Matt Hull’s April column: "I'm taking our CBR around the coast and I can't wait"

I’m getting excited. I’ve decided to go on a trip, a bike trip. I’m reading bike mags and books in the loo for inspiration and ideas, I’m making lists, preparing the bike and working out what to take. I can’t wait, it’s going be great.

My friend questioned me when I told him what I wanted to do. “You’re always on a bloody bike; why are you getting so excited?” And that’s the point. For the last 15 years I’ve been lucky enough (or not if you ask my bank manager) to be riding bikes for work everyday. But every trip has always been to somewhere, for something. I see so many readers’ trips with tales of trips and pictures of smiling faces and I’m jealous.

So, where do I go? Timewise my trip has to fit in with convoluted childcare and work regimes so nine days is my max. Still two weekends sandwiching a week is enough. Western Europe could be covered easily but I know that the lure from new cultures of Eastern Europe would be too tempting and that would involve big motorway miles – I do too much as it is.

Ireland would be great but Si Toyne is going there at the end of June. Spain via a ferry would also be great but would cost too much, so instead I’ve decided to head round the UK coast. There are no set route or rules as I don’t want to miss something interesting just because it’s not on the coast. And being a fully paid up member of the shandy-drinking-softy-southerners club it’s the North of England, Scotland and Wales that interests me the most, as I’ve spent so little time there.

So journey details aside I know where I’m going, so next it’s where to stay. To make this feel like a real trip camping is the only way for me. I’ve got a good tent that packs down to a reasonable size. It goes up and down fairly easily as I don’t plan to be staying in the same place for more than one night. My trusty Trangia stove should heat up my sausages and beans in a can for evening dinner and cups of tea and I’ll grab a snack for lunch. Si Weir our resident tour expert reckons £30-£35 per day for food but I don’t have such culinary tastes, so I should save some money.

Now the exciting bit, choosing the bike. Honda’s Transalp looks good – cheap to run and the engine is the same as my Bros and very reliable. BMW’s old F650 should go on forever and be frugal too. The ubiquitous 1150 GS has more power and would eat up my journey, but have you seen how they’ve held their prices? I’d love one but I’m not spending £3000 on a 12 year old bike unless its red and Italian.

So I’ve decided to use my CBR600F. It’s already in touring mode with the lowered pegs and raised handlebars and screen. I’ll add the bigger tank I made and possibly an auxiliary tank in the boot. I also want some hard luggage, so I’ll add a topbox, and some throw over panniers should hold my undies and still give room for the tent on top. I’m also on the hunt for a tank bag for food and sundries that turns into a rucksack so I can take it with me if I leave the bike.

And that’s it so far. I just need to polish the route up so I don’t find myself rushing towards the end; that would spoil it. I can’t wait until April. I just hope the trip is as much fun as planning it is. I’ve a feeling it will be.

Matt Hull 

Kev Raymond's April column: "Don’t go breaking my heart"

I spend a fair bit of time talking to breakers. Partly in the never-ending search for reasonably priced parts to keep my shedful of rolling projects... well, rolling, and partly for research for RiDE. Over the years I've got pretty friendly with some of them and once you get past the initial, 'Oh Christ, what does he want this time...?' that comes as a normal consequence of fielding a hundred witless phone calls daily from punters who don't really know what they want (but do know they want it for nothing), they're mostly a friendly bunch. They're also mostly genuinely enthusiastic – it’s not a business you get into expecting to get rich and unless you love bikes in the first place you won't last long.

On the other hand it IS still a business and if it's not going to make most breakers rich, they do need to make a living. And for most of the ones I talk to, that's been getting harder and harder over the past few years. This isn't because customers have less money to spend. If you've got less, you're more likely to spend what you have got with a breaker rather than a dealer if the difference in price decides whether you can afford to fix your bike or not. Anyway, there's plenty of money washing around. The trouble is, it's coming from abroad, and it's buying up used and damaged bikes that would normally have ended up in breakers, and spiriting them away to be repaired or broken overseas.

