Kev Raymond’s January 2012 column… uncut

With my BMW having tripped lightly past its first 100,000 miles this month, it’s hardly surprising I’ve been musing on the subject of older, higher mileage bikes lately. For much of the 20-odd years I’ve been doing this job I’ve had access to as many new bikes as I could eat, and for a while I took full advantage. I gorged myself, because I’d come from a place where new bikes weren’t an option. They were for grown-ups – people with proper jobs and disposable incomes – and something to be gazed at longingly through showroom windows before returning to something older, cheaper, less shiny and more knackered, and going sadly on my way.

That’s bollocks of course. I was perfectly happy in the ’80s because I had a bike and a bike – any bike – meant I had freedom, fun and adventure. I just couldn’t help feeling that I’d be having even more fun if the bikes I had weren’t quite so, well, crap. The nineties and beyond showed that I was sort of right – I had even more fun, which I assumed was because the bikes were newer, but actually it was because they were better.

What I didn’t realise in the ’80s was the crap bikes I rode weren’t crap because they were old or high mileage - they’d always been crap. My 1977 Suzuki GS750 was one of the world’s ultimate superbikes when it was new. It made about 60bhp, weighed a ton, was slow, handled like a barge and the brakes were rubbish. When I got it 10 years and 30,000 miles later it was also rusty and worn out, and the electrics had long ago given up. I loved it at the time (and I wish I still had it) but I wouldn’t pretend it was an intrinsically great bike. The equivalent 10-year-old today would be an early GSX-R1000. I rode one of those the other day and with 40,000 miles on the clock it still wheelied out of corners, offered more grip, handling and braking than I could exploit and looked like 10 minutes with a soft cloth would have it gleaming.

I have a theory, and it’s one I never tire of boring people with, so you needn’t think you’re going to get away without hearing it. It states that the average sportsbike started to outperform and out-handle the average rider in about 1988 (the year of the first CBR600, the second GSX-R750 and the once-in-a-lifetime RC30). Up til then the bike was the limiting factor. Now we have 200bhp sportsbikes that handle better than the GP bikes of the two-stroke era. Has it all gone too far? Probably, but I’m not complaining because there’s been a trickle-down effect on more everyday bikes too. The important thing is that while performance, braking and handling have gone through the roof, and prices have dropped through the floor, at the same time reliability and build quality have moved on so far they’re not even in the same building. That means there’s a huge pool of well-developed, fine handling, reliable bikes out there for absolute peanuts.

I still love new bikes. I love to follow the latest developments, I love to pore over their spec sheets and I love to sit on them at the NEC show making ‘Vroomm’ sounds. I love to ride them when I get the chance. But I don’t particularly want to own one and I certainly don’t want to buy one. New bikes are still for grown-ups and frankly, they can keep ’em.

So I’m back to where I came from – buying cut-price high-mileage bikes and keeping them on the road on a tight budget. The difference now is the bikes are bloody brilliant. Economic downturn? Global meltdown? We’ve never had it so good.