, Ariel and Triumph with more prosaic technical material on the Indian Chief and Hender son Four.

This isn't a bad book. It isn't wrong. Instead, it isn't what we thought it was and what it is, isn't as much as we would have wished.

Allan Girdler