I called Roy the other day, looking for some bits for the ZX-6R. "I haven't broken one in years," he said. "Can't get them. In fact it's so hard to get stock generally now I can't see how some breakers are going to manage. We're already under pressure from Ebay cowboys, but now people are coming over on the ferry and riding away on bikes that we'd have broken a few years back. Or they come over in vans and buy up half a dozen bikes at a time. In a few years there's going to be a huge gap where anyone running a five to ten-year-old bike won't be able to get used parts any more."

So where's this money coming from? Well, it's partly due to the weak pound - simple economics. But it's also due to the opening up of markets in eastern Europe, some of which haven't got a huge amount of money either, but they do have a raging thirst for the consumer goods they couldn't get for so long, and in particular for performance cars and bikes. There's no large existing pool of affordable vehicles at home, so they're naturally going to go fishing wherever there IS a big pool. And that's exactly what we've had here for the past fifteen years or so. 

In the '90s the boot was on the other foot - a strong pound meant UK breakers stocked up on European insurance write-offs, and when over-stocked French and Spanish dealers struggled to shift full-on sportsbikes the parallel importers could step in, buying up the surplus, undercutting official imports, and driving down prices for everyone. I've no doubt that at some point it'll all come full circle and it'll be us snaffling the bargains abroad again. If at that point it's hard to find parts for your '05 Fireblade in UK breakers, that'll be a short-term pain, but if it's also hard to find a UK breaker in the first place, that'll be a long-term disaster.

Kev Raymond

Simon Weir's April column – the angry version: "I can’t take much more of this. Summer can’t come soon enough…"

Indicator on, I check the mirror. Take a second to wipe drizzle from my visor, check the mirror again. Look over my shoulder. No, even though this is the longest slip-road in Britain and the outside lanes are totally unoccupied, the arsehole in the artic still isn’t moving – just sitting in the inside lane, apparently intent on either running me down or preventing me joining the main road.

If I was in a car I’d have to slam on the brakes. But I’m not – so I open the throttle harder and get out ahead of the idiot in the truck. Who has the nerve to flash his lights. Just how stupid is he? How hard is it to let another vehicle onto an empty road? Especially when that vehicle been in sight with its indicator on for probably ten long seconds.

Further down the road I spot the lowest of commuting lifeforms, the 50mph right-hand lane hog. This one’s in a Citroen Picasso, half-a-dozen smaller cars strung out behind it like the tail of slow-moving a comet. Two miles ahead, actually travelling faster in the left-hand lane than the Picasso, is a caravan. Never mind. Pablo’s happy holding everyone up.

I try to be good. I do. I really do. My willpower holds out for at least half a mile before, a vein throbbing inside my lid, I snap, move to the left of the driving lane  and slink past the queue at a crisp 70mph. I say “slink”, but by this point my fury has mounted to the point that I want a megaphone on the bike so I can shout “Get in the correct lane” at the idiot in the Citroen. Who’s on the phone. Of course. It’s possible that as I pass I suggest, by mime, that the driver likes not one or two but three types of beans in his coffee, like Gareth Hunt. Hunt. Hmmm.

Getting off the main road does precisely nothing to improve my temper. Farmer Giles has tracked filth from a field all over the road and suddenly my visor looks like a lapwing’s speckled egg. So I helpfully smear it into an opaque brown mess, effectively robbing myself of the sight in one eye. Idiot.

Naturally, that means I don’t spot the grandmother of all potholes on the way into a left-hander, thumping into it so hard one hand comes off the bar. Bloody hell – that felt bad enough to buckle the rim. Is the council ever going to do anything about these roads, or are they waiting until it takes men with ropes to winch the bike out of these craters?

I arrive in the office ready to murder someone. Anyone. Ideally Picasso-driving, HGV-licensed highway-maintenance workers who live on farms. It wasn’t that long ago I used to love commuting on a bike. What happened? Oh yes, that’s it: winter. The season where road manners and surfaces crumble.

