How much is attitude linked to motorcycle style?

[unicornadventures]

How much is attitude linked to motorcycle style?

While driving today I experienced an interesting moment: trying to overtake at any cost was a supersports motorcycle rider, who of course managed to get through a long line of vehicles, in a blind curve, over the white line, and right behind, strictly following the rules a group of Harley Bikers.

Does that single example demonstrate that all sport bike riders are not behaving on the road and that all HD ones are very good riders? As a former scientist I cannot accept to develop a theory on just one sample. But….

There is for sure an attitude linked to each type of motorcycle, at least I can base this on personal experience and also by analysing what I can see on a daily basis. Without saying that one category is worse than the other one ,wouldn’t make any sense, it appears that some common facts can be highlighted.

Touring bikers will most of the time keep that serious behaviour carried by the look of their bike: big, serious, no joke, made for very long rides, always coming with the proper gear and very often with a passenger dressed the same way, sitting straight and quiet. Luckily they can easily lose it when another type of motorcycle comes to close or tries to overtake them. Then the fight can be on but always with them sitting straight, not even having the eyes blink a little under the helmet no one can see the huge grin!).

A bit of the same attitude can be found in the big Dakar replica bikes like the BMW GS, KTM Adventure, and some Japanese ones. But here the biker has more of an adventurous mind set and is ready to go nuts at any dirty road crossing. They can even get confused and think the three vans they just overtook were camels. In their eyes the empty deserts will always shine even if those deserts are the ride through the square from home to work.

HD or custom bikers are a special specie! All of us know the Hells Angels or Bandidos, quite a serious bunch of guys who always stayed with the HD art of bike. They don’t represent the majority of custom riders. Considering the price of such a bike those bikers are very wealthy people who have a bit of bad guy/girl chromosome in them. Because of that they won’t ride on a touring bike but will work hard on their image, especially the one reflecting in the chrome! On the road they are pretty cool dudes playing with the low revs and the good vibrations! A sort of tribal riding, nearly never alone.

Off road bikers, well those guys aren’t really a set you can analyse on the road as they spend most of their time in the woods and the mud. When you cross them on the road they will act just as if they were in the wilderness: get around the trees (cars, bikes, buses, wheelchairs, grandmas etc…) as fast as possible until you hit the next forest or wash machine.

The roadster riders are the bad boys! Wheeling, Stoppie, burn, donut etc… is their music at the red light or in front of the café! The race is on! Considering that many roadsters are just a sports bike without a fairing and due to that not looking that aggressive to the citizens and the police they allow quite some extreme behaviour (away from the cops)! As much as the first three categories are more grouping over 30 years of age people, this one gets a lot of young guys! Mainly because of the price and the engine you get. Makes sense. And with youth comes less time spent thinking about life, women/men, kids, house, dog, step mom and all that, and thus more risk taking! But on the other side those bikers also demonstrate a lot of wisdom as they created the stunt attitude! Speed, figures are controlled in special places (yes a town square is a special place…or so) and no more on open roads (even though there are many contradictory examples) saving themselves, their license and some of the people around. Smart!

As I want to stick to the major categories I will end here with the supersport bikers. Not the ones we admire on TV during the GP. No! But the ones enjoying a fine R1 or a brutal GSX-R1000 or a ZXR, in fact any or the R bikes. Even though they are expensive and the insurance cost is pure science fiction many are you riders, but the older ones have the same spirit: “I am the fastest” ! Riding with a bunch of them (well if you ride with them you are mainly one of them!) always ends up in a race whatever your mind sanity is! In fact no racing with them will go against your ego, imply listing a very long list of false excuses (the exhaust has a problem, there was a kid on the road, did you see the cops etc…) which gets boring after a while, and anyway you will be called a “"wimp"” which no one likes. One important set of accessories comes with the superbike: the full racing outfit, including the sliders (which will never get used) and of course the passenger! A brief note about them: aside the fact love for the biker is the only possible explanation for accepting to sit on a 10 cm by 10 cm board, knees under the chin, wind in the face, not seeing the scenery and praying all the long that the hands will hold; there has to be a huge masochistic desire. Or , and that is the most possible explanation, a high need for speed and adrenaline.

The great advantage with the last two categories compared to the other ones is that the transition from one to the other doesn’t need a major mind reset! Very often it comes after crashing the fairing and going on without it!

Of course all the above is my very personal view, which I share with myself, and it can differ quite a lot from yours, but this is what is great about motorcycles and bikers: it will never be a static world and everyone can have her/his point of view about us!

Oh just forgot a last item, working for all categories and which, I am sure, every biker has done: twisting the right handle just once…to see and feel !

[Mintbread]

Someone has a bug up their butt about sportsbikes.

Paragraphs may have given me reason to read the whole article.

[J.R. Bob Dobbs]

yawn, perhaps you should start your own blog?

[GrandGT]

It is also my thorough conjecture that the predisposed mindset often strongly linked to the fourth primary cortex of the vast majority of preestablished serious motorcyclist cultures discovered to be rooted in american societal subsets of this most current age are considerably faulted by their inability to digress to a derivative work similar to the renaissance of motorvehicle culture in the postmodern era which was clearly initiated by the concurrent use of propaganda in the crescendo of affection and is a clear example of poor sentence structure and rediculously dense writing with no new or interesting content whatsoever.

i thank you

[icariz83]

Over 60% of motorcycle fatalities in Colorado are linked to people over 45 in which 90% are on cruisers....

I see a connection....oh wait I don't.

[jmillheiser]

Over 60% of motorcycle fatalities in Colorado are linked to people over 45 in which 90% are on cruisers....

I see a connection....oh wait I don't.

the connection being that in colorado 99% of that 45+ cruiser riding crowd DONT wear helmets. anybody who has ridden in colorado can attest to this one (for the record wyoming is just as bad)

[Outlaw]

I bet most states without helmet laws are similar. Illinois doesn't have a helmet law, and very few cruiser riders that I see wear them.

[Outlaw]

Touring bikers will most of the time keep that serious behaviour carried by the look of their bike: big, serious, no joke, made for very long rides, always coming with the proper gear and very often with a passenger dressed the same way, sitting straight and quiet. Luckily they can easily lose it when another type of motorcycle comes to close or tries to overtake them. Then the fight can be on but always with them sitting straight, not even having the eyes blink a little under the helmet no one can see the huge grin!).

[/url]

What a joke... I have yet to see a Goldwing that can hang with a sportbike!


.

[GrandGT]

the modern ones cant with all the fairings and crap, the old goldwings before the fairings became standard are beasts

[t_bonee]

I bet most states without helmet laws are similar. Illinois doesn't have a helmet law, and very few cruiser riders that I see wear them.

Ohio has no helmet laws and I see just as many sportbike riders sans helmet as I do cruiser riders. In fact, I'd say good 85-90% of all riders I see are helmetless, regardless of whether they ride a cruiser, sporty or big tourer.

I actually saw something funny the other day. A guy riding some kinda gixxer wtih the german WW2 style helmet with the spike on top. Had to do the double take on that one.