Leanings

LEANINGS

Ever more upright

Peter Egan

I BELIEVE THE TREND FIRST STRUCK ME about two years ago, as the Slimey Crud Motorcycle Gang wended its way through the green hills of Wisconsin toward an overnight stay at the little village of Alma on the Mississippi. As we rode along, I pondered the bikes on the road ahead of me, and those in my mirrors as well.

There were about 15 of us strung out along the twists and turns of Highway 33, and I gradually became aware that nearly everyone I could see in both directions was sitting relatively upright in the saddle, with his feet beneath him and his elbows slightly out, dirt-track style.

I, on the other hand, was leaned well forward into the bars of my Ducati ST2, and only two other riders-both on Airhead RIOORSs-were seated in similar, if slightly less radical, riding positions. For perhaps the first time in years, there was only a single committed sportbike with clip-ons and rearsets-a much-modified old Moto Guzzi LeMans. Otherwise, there was little evidence of the classic caféracer riding position so prevalent in the group not long ago.

Instead, the bike of choice was the Cagiva Gran Canyon. There were at least six of these adventure/tourer/whatever Italian V-Twins in the group. Add in a couple of Ducati Monsters, a BMW RI 100GS and a Suzuki Bandit 1200 with wide, comfortable Superbike-style bars, and you have the complete picture. My ST2 and the Guzzi were beginning to look like a pair of low, rounded submarines traveling in a fleet of square-rigged sailing vessels.

Which is all a long way of saying that it has not escaped the notice of a really sharp guy like myself that nearly all of my life-long sportbike riding friends are gradually metamorphosing toward a more upright riding position, some slightly taller and more modern version of the peg-bar-seat relationship found on my ancient 1968 Triumph Trophy 500, one of the original “dual-sport” bikes of the Triumph line.

This transition has begun to remind me of one of the old “Ascent of Man” illustrations that show the human species evolving from Australopithecus, or one of those little knuckle-dragging, lemurlike hominids with no chin or forehead (sort of like your freshman photo in the high school yearbook), upward to a slightly stooped Neanderthaler who looks like Charlie Watts and onward to a Cro-Magnon who walks perfectly upright and looks, essentially, like a modern human except for his lack of Dockers and a cell phone.

At the time of our group ride to Alma, I'd made it about halfway up this sliding evolutionary scale-stooped, yet not quite down on all fours-but a lot of my riding buddies have graduated into the post Cro-Magnon era. Mike Mosiman in Colorado, for instance, bought himself a BMW RI 150GS and has called several times to tell me it’s the best-handling, easiest-to-ride motorcycle he’s ever owned. Fellow Crud Lou Terpstra recently joined the Gran Canyon brigade and told me it’s “as close to the perfect motorcycle as anything I’ve ever had.”

And the trend continues this year. A couple of Cruds have just picked up Ducati Multistradas (Multistradi?) and are presently attempting to transform their seats, via the aftermarket, into something that can be sat upon. Also, a couple more BMW GSs and a standard R-model have been added to the club.

And now, even I (yes) have moved experimentally more upright, having traded my ST2 for a black KTM 950 Adventure, which seems to remind all my friends of a praying mantis-like insect. One said, “I notice all the cicadas have gone silent or left town since you bought that thing,” and another described it as “looking like a large, fearsome insect that eats its young.” In any case, the riding position is strictly dirtbike, hardly any different from that of my KTM 525 or Suzuki DR650. You ride with your feet underneath you, elbows slightly out and faceshield at a right angle to the ground.

So what’s going on here? Are my colleagues and I simply getting old?

Well, yes, of course we are. But it’s more complicated than that.

First, you have to remember that nearly all of us d’un certain age (as the French so tactfully describe that middle ground between vibrant youth and looming death) grew up on Triumphs, Hondas, Nortons, etc. that had their handlebars and footpegs arranged pretty much like those Gran Canyons and GSs-and much as they had been (by general agreement on the norms of human comfort) since the turn of the previous century. Outside the caféracer movement in England-and real

roadracers who needed that extra 3 or 4 mph on the main straight-it seemed not to have occurred to anyone that you would want to ride around with your head lower than your butt.

That all began to change in the midSeventies with mild-and still pretty comfortable-café bikes like the Honda 400F, BMW R90S and Kawasaki Z-1R, which gradually metamorphosed into the more committed, eminently track-worthy sportbikes we have today-the 999s, RC5 Is and Rls of this world.

These are bikes I still like and admire, both technically and for the roadracing tradition they represent, and I like nothing better than a track day with a real, hard-core sportbike.

But I think my days of voluntarily riding them on the street are over.

For public roads and longer distances, I simply go faster and ride more confidently and comfortably when I have better leverage at the handlebars and a wider field of vision.

The template of my favored range of riding positions these days seems to begin with, say, a VFR Honda and arc slowly upward to the adventure-touring stance of the KTM.

Neither of which, incidentally, has a riding position quite as perfectly evolved as that on the Vincent Black Shadow I once owned, a bike from the age of mastodons and cave paintings, when the Cruds were, quite literally, still learning to walk upright