Dangerous Liaisons

Dangerous liaisons

LEANINGS

Peter Egan

I HEARD AN OLD JAZZ SONG ON THE RAdio the other day called “I Fall in Love Too Easily.” I don’t know who it’s by-you have to wait a long time (usually shortly after your own death) for DJs to back-announce their songs these days-but I can certainly identify with the subject matter.

Normal people probably see this as a tune about romantic entanglements, but I immediately spotted it as a motorcycle song. When it comes to bikes, falling in love too easily is the story of my life.

This past weekend, for instance, my wife Barbara and I flew down to St. Augustine, Florida, for a big charity motorcycle concours called Riding into History, where 250 people suffered the grave misfortune of having me as guest speaker while they were trying to eat dessert or flag down the waiter for more wine. You can hardly blame them for drinking.

Nevertheless, Barb and I had a wonderful time. We were house guests of Bill and Valerie Robinson, who helped organize the event, and 305 classic bikes showed up at the concours. On Sunday a bunch of us took a ride into historic old St. Augustine, and Bill let me ride his 1982 Honda CBX.

Some of you (the grayer ones, with great accumulated wisdom) will remember this as the last version of Honda’s amazing transverse-Six, a pearlwhite GT bike with a sport-touring fairing and hard bags. I actually wrote the CW road test on the silver version of this bike in 1981 and am pictured on the cover of our July issue, waltzing the glamorous, wide beauty down a mountain road in California.

Building a GT version of this bike with a fairing and saddlebags was, at the time, an effort by Honda to widen the appeal of a bike whose sales had been disappointing, despite the obvious visual splendor of that twin-cam Six. Shoichiro Irimajiri was the brilliant young engineer who’id designed the ethereal six-cylinder 250cc Honda racebike (among others), and he’d also done the big 1047cc CBX, injecting an element of race-bred credibility.

Despite these bloodlines, the CBX didn’t sell all that well. It was fast, greatlooking and had a lovely wail to the exhaust note, but it was also wide and a little heavy at 662 pounds with half a tank of gas. It was in about the same performance envelope as Kawasaki’s KZ1000 and the Suzuki GS1000, but those bikes were cheaper, more agile, easier to maintain and better on the racetrack.

So, after the CBX run ended in 1982, Honda still had leftover bikes and started discounting them. Heavily. The sticker on the handlebars went from $5495 all the way down to about $2695, and at that point I considered buying one myself. I was looking for a good all-purpose road bike that Barb and I could use for weekend touring in California, and I recognized the CBX as an unbelievable deal.

But.. .still.. .there were all those valves-24 of ’em-with buckets and shims. And six carburetors, all huddled tightly together. I’d owned Honda 400Fs and 750 Fours with gummed-up carburetors and knew that cleaning (or replacing) jets in these big banks of carbs was no treat. So I passed on the exotic CBX and bought a leftover 1980 Kawasaki KZ1000 MKII instead. Or, more accurately, Barb bought me one for my birthday. And so it happened that the KZ was our road-burner for the rest of the Eighties. A near miss on CBX ownership.

But riding Bill’s bike last weekend reminded me how much I like CBXs, visually and aurally. Also, they’re amazingly comfortable, with a low, flat seat and perfectly placed handlebars. Barb liked riding it as much as I did. “I could go anywhere on this bike,” she said.

So now I’ve fallen in love too easily again and returned from St. Augustine with CBXs on the brain. The old brochures are scattered around my bedside stand like autumn leaves.

Fine. But what about old BMWs? Old BMWs?

Yes. Last month, my buddy Rob Himmelmann and I hauled a couple of dirtbikes out to South Dakota to go trail riding on the cattle ranch of our friend Randy Babcock. Randy has, among other things, an old BMW R75/5 in the barn. It’s a well-worn nail with 205,000 miles showing on its now-broken odometer, but it runs like a clock.

I took this thing for an afternoon ride on the nearby gravel roads and this was yet another mistake. Here we have a simple, plain, basic, unadorned sensible motorcycle that ticks down the road with a wonderfully relaxed gait. Two carburetors, four easily-adjusted valves-all sticking out into mid-air. Looks good and handles amazingly well. So I came home from the ranch all fired up about BMW Slash-5s from the early Seventies. Got out all my books; read all the old road tests; started looking at the want-ads. I’ve been keeping my eyes open.

And now this CBX ride.

Two marvelous old motorcycles, poised like bookends of the Seventies, sitting at opposite ends of the engineering spectrum, appealing for totally different reasons, but compelling nevertheless. Pragmatism versus exoticism, with no clear winner.

There’s a 1971 R75/5 in our local paper today with only 22,000 miles on it. On the other hand, a friend of mine in D.C. has a beautiful ’81 CBX for sale. Like the one I rode on the cover.

Still, it has all those carburetors. And all those valves. Twenty-four of ’em, with buckets and shims...

Funny how the very things that make us nervous and shy also seduce, even after 25 years. And sensible things never stop making sense.