My blood pressure can’t take much more of this. Summer can’t come soon enough…

Simon Weir

Selective perception

Hey, want to do an experiment? Of course you do, everyone loves an experiment – just click on the link below, and don’t read on until you’re done the test, it’s dead easy, only takes ninety seconds or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo

How did you get on? Fancy another crack at it? Try this one –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IGQmdoK_ZfY&feature=related

How was that? Not too hard, hey – just a bit of counting, but not as easy as it seems, I know, and the results do surprise. It’s a proper scientific experiment – give it a try on your friends, family and co-workers and, if they’re anything like mine, you’ll find the results are about the same: about half the people who take the test don’t see the gorilla. 

There’s no personality type that’s more or less likely to see the gorilla, it’s not a test of eyesight, intelligence or speed of brainwork – just, some people do, some don’t. So don’t be offended if you don’t – it just happens.

There is a point to all this – it’s all about how perceptive people are to things they’re not expecting when they’re concentrating on something else. The problem is, for you and me, that it relates roughly to how perceptive motorists can be to motorcyclists. How many times have you had someone half-pull out on you at a junction or roundabout, with a look of shock on their face. Or, even worse, a full pull-out leading to a catastrophic bike-car interface?

It happens, a lot – MAIDS was a massive European study into the causes of motorcycle accidents carried out at the turn of the millennia, and although the almost endless mass of statistics available in the report is beyond my scope to fully comprehend, some of the bullet-pointed summaries at the end make for interesting reading. 

How about 50 per cent of the almost a 1000 accidents investigated found the primary contributing factor to be driver error on behalf of another vehicle (read car/bus/van/lorry, etc)? How about over 70 per cent of other vehicle driver errors being down to a failure to perceive the motorcyclist? Or 78 per cent of accidents involving a collision with another vehicle? In less than 20 per cent of cases was speed differential with surrounding traffic thought to be a significant factor, so it’s not like we’re all hooning around like eejits.

The sad fact is, there’s nothing to be learned from this other than to be on your guard – there’s no technique we can learn that will make us more likely to be spotted. Visibility is not the main issue, although it would be wrong to assume that wearing hi-viz gear would be anything other than useful in making you more likely to be spotted and therefore statistically less likely to be pulled out in front of or into.

Nope, it’s just this – sometimes you just ain’t gonna be seen. About 50 per cent of the time, where you happen to be the unexpected event in front of someone concentrating on their driving, more or less. Even if you’re wearing a gorilla suit.  

Paul Harris 

The Magic Roundabout

I witnessed a miracle last month – rolling gently along some top-class swoopy West Midlands tarmac, I happened upon a large roundabout joining two A-roads that was in the midst of a do-over. Freshly laid tarmac glistening in the low autumnal sunlight, no one had yet had a chance to lay a brush to the unmarred surface. And would you believe it, even without all those tramlines and idiot arrows pointing the way, everyone was negotiating said roundabout in a civilised, ordered manner. I’d even bet things were running more smoothly than normal. I went round it twice, I was that happy. 

This creeping menace of road surface signage offends me. Back when I learnt to drive a car, you were taught how to negotiate roundabouts – if you’re going left or straight ahead, go in the left-hand lane, right-hand lane for turning right, and use your indicators for the benefit of other road users. Everyone followed the same rules, and as a consequence, at least through my rose-tinted specs, roundabouts in the old days used to be a kharmic pleasure zone, where all road users were united and co-operative in their methods of negotiating traffic islands, allowing traffic to flow freely and the universe to roll more easily on its cosmic path. 

