The Racing Motorcycle
THE RACING MOTORCYCLE
CW BOOK REVIEW
John Bradley Euro Spares 1451 46th Ave. San Francisco, CA 94122 415/665-3363 400pages, $70
EVERY SO OFTEN, A MOTORCYCLE BOOK comes along that stands out from the rest as a must-have addition to the serious enthusiast’s bookcase. John Bradley’s The Racing Motorcycle: A Technical Guide for Constructors, Volume 1 is one of those. It’s literally indispensable if you want to extend your understanding of how all bikesnot just racers-work, and why.
The best compliment I can pay The Racing Motorcycle is to say that, on the basis of producing it, Bradley deserves to be ranked alongside Phil Irving as a writer gifted with the capacity to explain complicated technical concepts in a way laymen can understand. Like Irving, the author of Tuning for Speed and Speed and How to Obtain It, Bradley discusses contemporary motorcycle design in a direct, straightforward style, scorning the use of jargon or esoteric terminology in favor of plain English.
The subtitle, A Technical Guide for Constructors, is a bit of a red herring, because the book is a bible for anyone interested in understanding why people build bikes the way they do-mistakes and all. It’s also a great how-to manual: I invite anyone who reads the chapter on “Swinging Arm Geometry” to resist checking out and modifying their own bike.
This is intended as the first of two companion volumes, here relating to aerodynamics, gearing, geometry and suspension. Four hundred pages on those topics alone, replete with graphs and tables, certainly leave me looking forward to Volume II.
For anyone wanting to expand his motorcycle knowledge, The Racing Motorcycle is a compulsory purchase, well worth the steep cover price.
—Alan Cathcart
