Change

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OK, so maybe we’re not ready for the Nuda’s two-wheel drive and power steering quite yet—and the Nuda concept is 25 years old. Technology is more likely to catch on when it’s evolutionary and not revolutionary. (Cycle World Archives/)

How is it that motorcyclists so strongly resist change? After all, their choice of two wheels is in itself an act of rebellion against the bland conformity of four wheels and travel in a motorized living room.

Had we successfully resisted change, today’s motorcycles would lack rear suspension (“Nothing steers like a rigid”) and their engines would require our direct control; we’d still be using the handlebar-mounted spark and mixture levers found on so many bikes—including racers—right into the 1970s.

Frames Never Stop Evolving

Around 1925, rising motorcycle performance forced adoption of taller engine configurations, shorter wheelbases, stronger duplex-cradle construction, and bulbous “saddle tanks” set over the top frame tubes. Riders who had loved the spidery, long-and-low look of Edwardian bikes with their bendy bicycle frames and soldered flat-sided tanks disliked this new look. They could blame Howard R. Davies (who would later become the “HRD” of Vincent-HRD). Sorry, my good fellows; whatever won TT races was soon perceived as beautiful.

Wire wheels would remain the only kind available until the early 1970s (“if the good Lord had intended the motorcycle to roll on cast wheels, He’d have created it so”) and chassis would continue to resemble their ancestor the bicycle, with steel tubing spelter-brazed into joining lugs, all tubes used in the least efficient way, loaded in bending.

A compromise in our own time is the “trellis” frame created by Massimo Tamburini for the 1994 Ducati 916. Its steel tubes are used more efficiently in tension and compression, as in bridge construction. The trellis is a refuge for those who reject the new orthodoxy of today’s twin-aluminum-beam chassis. KTM has now shown that steel trellis frames can win in MotoGP.

Rip Out All the Electronics!

In our own time, the response of older journalists to the coming of electronic rider aids (first in MotoGP, then in showrooms) was something like, “If I were Emperor of the World, I’d rip out all the electronics and return racing to what it should be: a contest of rider against rider.”

Yet here we are, 20 years later, and all have calmed down. We’ve ridden in rain mode on big, powerful bikes, and have actually liked it because it makes us feel like better riders. Yes, some early rider aids were clunky interfering uncles. Such initial problems have been or are being overcome. The best systems allow you to perform well with a larger margin of safety.

Shifting Gears Is a Rite of Passage?

From the 1960s onward, motorcycle manufacturers have tested the waters with automatic shift. Save for the scooter market, for decades riders have rejected automatics, even though in automobiles automatic gearboxes have fast been pushing the manual shift aside. So why do motorcyclists reject automatics?

Did we want motorcycling protected by the “skill barrier” of synchronizing the operation of clutch and throttle? Shifting gears is not a high-order skill—World War I taught the world to drive more than a hundred years ago.

If You Can’t Kickstart it, You Don’t Deserve to Ride

When Honda’s 1959 Benly 125 twin brought reliable electric starting to motorcycling, it made sense. Six years later, Harley-Davidson offered electric start on its Big Twins. But some resisted and decried electric start for “turning bikes into cars.” Kickstarting big bikes did attract onlookers. After last call at the Revere Beach’s Ebb Tide Lounge north of Boston, people lined up to see tipsy young men stiff-leg their Sportsters to life. Yet kickstarters have quietly disappeared.

Electronic Ignition Will Leave You Stranded at the Roadside

Mechanical contact-breaker-triggered ignition came to an end in the 1980s, replaced by electronics. For those too young to remember, a small ignition cam rotated at half crankshaft speed. At the crank angle where the spark was required, it opened the ignition circuit, causing a spark to jump the spark plug electrodes. The wear of the contact breaker’s rubbing block on the points cam caused the points gap to shrink, requiring—every thousand miles or maybe more often—what was called a “tune-up.” This involved cleaning and gapping the spark plugs, resetting the engine idle, adjustmenting the points gap, and setting the spark timing. (“Wanna hand me that strobe light?”) Every. Thousand. Miles.

Yet when electronic ignition—a fine step toward civilization—was offered, I heard worrying and moaning. “A rider can see what’s wrong with a points ignition and fix it. But with this new black-box thing? We’ll be stranded.”

There were some black-box failures. I had my share at the track. But with the Cold War driving electronics, reliability quickly became as solid as that of Japanese electric start. The expression “tune-up” has taken on entirely new meanings.

Are You a Mikuni Guy? A Keihin Guy? An Amal Guy?

Same applies with fuel injection versus carburetors. When technology takes a step forward, the priests of the Old Way curse the New. Those who learned carburetor tuning with main jets, slides, and metering needles resented fuel injection because it made their skills irrelevant. But their real skill is making engines run well, and fuel injection is a better, more versatile tool for achieving that. In the mid-1990s, the late Don Tilley found the electronic injection on his new Harley VR1000 Superbike racer hard to understand at first. “I decided to take the manual home and learn it,” he said. “Then it all made sense.”

It made sense because carbs and digital fuel injection (DFI) have the same purpose, simply to provide a correct fuel-air mixture over the widest possible range of conditions. As it turned out, DFI could produce a mixture under that most important of all conditions: EPA emissions testing. When the emissions laws hit, the best that carburetors could do was stutter and stall from leanness.

Fuel injection, controlled by what we want rather than being tied to engine intake vacuum as carburetors are, has eventually become able to please both the riders and the EPA.

Two-Stroke, Four-Stroke, Electric?

Humans always face problems and can’t stop devising solutions. That makes technology never-ending.

I was a two-stroke guy in the 20 years after 1965, so I saw the confusion and anger of the old-timers who came before me as the two-strokes took over. Later, it was my turn when emissions laws ended the two-stroke era. I had to remind myself that in four-strokes, it’s the same air, the same fuel, and the same laws of physics at work. Like so many others before me, I had the choice of learning the new way or going without.

Some say change is difficult for children, but in my experience, it’s not that easy for any of us.

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