Motorcycles old and new: the models, buying and owning, gear and the rides worth taking.
Weight is the thing nobody warns you about. Horsepower you can manage, and the wind, the miles, the early starts are all fine. But a bike that tips past 500 pounds at a gas station with a slight camber in the pavement becomes a problem that has nothing to do with how well you ride….
The door chime, the parts man wiping his hands on a shop rag before he’d touch your money, the blue haze of someone test-firing a two-stroke out back. That was a motorcycle shop in the 1970s. No touchscreens, and no ordering a part from a warehouse three states away. If the shop didn’t have it…
The honeymoon bike has been parked in the garage for three decades, and now you’re standing on a showroom floor with your reading glasses pushed up, pretending you understand ABS brake modules. Your heart does a thing it hasn’t done since you were nineteen. You tell yourself you’re being practical. You are absolutely not. Shopping…
The bike was wrong for you, and you knew it in the parking lot, somewhere behind your sternum, the same place that knew the last three bad decisions. Then the tank caught the afternoon light and your judgment left the building. We’ve all stood there — keys to our sensible life in one pocket, phone…
A barn-find Triumph with a seized engine and a title in a shoebox will teach you more about human nature than any self-help book on the shelf. First comes the optimism when you push it into the light, then the denial when one problem quietly becomes six, and finally the stubborn refusal to walk away…
You will stand in a showroom, lean over a tank you have no business affording, and feel your heart do the thing it was not supposed to do at your age. Then you go home and pretend the decision was rational. It never was. The wiring that pulls us toward one bike over another is…
The pull-cord snapped back three times before the little engine caught, then coughed blue smoke across the gravel and the whole afternoon changed. Before anyone had a license or a curfew, there was a machine small enough to hide in a garage and loud enough to annoy the neighbors. Some folded into a suitcase. Some…
Many of these bikes never saw a showroom floor. They came out of garages, race shops and small factories, built by men who cared more about the engineering than the ledger. A rotary Dutch tourer. A Grand Prix twin assembled by hand in Milan. A boat-engine racer that somehow beat the Japanese. The survivors —…
The browser history gives it away. Three in the morning, twelve tabs deep comparing torque figures on bikes you have no business owning, and you tell yourself this is research. It isn’t. It’s the same wiring that makes a man buy a boat he’ll use twice, or sign up for surfing lessons at fifty-two. Shopping…
The real money, and the real conversations at Bonhams and in the paddock at Goodwood, happens around machines most riders have never thrown a leg over. Hand-welded frames from a workshop in Rimini. A Dutch superbike running a Wankel rotary. A turbocharged Swiss exotic with a frame builder’s signature in the backbone. These were low-volume…
Ask around any coffee stop on a Sunday morning and you’ll hear the same story told a dozen ways. Somebody sold the bike in 1986 for a few hundred bucks to cover a mortgage payment or buy a minivan, and now the thing trades for the price of a decent used truck. These machines defined…