Leanings

LEANINGS

Café-Racers of the Disco Decade

Peter Egan

YESTERDAY WAS A DAY OF BIG MOTORcycle plans. It was projected to be one of the last warm, balmy days of late autumn by our “Storm Team” TV weather forecasters, who, I’ve noticed, seem to issue a forecast every day whether there’s a storm coming or not. But I suppose they can’t call themselves the “Dead Calm Team” or the “Gloomy Overcast Team” or just the “Usual Crappy Weather Team.” It wouldn’t sound dramatic. Still, I can remember when it was just “The Weather.” But I guess that was too obvious.

But back to bikes. I decided to take advantage of this warm windfall of nonstormy weather by running my small collection of bikes (one at a time) to the nearest gas station for a fill-up augmented with a few ounces of Sta-Bil in the gas tank. Winter preparation for impending storage, in other words.

First, however, I had to drink my usual five cups of coffee on the front porch and jitter my way through the motorcycle classifieds in the morning paper.

“Uh, oh,” I said aloud, setting down my coffee cup.

“What is it?” My wife Barbara asked, concerned.

“A 1975 400F Honda for only $900.”

“Uh, oh,” she said.

Low miles and excellent condition, it said, with an aftermarket 4-into-1 header and the original exhaust system. I walked to the phone and called the owner, who lived in the nearby big city of Madison, Wisconsin. We agreed to meet at his rented storage garage in a back alley, so I drove into town, first sticking a checkbook into my back pocket and throwing my ramp into the van, just in case.

When the garage door opened and I finally saw the Honda, I breathed a huge sigh of relief. The bike was rough. Repainted gas tank, dented headlight, badly re-stitched seat, acid corrosion on the swingarm, etc. Not for me. I used to take on projects like this when I was slightly stupider (yes, such things are possible), but I have finally come to realize that restoring Japanese bikes in bad condition will always cost you about $2000 more than just going out and paying top dollar for the nicest one in existence.

I say I breathed a huge sigh of relief because I need another motorcycle in my garage like a hole in the head, and by not buying the 400F I immediately saved myself the purchase price, restoration costs, insurance premiums and a long wait in line for plates and registration at the DMV

Still, I am almost helpless not to go look at a Honda 400F when one appears in the paper. Why? Because it’s a sublimely beautiful bike from an era of motorcycling of which I am inordinately fond, the age of the mid-Seventies café-racer.

The Seventies, of course, have gotten a bad rap on nearly all fronts: The Vietnam war fizzled to a pathetic rout; Nixon resigned in disgrace; the Iranians held our hostages forever while we did almost nothing about it; most fashions were dreadful; cars got uglier, harder to work on and less powerful; and rock ’n’ roll (with a few bright exceptions) got so bad, thousands turned to disco, just so they could dance to something.

(Egan’s Universal Cultural Rule Number 8: Humans will dance. If you stop them one place, they’ll go somewhere else. We are a butt-shaking species that likes to get down, get down tonight.)

But amid all this squalor and degeneration, motorcycles actually got better in those years. This is a strange thing to say, coming from a Britbike guy steeped in Sixties Triumphs, Nortons, Velocettes, etc., because this is when most of those companies died off. I hated to see them go, but they had their best work behind them (still available for restoration and riding, even now), and there were new and exciting things in showrooms to take our minds off the British debacle. Specifically, a fine generation of factory-built café-racers.

Let’s look at the period from 1974-1978, for example. In those few years you could have bought, brand-new: a BMW R90S in moody Silver Smoke or shimmering Daytona Orange; a silver-and-blue bevel-drive Ducati 900SS with “race-kit” Conti mufflers and big Dell’Orto carburetors; the brutally lovely black Harley XLCR Café Racer; that stunning classic, the Moto Guzzi V7 Sport or its 750-S3 and 850 Le Mans progeny; the formidable Laverda 750 SFC or Jota; the muscular Kawasaki Z-1R and, of course, the jewel-like Honda 400F I mentioned, plus the 550 Supersport as well. Even England-home of the café-racer concept-managed to crank out the John Player Norton racer replica at the last minute.

This is an extraordinarily nice group of bikes to choose from. Unlike some of my Sixties favorites, most of these motorcycles were fast and reli’ able, with good brakes and handling that was either adequate or downright superb. They also had an intense mechanical presence and spare, classical styling that reflected an honest relationship with function. You didn’t get the feeling the designers had run out of ideas and were just adding curves and plastic for the hell of it. Also, there wasn’t much plastic.

Years ago, I wrote a piece for Road & Track about all the cars that were available the year I graduated from high school, 1966.1 noted that it would cause no hardship for me, esthetically or functionally, if some strange law required that I buy no car built after my graduation. Just drop off my Cobra, Sting Ray, GT350, 91 IS and E-type, please. I’ll get by somehow.

I’m not sure I’d want to be stuck in the Sixties, motorcycle-wise, but I could certainly get by on that batch of mid-Seventies bikes. And if I were in the mood to collect motorcycles with some theme in mind, that is where the thematic center of my collection would lie, pivoting on a fulcrum placed somewhere around 1975.

I love my few modern bikes, of course, but to turn on your garage lights and find an R90S, 900SS, V7 Sport and XLCR sitting there would not be too hard to take. With, say, a nice clean little 400F for flavor.

Almost makes up for disco. And Iran, and Watergate...and those chocolatebrown bell-bottomed leathers with big collars flapping in the wind.

No matter how bad things are, the gods always leave us something to live for. Humans will dance.