Nowadays it seems every road authority has gone to insane lengths to take away any suggestion that you need to find your own way round the things, to mark and measure every inch of tarmac, big angry white arrows dictating your every move. It’s not just roundabouts, of course, and it’s not just the paint on the road that’s annoying at roundabouts – nowadays they frequently have traffic lights on them, at least round by me, and even traffic islands separating and shepherding the traffic around them (now that’s REALLY annoying). And while I have no figures to say whether heavily marked roundabouts or those with no markings are the most efficient means of keeping the traffic flowing, one thing I CAN tell you with assurance is that unmarked roundabouts are a heck of a lot less stressful to navigate. 

Take Lydiate Ash. It’s a junction I used to negotiate daily, the M5 bouncing off the A38 into Birmingham, along with an A-road in the direction of Stourbridge and the retail soul vacuum of Merry Hill. It’s also got traffic lights all the way round it and the local road painters have done more lines than Michael Barrymore. The upshot of this is that there is almost no chance of you negotiating it without having to stop at some point, and only then if you plan on exiting it at the first opportunity – if you’re traversing a few exits, you’re going to get stopped.  No ifs, no buts – you are going to stop.  

Now, in terms of the amount of time it’s going to take you to get round it, the lights probably don’t make such a big difference. Where the problem starts is when you get more than one vehicle, and specifically more than one vehicle going in the same direction. Because inevitably, what you’re going to end up having at some level is a race, and as much as the namby-pamby H&S nanny state wants no one to have to suffer the frustration of not winning, life will occasionally hand you a losing card. Losing the traffic light GP isn’t the issue, and that’s not a problem, it happens to us all from time to time. No, the problem comes when you get people lining up alongside you in a shorter queue aiming towards the same exit, hoping to jump ahead by using the wrong lane and beating you away from the lights – that’s annoying. 

Alongside that, you have the trials and tribulations of those who aren’t too sure where they’re going. Back in the day, if you were hesitant about which exit to take, you could circulate until you were sure, then filter in with the rest of a placid and easy-going automotivated nation, but in the 21^st century, you have to run the gauntlet of one or more lanes of irate motorists who all think you’re trying to steal a march and jump in front of them. Without actually timing the lights to hold you as long as possible, it’s hard to imagine anything more able to cause the greatest frustration to the largest number of people. But then, I sometimes think that that IS the role of our elected officials – it’s certainly what they seem to do best. 

Paul Harris

How did BMW bikes get to be so good?

BMW’s motorcycle division has transformed itself in less than 20 years. It used to be the provider of trusty transport to traffic cops and bearded long-distance tourers, but now it makes a huge variety of cutting-edge bikes that look amazing, push the technology envelope and set the agenda with a verve that leaves other more timid bike makers playing catch-up.

The old boxer twins used to pull off the unlikely trick of being simultaneously eccentric and dull. Today, BMW creates new niches, redefines what’s possible and converts car drivers into motorcyclists. It’s not just ahead of the curve – it’s dictating the shape and colour of the curve.

Show them a trend and they’ll buck it; the average age of a BMW motorcycle owner has gone down when everyone else’s typical buyer is getting older. And that looks likely to continue with the imminent arrival of BMW’s scooters – internal combustion versions first, with an electric version to follow, having been unveiled in impressive concept form at Frankfurt.

Like the other high-profile European niche bike makers Ducati and Triumph, BMW Motorrad (it’s German for motorcycle) has been growing market share while the Japanese have struggled. (The exchange rate has helped too, with Japanese bikes getting very expensive in the last couple of years, to the extent that BMWs are looking like tremendously good value.)

There’s no single explanation for BMW Motorrad’s huge success. Its GS models – essentially two-wheeled Range Rovers, as ridden by Charley Boorman and Ewan McGregor in the Long Way Round TV series – have been the main driving force behind the big-selling adventure bike class. That’s one big factor. BMW has returned to international road racing, albeit with distinctly mixed results, and that’s got to be another factor. The company has led the way with innovations in aerodynamics, suspension and braking – but the motorcycle buying public is notoriously conservative, so those developments could have hindered as much as helped BMW’s cause.

