Tabla de contenidos para Issue 4 - 18 en Cycle World

The “golden cage” is how we have sometimes described Harley-Davidson’s position in the market. Traditional customers kept buying the company’s traditional bikes. Since the big boom that started in the 1980s, Harley-Davidson has become mainstream motorcycling. But demographics have changed, and Harley-Davidson’s sales have declined along with the new-bike market. Touring bikes and Softails have seen a lot of upgrades, but even with new engines, new technology, and many new models, growth has not come. It also felt a little like the company was stuck doing the same old things—locked in the golden cage but finding it less golden. In a dramatic shift on a product and communications level, Harley-Davidson announced a significant portion of its five-year product plan, detailing new bikes that would be delivered from 2019 to 2022.…

While talking with former Ducati engineer Corrado Cecchinelli at Laguna Seca Raceway one year, I asked him what special property had made his company’s trellis steel-tube chassis so effective in racing. “It is because it was designed by a genius,” he replied simply. That genius was Massimo Tamburini, who was associated with Ducati through Cagiva’s temporary ownership of that company. But genius is a description, not an explanation. When I observed to Colin Edwards that Ducati Superbikes visibly wallowed in turns, he said: “Yeah, they wallow. But they dig in and go around the corner.” An engineer would call that wallow by its proper name: weave. Weave is the side-to-side caster oscillation of the rear of a motorcycle, at a typical frequency of two to three cycles per second. Edwards…

“You cheated!” John shouted at me. Now, normally I don’t take kindly to this kind of rhetoric. The thing is, John rode his BMW R1200GS from New Orleans to Fairbanks just for the privilege of taking on the final 500 miles to the top of Alaska. And I revealed that I had just flown in from California, to take a borrowed GS along the last glorious stretch. He was right about me. Then he told me the first of many daunting stories I would hear about the Dalton Highway. There was a thundershower, he said, lashing him with rain and hail so violently that he pulled over. When he tried to go again, the surface of the road had become so slippery that his bike wouldn’t move. “These will be…

During Dick Mann’s racing career, people said: “He sure is lucky. Just when you think someone’s got the race sewn up, he comes from nowhere to win it.” The truth was that Mann understood what machines could and could not do. He managed his resources wisely. In 1970, he won the Daytona 200 on a Honda CB750-based racer. Mike Hailwood on a BSA Triple was out on lap eight with center-piston failure. Cal Rayborn’s iron XR Harley-Davidson failed a valve. Ron Grant’s Suzuki seized, and then Gary Nixon’s Triumph Triple failed, as Hailwood’s had. And there was Mann, first at the finish. AMA racing’s rules had for years pitted 750cc Harley side-valve four-strokes against everyone else’s 500cc overhead valve (OHV) models and two-strokes. Then, in 1968, Harley-Davidson brought innovations to…

Arthur C. Clark famously said that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. That certainly applies to face shields, goggles, and glasses that automatically darken. That sorcery has existed for decades, but it has been refined and is more widely available now than ever. This change of lens shade as light increases is called photochromism, and it depends on a reversible chemical reaction that takes place when a material embedded in glass or plastic is exposed to certain wavelengths of light. Glass photochromic lenses were first offered in eyeglasses in a process invented by Corning Glass Works in the 1960s. Corning infused glass with a silver halide (generally silver chloride), and then, after casting, precisely heat-treated the lens blanks. Silver chloride molecules were transparent after the heat treatment, as…

For all of us in American road racing in the 1970s, Kel Carruthers was the man who always found a way. When Kenny Roberts went to Europe in 1978, it was with Carruthers as tech chief. Three successive 500cc World Championships were the result. Breaking into Australian racing as a teenager on home-built machinery, Carruthers made himself the one to whom Honda entrusted a replica RC161 four-cylinder 250 Grand Prix bike. That was a machine notorious for weave during corner exit, but Carruthers discovered that if he stayed down and pushed the machine up, acceleration became stable. Five years at the Australian top made European Grand Prix racing the next step. With his wife Jan—ever a force to be reckoned with—and his dad, Carruthers was ready for the GPs. They…

Most people have at least one inexplicable habit—something you do in private or late at night, thankful that no one’s watching. This probably marks me as a brand of especially boring weirdo, but I read old airplane service manuals. My favorite is a 1953 Air Force publication called Powerplant Maintenance for Reciprocating Engines. The front jacket holds a drawing of a nine-cylinder radial, and the book’s 452 pages contain everything from a treatise on the disposition of aviation fuels to prose and diagrams outlining the operation of a Curtiss electric propeller governor. Dangerous stuff, if you’re wired a certain way. But its joys are mostly in the little things. The elegant, brutally efficient language of the government repair manual, applied to virtually universal topics such as cylinder heads. “It is…

Everywhere is arguably a good place to ride a motorcycle. But for going on a big dirt adventure, Utah ranks as one of the finest places on Earth. World-class scenery that includes five stunning national parks is connected by dirt roads and trail systems that take riders from desert to alpine forest. The vast expanses available make adventure bikes the logical choice because they offer the power, comfort, and range that allow a well-equipped rider to take it all in. It also makes Utah a great place to put adventure bikes to the test. We sought the off-road-leaning middle ground in adventure machines—the Honda Africa Twin Adventure Sports DCT, KTM 1090 Adventure R, and Triumph Tiger 800 XCx—reasoning that 650cc singles don’t have the legs we were after, and larger…