Leanings

LEANINGS

Long legs

Peter Egan

LAST MONTH I FOUND MYSELF OUT IN the garage, doing the unimaginable: lowering the overall gearing on a road bike. Off with the 37-tooth rear sprocket and on with a 39.

Yes. My new 900SS SP Ducati, like the old one I had a few years ago, actually came from the factory with gearing a little too tall for my rarefied tastes. An almost unprecedented circumstance.

Despite the Ducati’s relatively wide powerband and non-astronomical redline, top gear drops it just below the bottom edge of smoothness and grunt in the 60-70 mph range, requiring a downshift to fifth for serene running at semi-legal speeds. In sixth, it’s chinking and chattering slightly and you can almost feel the individual power pulses hitting the chain. There’s probably no harm in leaving it in fifth on the highway, of course, but philosophically it seems Wrong.

I’ve been told this long-legged gearing was chosen partly to get the bike past the federal sound meters. Fair enough, and easy to change. The replacement aluminum sprocket cost me only $39, and I have found it raises cruising rpm by a few hundred crucial revs at 70 mph (3800 to 4000, givertakeafew), just enough to put the engine in a slightly mellower zone.

Anyway, it’s almost a relief to find a road bike whose stride is actually too long for a change. Historically, most bikes have surprised or disappointed me in the other direction.

In the mid-Seventies, when I was riding and racing my Honda 400F, that bike had a reputation as revving like a blender set on Liquify. It had a 10,000rpm redline, nearly unheard of at the time, and produced a shriek that made you think either Honda GP bikes or blended margaritas, or both at the same time. Nirvana.

I didn’t mind the high revs in a small-displacement motorcycle because (a) it was very smooth and (b) that’s how you get more horsepower out of a small set of pistons-many, many tiny bangs adding up to give you acceleration, much the way grains of sand add up to give you a good beach.

While riding this bike, however, I secretly imagined that guys who had big four-cylinder bikes, like Z-l Kawasakis, did not have to put up with this Dervishlike gearing. How calm and muscular their bikes must be on the highway compared with my little 400F.

Then I bought a KZ1000.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered that, while it was geared substantially taller than my 400F (4.64 vs. 6.62 overall in top gear), the KZ vibrated more and still churned out 70 mph at a distinctly buzzy 4300 rpm. I was constantly lifting the gear lever with my toe to see if I hadn’t made a mistake and left it in fourth.

I don’t know what I was expecting. Maybe something on the order of a Henderson Four, a locomotive-like stump-puller with long, easy strides. Maybe not one bang per fencepost, but not several thousand bangs, either. Why did a lOOOcc engine in a motorcycle have to be so confoundedly busy?

The answer, of course, was to compete; to produce low ETs in the quarter-mile, to win the horsepower wars on the brochure and to win Superbike races. To sell bikes to guys like me, who always say they want more horsepower and acceleration.

Of course we now have 600-11 OOcc sportbikes that make my 400F look like a John Deere tractor. Road tests regularly carry lines like, “While the new Zipfire 1100 makes only adequate power below 9000 rpm, it builds a tremendous wallop as the needle zings toward its 13,500-rpm redline.” Generally speaking, my reaction to this news is, “Really? How unfortunate for the owner.”

To me, these characteristics are ultimately ungratifying once you get off the racetrack. On the highway-especially on a long trip-a whining engine begins to sound like just that. Again, the left toe probes upward, looking for relief.

' Luckily, there’s lots of relief around, seemingly more every year.

Harleys-once you clear away all the lifestyle smoke-continue to sell well at least partly because they provide a fair amount of torque where most people really use it, and a relaxed highway gait. Ditto Ducatis, as mentioned. And a few years ago BMW finally fattened the midrange and brought the revs down on its K1100s, relative to the old KlOOs they replaced. Good move.

Honda’s ST1100 was one of that company’s first real attempts to calm down a big-bore Four and tailor it specifically to riders who don’t think a motorcycle engine has to sound like a hair dryer.

Honda and Yamaha transverse VFours achieve a similar level of tranquility through crank and piston orientation. They rev like inline-Fours but have almost the soothing presence of a counterbalanced Twin-or a bigblock V-8.

Actually, nearly all inline-Fours (and Triples) are now a lot better than my old KZ1000 was. Even the current crop of manic 600 sportbikes proceeds down the road with remarkably good midrange torque and relatively little commotion, considering how much potential frenzy is left on the tach. Perhaps combustion efficiency and refined engine balance are rendering moot the entire revs-per-fencepost issue.

Perhaps not.

I just ordered a set of carbon-fiber mufflers for my Ducati. I did this partly to lose some weight and gain a few horsepower. But mostly it’s just to hear a little more of that V-Twin sound. It is a song of which I never tire, no matter how long the ride or how far the horizon.

Strangely-even with that new 39tooth sprocket and a few more bangs per mile-I have never once been tempted to prod the shift lever upward to make the engine go away and leave me alone.

Maybe this is the final test, all that really matters in the private pact between rider, engine and sprocket teeth. E3