No, if we’re looking for the single most important element in BMW Motorrad’s transformation, it’s a charismatic American called David Robb. He spent part of his childhood in Kobe, Japan, where his father was a missionary, and later got a scholarship to the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. One of his brothers is a minor rock star, another ran security for Metallica. His hobby is acrobatic flying.

More to the point, he designed cars for Chrysler, Audi and BMW before transferring to Motorrad in 1993, at the same time as the division also got a new boss and a new engineering chief. They’ve moved on but he’s stayed – and continues to inspire change way beyond his design remit.

‘About eight years ago we had the opportunity to look at the business and we realised that people liked BMW engineering and quality – but always added “I’m not that old yet”. We were regarded as the Mercedes of motorcycling, not the BMW of motorcycling.

‘Motorrad began in 1923 and we had 40 years of winning races. In the ’60s and ’70s our bikes were very well engineered but our race heritage was no longer a high priority. They were rational and good, but lacking sex appeal. Now we think you can have both at the same time.

‘We had a car philosophy and strategy and a motorcycle philosophy and strategy. We decided to re-write them as one, to adopt the sporty and fun quality of the cars.’

When he started, BMW was selling about 30,000 bikes a year, most of them worthy plodders. Now it’s 100,000 bikes, ranging from the £5000 G650GS to the phenomenally accomplished six-cylinder K1600GT hyper-tourer. And then of course there’s the S1000RR sports bike. Unusually for a BMW, the RR accepts the Japanese terms of engagement, and uses a highly tuned four-cylinder engine, chain final drive and conventional suspension. It has one or two technical advances over the rival Honda, Suzuki, Kawasaki and Yamaha, but the real achievement is that it has matched or beaten them at their own game.

And it manages to look like a BMW, with the asymmetrical ‘split face’ that’s Robb’s signature (although he insists there are always good engineering reasons for it) and a distinctive top/bottom split. ‘Many BMWs have an upper and a lower half,’ says Robb. ‘The upper half has the contact surface, like a horse’s neck, while the lower half is more technical.’

He adds: ‘The intention with our products has been to go up a notch: sportier, faster. We have taken the design up a notch too. You need to be careful, though. If a bike looks like it’s got 200 horsepower but it’s only got 100, people will be disappointed.’

The S1000RR has sold extremely well, satisfying those BMW loyalists who had been waiting for a full-on sportsbike, but also bringing many newcomers into the BMW family. It’s as full-on as they come – think M3 GTS – to the extent that it can seem a bit overwhelming for road use. But stick with it, and you find that it’s a fundamentally very well sorted bike, and that the switchable engine mapping and other electronic aids can be made to work for you, to help you get closer to the full amazing experience. It’s one hell of a way to get to work, and it costs about the same as a Vauxhall Corsa.

Robb’s every bit as excited by the new scooters as he is by the 190bhp S1000RR. ‘Green doesn’t need to be dull or unexciting, despite what people thought for a long time. The electric concept has lots of typical BMW Motorrad elements, but not with the aggressive styling you expect from a motorcycle. It’s dynamic but not aggressive. We hope it will sell to people who are not currently motorcyclists. For the first time since the ’50s or ’60s motorcycling is becoming practical again, not just something for people with time on the weekend.’

  

KEY BIKES OF THE ROBB ERA

Funduro (1993)

Robb inherited the Funduro, the first single-cylinder BMW for decades, and for 2000 transformed it into the much more on-brand F650GS, aligning it with BMW’s Dakar heritage.

K1200RS (1997)

The big leap forward: BMW abandoned its policy of limiting bikes to 100bhp, and Robb gave the 125bhp RS the looks to match.

R1200C (1997)

‘With particular segments there are rules that you have to understand,’ says Robb. The R1200C wasn’t a cruiser in the true sense, and we didn’t fully understand that at the time.’ But he’s proud of it, and the company continues to explore possibilities for a return to this lucrative segment, dominated by Harley-Davidson.

