The Forgotten Passenger
The forgotten passenger
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
LAST AUTUMN, JUST BEFORE WINTER came galloping across the Midwest like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (Snow, Wind, Cold & Salt), my friend Randy Wade called and asked if he and his wife Marilyn might stop by on their Honda Nighthawk and take a ride on my Ducati ST2.
Randy, you see, was shopping for a new bike.
He’s a long-time motorcyclist who drifted away from the sport, then decided to get back into it a couple of years ago. He went looking for an all-around, doeverything motorcycle, and, in short order, found a really nice used Nighthawk 750 with low miles.
He paid so little for this bike I still have a deformed skull from slapping my forehead in disbelief. Further proof that motorcycling is almost free, if you back away from the cutting edge by about 10 percent.
Anyway, Randy’s ridden the Nighthawk for several years, but decided last summer to narrow his focus and get something sportier and faster-preferably a sport-tourer that he and Marilyn could use for two-up weekend trips. Hence his request to ride my ST.
Randy and Marilyn showed up on their Nighthawk, swapped bikes and disappeared into the hinterlands for an hour or so to try out the Ducati. Before leaving, Randy told me they’d just come from a motorcycle shop in Madison, where they’d ridden a slightly used 1998 Honda VFR800, which he’d liked.
When the Ducati returned, they got off and looked the bike over for a while. “Well, how was it?” I asked.
“Not as comfortable as the VFR,” Randy said. “The seat is harder and narrower and the bars are farther forward, so you’re stretched over the tank more. But the suspension, engine torque and brakes are great. Also, it’s a really distinctivelooking bike, and it has luggage, which the Honda doesn’t.”
I raised an eyebrow and nodded. Those were exactly my impressions of the ST2 after a season of ownership. I wondered if perhaps we should hire Randy to do ina-nutshell riding impressions for our annual Buyer’s Guide. Also, his criticisms of the bike were precisely those recently rectified by Ducati with the new ST3.
I turned to Marilyn and said, “How did the passenger like it?”
She smiled wanly and shrugged. “It’s okay,” she said, “about like the VFR. I can live with both of them, but neither one is as comfortable and pleasant to ride on as the Nighthawk. I don’t like being perched way up high in the wind. The old Nighthawk is just so comfortable. The seat is nice and flat, and I’m more tucked into the bike.”
Interestingly, those impressions were almost word-for-word like my wife Barbara’s.
Barb doesn’t really mind the ST2, but she’s not ecstatic about it, either. She reports feeling a little too high up, too much in the wind, tipped slightly downhill and just a bit remote from the center of the bike.
I should add here that Barb has almost never complained about a passenger seat on a motorcycle in our 37 years (yikes!) of riding and touring together. She’s cheerfully ridden across the country on every manner of bike-including the CB160 Honda I had when we met-without much negative comment.
The only accommodations she ever criticized aloud were the pillion fender pad on an old Sportster, described as “like sitting on a Gideon’s Bible,” and the passenger seat on my Ducati 996, which, after a 25-mile ride, she pronounced “the worst thing I ever sat on.”
But, of course, the Ducati 996 was never really intended as a two-up motorcycle. I think the passenger seat was just put there to make the purchase seem less selfish. But it’s sort of pointless, like installing a rear jumpseat in a Kamikaze airplane. Why would you want to ride back there? If I had it to do over again, I’d have admitted to myself that I was buying a track bike and gotten the monoposto version.
Another bad one was my Harley XLCR Café Racer. The optional snap-on dual seat came with footpegs that screwed into the hollow axle, and everything was in the wrong place. Halfway around the block, I thought Barb was going to leap off and call a cab. She never rode on it a second time.
That’s okay. Some bikes are just meant to be ridden solo, and the XLCR is one of them. But sport-touring bikes should make both the rider and passenger feel at home, and Barb carries vivid memories of some of her favorites. Any time the subject comes up, she mentions, longingly, the flat, cushy saddles and ample legroom on both our old 1975 Norton Commando Interstate and the 1980 Suzuki GS1000 we rode across the U.S. Our 1980 Kawasaki KZ1000 Mk. II was another favorite, as were all three BMWs we’ve owned, especially the 1984 R100RS. The Electra-Glide Sport and Road King she deemed comfortable, too, but they didn’t go fast enough or lean over far enough to please my speed-demon spouse. Plushness at the expense of speed and handling has never impressed her. Just a born sport-tourist, I guess.
Except for that small handful of bikes, very few others have made her honorable-mention list over the years. And you’ll notice that most of her favorites are now about 20 years old, or more.
But Barb’s criticisms (when she makes them) of current sport-tourers are almost always the same, and they echo those of Marilyn Wade: Too high; too much wind-blast; seat slanted downhill so all the braking force transfers on to the rider’s (my) wrists; hard to climb off and on; an insecure, out-on-a-limb lack of oneness with the bike and rider.
I’ve often wondered why car manufacturers make so many undistinguished cars, when good-looking sheetmetal doesn’t cost any more than the ugly stuff. Like style in cars, comfort on motorcycles is almost free; it costs the manufacturer hardly anything.
And, in this family at least, it sells bikes. The lack of it sometimes gets them traded in. □
