Sharing

SHARING

UP FRONT

EDITOR'S LETTER

WHO GETS TO SHARE YOUR RIDE?

Every day at CW is borrowed-bike day. Riding other people’s motorcycles is fundamental to our business, but it’s actually pretty uncommon to just hand your personal bike to others.

Particularly a vintage bike. I had this unusual occasion at the Quail Motorcycle Gathering, in a double sense. First, for our pre-Quail early morning Cycle World Tour, I was offered a ride on Jack Massarello’s rare 1988 Honda Africa Twin (a machine never sold new in the US) as a contrast to the 2016 Africa Twin I’d ridden up Highway 1 two days previously. Massarello had imported his vintage Africa Twin after time living in Germany and brought home an additional four other (!) similar ones with him. It was an interesting sample of late ’80s adventure-bike tech, and all he had to say before I got on was, “There’s a new rattle, but I’m not sure what it is.” On the road, it had all the high function and polish you’d expect from a Honda of that era, and having just gotten off a 100-mile ride on my 1954 Velocette MSS I could detect no rattle!

The second instance was on the very same CW Tour breakfast ride that I rode Massarello’s bike, when I handed over my Velocette to Kim Young, a longtime friend I first met at our Rolling Concours events at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, California, circa 2000. The strangeness here was giving her my ’54 Velo with all its quirks and hardly needing to explain a thing. Young is also in the Velo club and typically rides a ’30 KSS overhead-cam 350. So when I’d normally tell somebody to watch out for the ineffective brakes, mind the flexible chassis, etc., all I had to say was, “Have fun,” because she was stepping forward in time from a prewar rigid bike with girder fork, smaller brakes, exposed valve springs, and manual ignition timing! She thought it was amazing and fast, and I knew I had nothing to worry about because her résumé was impeccable.

After this experience, it occurred to me that most modern bikes offer the opposite of explaining how a Velocette might or might not behave to an unsuspecting borrower. Yes, electronic rider aids, power modes, electronic suspension all (usually) require quite a bit of familiarity on the rider’s part to use to good effect. If the most perfect bikes are the ones that require the least amount of explaining when you lend them out, an ’88 Africa Twin is looking pretty good!

And a final thought on sharing: Our fundamental job at Cycle World is to share our experience and experiences of riding motorcycles and meeting the amazing personalities we meet on two wheels. To that end, we have hired Sean MacDonald as a new addition to the staff. MacDonald spent the last several years working on a variety of motorcycle websites building a fan base and community around solid storytelling, deep motorcycle enthusiasm, and sharing his exploits in social media to give readers a real insight into the machines and adventures we love. He joins the best testers and editors the business has ever seen: Bradley Adams, Blake Conner, Don Canet, and writer/ photographer Jeff Allen. And there’s no doubt he’ll learn something from Kevin Cameron, since we all do that almost every day! This makes up the most wellrounded full-time staff of any motorcycle publication, and I’m proud that Cycle World can add staff members at a time when other magazines and websites are being cut back or shut down. And so we expand on our strong foundation of great empirical testing with real numbers and meaningful data conveyed with art, style, and enthusiasm. Thanks for riding with us.

MARK HOYER

THIS MONTH'S STATS

185 LAPS BURNED AT OUR LITER-CLASS SHOOTOUT

2,bUO ESTIMATED # OF SHIFTS THAT DAY AT THE TRACK

zero REQUIRED TIRE CHANGES AFTER A FU LL DAY OF TESTING