R1100S/Boxer Cup (1999)

The path to BMW’s current World Superbike campaign with the S1000RR began with the Boxer Cup, a one-model championship using the R1100S.

C1 (2000)

A scooter with a roof. Not, it turned out, what the world had been waiting for. ‘The C1 was not well communicated,’ concedes Robb. ‘It was a great product we could have done more with. They’re now getting quite valuable; my wife has one.’

R1200GS (2004)

As bikers get older (and fatter, and creakier) they move away from their highly strung sports bikes in search of something more comfortable without being duller. This is the bike they buy, in their thousands.

HP2 Megamoto (2007)

WTF! A stripped-down, beefed-up, groundshaking, hardcore off-road version of the GS. ‘That really upped the noise,’ says Robb, speaking figuratively and literally.

S1000RR (2009)

Very powerful, very fast, and rammed with electronic safety aids that allow you to use more of that power and speed.

Concept 6 (2010)

Previewed the six-cylinder engine that turned up in the K1600, but you’d like to think the styling will make its way on to a production bike too.

K1600 (2011)

‘At the moment I love the K1600GT and GTL and I’m figuring out which one to buy,’ says Robb

Scooter/electric scooter (2012)

‘Urban mobility’ is one of BMW’s new buzz phrases, and what could fit the bill better than a scooter? Well, an electric scooter could, and there’s one of those coming too, fitting in beautifully with the four-wheeled ‘i’ programme.

Colin Overland

THIS IS THE FULL TEXT OF A STORY THAT APPEARS IN THE CURRENT ISSUE OF CAR MAGAZINE IN EDITED FORM

Fastest

What would you like to see in a film about MotoGP? Not a fictional film – a documentary? Gorgeous footage, of course, with lots of tasty super slow-motion. Rider interviews and anecdotes, too, getting inside the minds of these legends and seeing them away from the relentless glare of the media spotlight. Boat-loads of race action, we’ll need that too, and let’s add the insights of a bunch of paddock insiders – all we need now is someone off of Star Wars to do the commentary. I think that’s about all the boxes ticked, no?

Fastest is the latest incarnation in a series of documentary films about the world of MotoGP from director Mark Neale, and it ticks every one of the boxes above with a spectacular flourish. It’s to the film’s credit that it doesn’t follow a simple “this is what happened in race one, this is what happened in race two...” discourse of the 2010 season. Instead, the narrative is very non-linear, touching on a point here that links to another point there, exploring the theme and perhaps touching on another direction that would be interesting to pursue. As a consequence, darting about from point to point, it covers an awful lot of ground and stands a mile above a simple review of the season.

It does tell the story of the season, of course, but almost as an aside – far more, it paints a picture of the sport as a whole. If you wanted to show someone – an apathetic spouse, for example, or an indifferent relative – why the world of bike sport in general and MotoGP in particular is as all-encompassingly brilliant as we all know it is, you could do far worse than to sit them in front of the telly with Fastest queued up on the DVD player for a couple of hours.

That’s not to say that the appeal is only for the uneducated – even for the hardened fan I would think there’s much to enjoy. The aforementioned footage, of course, is a glorious visual treat, but maybe some of the more interesting segments are those where the riders are speaking – mostly shot with the rider on their own, everyone they speak to is open and straightforward, and you get some interesting insights. Without wishing to give anything away, Jorge Lorenzo’s recount of the start of his MotoGP career was a particular standout. That boy is tough.

Is there a downside? Well, it’s not perfect – it didn’t seem to showcase the rather pleasant noises that the modern premier class GP bike emits as much as I’d hoped, although in all fairness I need to give it a second chance by cranking up the TV at home. But on the subject of noise, I thought Ewan’s commentary was fairly indifferent – not bad, by any stretch, but a bit flat, not particularly inspiring. Seems pernickety to moan about how the words are spoken when the words themselves are so good, however.

Overall, I loved it – interesting, engaging, informative, entertaining. How could I give it anything other than 4.6 out of 5?

Paul Harris