Let's Ride by Sonny Barger Page B

than a sport-tourer can actually feel lighter.
    Another disadvantage of sport-tourers, at least for newer riders, is that they are covered with expensive bodywork that can break if the bike tips over. The sad fact is that when you are learning to ride, you will most likely have a minor tip over or two. I can’t remember my first tip over, but I’ve had a few. I’d like to say I haven’t tipped my current bike, but shit happens. Even though my Vision has a lot of bodywork, it’s well designed, with stop plates underneath that are the only parts that come into contact with the ground and hold the bike at a forty-five-degree angle in the event of a low-speed tip over. Most bikes with plastic bodywork hit the ground plastic first, which can get expensive. It seems the designers at Victory understand that motorcycles inevitably fall over. If you ride long enough, you will fall down; hopefully it will only happen when you are going slowly.
    Even with all the plastic bodywork, a midsized sport-tourer can make a good choice for a newer rider, especially a newer rider who’s fairly tall—just make sure you carry good insurance. If that’s the type of bike you like, you’ll find that most midsized sport-tourers are practical, comfortable, and versatile motorcycles.
    Sport Bikes
    Back in the 1950s and 1960s Americans weren’t the only people modifying their motorcycles; Europeans were doing the same thing, only they had a different aim in mind when they started customizing their bikes. Compared with America’s long stretches of straight, wide-open highways, Europe is much more condensed, with narrow, twisting streets, crowded high-speed freeways, and winding mountain passes. Americans need bikes that are stable in a crosswind on an open road, so we tend to go for motorcycles that are long and low; Europeans have to dodge fast-moving traffic on streets that often are older than the oldest American city.
    The different needs of American riders and European riders go back so far that you can see them reflected in the types of saddles used on horses. American-style saddles put the rider in a roomy, stretched-out, upright position; European-style saddles had the rider leaning forward in a racer-type crouch, his or her legs tucked up behind.
    When the Europeans, particularly the Brits, started modifying their motorcycles, instead of building long, low, stretched-out choppers, they copied European horse riding: low-mounted handlebars, footpegs set high and back, and cut-down saddles. This put the rider into a forward-leaning racer-type riding position. The Brits called this kind of custom a “café racer,” because their riders often raced from one café to another.
    This style of motorcycle was slow to catch on in the United States. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s most European and Japanese manufacturers equipped bikes sold in Europe with low handlebars and rearset footpegs, whereas bikes shipped to the U.S. market featured lower, forward-mounted footpegs and higher handlebars, which were often called “western-style” bars, because they had a sort of cowboylike look to them.
    BMW brought the R90S, a café racer with a small fairing—more of a headlight shroud, since it didn’t do much to protect the rider from the elements—to the U.S. market in 1973. Harley followed suit with the XLCR Sportster (“XL” is Harley’s designation for the Sportster engine, and “CR” stood for “café racer”) in 1977, but its model wasn’t very successful and was the last sport-type motorcycle to wear the Harley brand until the recently introduced XR1200. Other than an oddball European bike imported into the country in extremely small quantities, café racers were thinly represented in the United States in the 1970s.
    That was about to change, thanks in large part to the development of superbike racing. By the mid-1970s road-racing motorcycles had become so specialized that they literally no longer shared a single part with their