THE VERSATILE MOTORCYCLE
IGNITION
TDC
IS IT MAINLY ABOUT HOW WE FEEL?
KEVIN CAMERON
After its up-and-down history, what has the motorcycle become? For those of us who care, what are our motivations? All this has become pretty complicated. Read the articles on “The Motorcycle” in the catalog of the Guggenheim’s icon-breaking 1998 show featuring the motorcycle as art; they read like the authors are Freud, Jung, and Reich. Better not to talk about such things. Or maybe not. Let’s tweet everything that comes into our heads and see who salutes it.
Just after 1900, when the new, noisy, and smelly IC engine was irresistible to the wealthy few, the motorcycle gave the lesswell-heeled a whiff of the happening scene.
Industry flapped ’em out. By 1913, US production at Indian in Springfield, Massachusetts, had risen to 30,000 a year. By 1923, English motorcycle output exceeded 100,000. As we are too often tempted to feel, “It’ll always be like this.” That’s how it seemed to me every year at Daytona 200 time—the Unstoppable Big Deal that I had enjoyed for so many years.
Forget permanence. Henry’s Model T, its price dropping with every economy of mass production, killed the transpo market for the US motorcycle. By denying the motorcycle the R&D funding afforded by large sales, this froze it as a rugged heavy affair with most of its suspension in the form of fat tires. Auto demand and deep holes in the Texas landscape kept fuel cheap, so our motorcycle engines were large, slow-turning, and long-lasting. Now the US motorcycle was mainly appreciated by two groups rich in emotional freight: the police and young men thirsting for cool. Other than policemen, no American needed a motorcycle. Motorcycles had become an investment in emotion.
The terrible World War of 1939-’45 reset English, European, and Asian economies to zero. People had to get to work, and what the bicycle couldn’t manage, the motorcycle did—hundreds of thousands of them. Instant industry. But only momentarily, for when auto plants were finally up and humming, European motorcycle sales tanked, as every family who could afford a motorized roof traded up. In Japan, domestic market saturation forced production to export, leading to the enduring biff, pow, sock-o collision in the US between conflicted images; bad-boy rebels in black on flatching V-twins versus the “nicest people” on their humming electric-start appliances.
In the US, a small subset of the small motorcycle subset had an athletic, competitive bent. They went racing, mostly on dirt but sometimes and increasingly on pavement. For this group, motorcycling was more than just not-a-car or a way to vaguely dissent from the national average. It was a skill. Motorcycle racing went from strength to strength from the 1970s through the ’90s then almost disappeared when the events of 2008-’09 chopped people’s nest eggs and shrank their discretionary income. All ahead stop.
What have motorcycles become since then? Lots of things. Quirky, as wishful marketeers imagined the fanciful “new buyer” for the nth time—NC700X. Miniature:
Grom and the outpouring of big-bike-styled little 300s. Expensive: the steady stream of super-trick Ducatis for those whose money was 2008-proof, sold out in advance on the internet. Associative: scramblers, trackers, ADV—evocative themes more than capabilities. People love a story, especially if it’s retro Americana that takes us back to when everything made sense.
Artists are always up to something. Orange County Choppers reduced custom bikes to a formula: Fill a shopping cart with beautiful parts, milled from solid by CNC shops that had once made wing hinges for F-ins. Zap them together in minutes with whooping air tools. Now the sails of that once-proud vessel hung slack. Too much sameness? The New Customs arrived and a trickle of alternative show visitors fattened into a flood. I’ve got it! With this chain saw we can make a chassis out of a tree trunk for this old V-7 Guz engine I picked up for a century. Leave the bark on! I like turbochargers, so let’s have two great big ones. Two-stage turbocharging—it’s got a ring to it. Cool. And Holley four-barrels—love those things. Hours at the Bridgeport with a 75-pound block of aluminum to extract this exotic finned manifold for them. Kinda fixes it so it’s hard to see where the rider goes, but as Peter Ustinov has the Schnorcedes team manager say on The Grand Prix of Gibraltar!, “Man must be a slave to his machine.”
BY THE NUMBERS
80 MINIMUM AGE OFTHE YEAR, OLD COUPLE I SAW AT THE 1998 GUGG "ART OFTHE MOTORCYCLE” SHOW OPENING. IN FRONTOFTHE LONG, LOW, YELLOW-WHEELED BOEHMERLAND, ONE MURMURED QUERULOUSLY TO THE OTHER, “ISTHATTHE KANDINSKI?”
250,000 PRICE IN US DOLLARS OF PEAK-OF-THE-MARKET KINETIC ARTCH0PPERS OF 15 YEARS AGO, EVERY PART OF WHICH REFLECTEDTHE HIGHEST STANDARDS OF CRAFTSMANSHIP AND MATERIALS.
1-2 WEEKS LENGTH 0FTIME REQUIRED FOR MOTORCYCLE CHASSIS WELDED OF AGE-HARDENING ALLOYS TO REACH FULL STRENGTH. TIME REQUIRED FOR A CHAIN SAW-FABRICATED TREE-TRUNK CHASSIS TO DO THE SAME? DUNNO.
It’s terrific fun because anything goes, and long may it wave. Unbridled creativity. Subtle themes. Buried meanings that Vladimir Nabokov could admire. What is pinstriping actually telling us? Surely learned essays are in preparation; there are PhDs to be won by scholars who boldly identify fresh social significances. Is that sarcastic cry of 1950s hotrodders, “If it won’t go, chrome it,” actually a crypto-allegory for the industrial decline of the USA?
In this way, cast-aside motorcycles, for years languishing under moldy lawn furniture and cracked Hula Hoops in garages everywhere, arise to new lives, new appreciation, as art.
Is it a new discovery that the motorcycle, in its non-transportation form, is about how we feel? About how we’ll appear to others? For every leather-clad desperado in knee-sliders aboard a heeledover GSX-R, there were always 10 in shorts, a T-shirt, and go-aheads chugging along the beach road, packing a spare helmet prominently displayed. My former rider Cliff Carr described his English North Country friend who came in from roadrace practice to wave aside the proffered stopwatch board and recorded times.
NO AMERICAN NEEDED A MOTORCYCLE. MOTORCYCLES HAD BECOME AN INVESTMENT IN EMOTION.
“Never mind my lap times. How’d I look?”
Get it right. If it ever did, motorcycling now has nothing to do with stodgy outworn recitations of bore and stroke, compression ratio, and power at rpm. Carbonfiber self-stick shelf paper looks as good as the real thing, and titanium has become a fashion color. Ducati is missing the boat if it doesn’t immediately add to the celebrated Accessory Catalog a forward-projecting, self-damping motor-pan-tilt selfie bracket with phone app to be attached to bikes, allowing video of those on or near the machine to be constantly shared with two or three hundred close personal Facebook friends. MotoGP does it. Why shouldn’t you?
