I Have Seen the Enemy

I Have Seen The Enemy

EDITORIAL

And his initials are not BHP

To HEAR SOME PEOPLE TELL IT. TO day's greatest threat to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not nuclear war. Not inflation or crime. Not famine or poverty. Nope, to them, the scourge of mankind is that old demon horsepower: and any vehicle that has lots of it obviously is an instrument of the devil. Do away with anything that makes enough power to get out of its own way, they tell us, and the streets will be safe for us all once again.

Prior to mId-1980, the chances of me ever adopting that point of view were slim. After that, they were none. Because if memory serves me right, it was on June 24th of that year that I got a much-too-explicit demonstra tion of a major flaw in that philoso phy. I was about a third of the way through an intersection, somewhere in the vast urban wasteland of Los Angeles, when a speeding Chevy Camaro suddenly appeared on the left, barrelling straight toward me with no apparent intention of stop ping or swerving out of the way. I had the green light, so the Camaro driver was dead-wrong. but my concern at that instant was to prevent myself from being dead-rig/it-literally. I only had milliseconds to react, but my instincts told me that maneuver ing to the right or left would be futile, that braking would merely get me centerpunched by the right-front fender rather than the left-front, and that downshifting would waste just enough time to ensure that I'd die in the proper gear. The only possible way out was straight ahead. Andfast.

we get to he important part. I had the good fortune that day to be aboard a new GS1 100 Suzuki, a mo torcycle that not only was the king of the quarter-mile in 1980, but also had enough engine response and roll on acceleration to separate both shoulders simultaneously. So, from my speed of 30 or 35 mph in second gear. roughly about 4000 rpm, I sim ply dumped the throttle wide-open and prayed.

I don~t k'now exactly how close I came to becoming a hood ornament, but I'll wager that had there been one more coat of paint on the Camaro, its front fender would have broken my taillight. More to the point, though, if the Suzuki would have had one less horsepower at the ready-just one-I might not be here to tell you about it. So I don't want to hear any nonsense about horsepower being evil. In my world, horsepower is good. Horse power is my friend. Horsepower saved my life.

Actually, that wasn't the first time that an instant burst of power had gotten me out of a bind, nor would it be the last. It just happened to be the most graphic-and the closest call. But there also was the time a loony in a Porsche almost got me. He was cut ting through light freeway traffic like O.J. Simpson through an elementary school backfield when he came up on me from behind traveling 20 or 30 mph faster than I was going. I guess he didn't see me, nor did I see him, until he was right on my rear fender. I was riding a Yamaha XS1 100 that day-another bike renowned for its phenomenal power and accelera tion-and a quick downshift and a handful of throttle instantly launched me out of the danger zone. Then there was the time two cars cot tided on the opposite side of the road and sent a nice collection of shrapnel careening over to my side. Only the 100-plus horsepower of a GPzl 100 bailed me out of that one.

I could cite more instances, but those three are sufficient to illustrate my point. The anti-horsepower folks seem to assume that everything that might cause an accident happens more or less in front of you. and that avoiding all potential mishaps in volves only stopping or slowing or steering, but never accelerating quickly. And that's simply not the case. Granted, most avoidable acci dents can be prevented by a reduc tion in speed or a change in direction; but survival is based on avoiding a/l accidents, not just most of them. And that includes the ones that attack from the rear.

Of course, the anti-horsepower league's premise is that far more acci dents are caused by power than are prevented by it. But that's not true, either. Horsepower doesn't hurt peo ple: the indiscriminate use of horse power sometimes does. And I think it's here where the critics of power and performance go astray, because the presence of something and the in discriminate use of it are not one and the same. But as far as the foes of power are concerned, if a few can't use it properly, then none should have it at all.

Not only is that a truly mindless position to take, it's an insult to the intelligence of anyone who's ex pected to believe it. You don't have to be a Rhodes scholar to figure out that the indiscriminate use of practi cally anything can cause injury or death-and, in fact, it regularly does. Yet there aren't movements afoot to outlaw everything from bathtubs to baby pillows, from hair dryers to elec tric heaters, from baseball bats to tire irons, even though the indiscriminate use of everyday items like these causes thousands upon thousands of accidents every year.

Now, I'm not denying that some people are better equipped than oth ers to deal with large doses of horse power: but the solution is not to make that power off-limits for the rest of the populace. Instead, the answer lies elsewhere, perhaps in a multi-level li censing system based on engine dis placement such as used in Japan, or at least in teaching people how to ride instead of simply showing them how to pass the test. All I know is that had someone succeeded five years ago in instituting maximum-horsepower legislation. quite a few people might not still be with us today. Including the one whose signature appears at the end of this 1in~.

Paul Dean