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Motorcycle manufacturers made some strange experiments as they looked for new customers or that novel idea that would create a new type of machine. Technical Editor Kevin Cameron and Editor-in-Chief Mark Hoyer go down a list of odd and wonderful machines that made it to the market--sometimes not for very long. Did you know about the two-wheel-drive dirtbike? The cruiser with the fabulously expensive front suspension? What's a Monotracer? Watch now and join us on this oddball journey.

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Transcript
00:00:00Welcome to the Cycle World Podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief. I'm with Kevin Cameron, our Technical Editor.
00:00:08Our concept, or excuse me, our topic today is a list of crazy bikes that were killed.
00:00:15So we have a list of the internet's favorite thing, a list.
00:00:19We'll try to end on an odd number so the producer can say that we have 11 or 9.
00:00:25But we're going to talk about crazy concept bikes.
00:00:27Before we get into it, America's favorite transportation rider, maybe in competition with Kevin Cameron,
00:00:36but they have, you know, different styles, let's say.
00:00:39Peter Egan has released Landings in America through Octane Press.
00:00:44I wrote a book review on this, so I won't do the book review.
00:00:48We'll put a link in the description and you can go read the review.
00:00:51Piper Cub, 1987.
00:00:56Peter and Barbara flew 7,000 miles around the United States.
00:01:01And it's not just a travel log.
00:01:04It's the best of Peter Egan.
00:01:08It really is.
00:01:08It's historical context, geography, local history, Americana,
00:01:15the struggles of traveling with less luggage space than on a Goldwing.
00:01:2120 pounds.
00:01:22They had to, that was all the luggage they could fit in the 65 horsepower Piper Cub.
00:01:26It's like go light camping.
00:01:28Yeah, 100%.
00:01:30Just anything.
00:01:32Anyway, everything you'd love.
00:01:33There's a 32 page photographic insert.
00:01:36And it's all snapshots, you know, of course, on film,
00:01:38because that's what we were doing back in the ancient days.
00:01:42And it really lends, the photos lend an intimacy to the book that is really charming.
00:01:48It's sort of like social media of the trip.
00:01:51It really is.
00:01:52Like it's what we would post on Instagram now.
00:01:55And it really gives a good feel.
00:01:57So go check that out.
00:01:59There's a link, like I said, link in the description to check out that book.
00:02:02And then we're giving a shout out to Battery Tender.
00:02:05This is the Charge and Start.
00:02:07It's a one amp trickle charger or smart charger, excuse me.
00:02:11Smart charger, meaning it knows when the battery is nearly full
00:02:13and it won't overcharge your battery.
00:02:15It's also a 1200 amp jump box, which came in handy for me the other day
00:02:19because I've been trying to extend the life of the battery on my pickup truck.
00:02:25And I, you know, I'm thrifty.
00:02:27I want to use it up until the plates just can't do it anymore.
00:02:30It's a seven-year-old battery that I've taken reasonably good care of.
00:02:34And that's why it's seven years old.
00:02:36Extending its life.
00:02:38Extending its life by not replacing it.
00:02:41Yes.
00:02:41So we're ready to replace it.
00:02:43But also I want to wait until it just can't give anymore.
00:02:47And it's the summer and it's going to stop giving because it gets hot.
00:02:51And I think that's, you know, it's either when it gets really hot
00:02:54or when it gets really cold, that's when a battery goes.
00:02:57But I'll be okay because I have this.
00:03:01So, yeah, it comes with jumper cables.
00:03:03It's reverse polarity protected.
00:03:06All kinds of extensions to get it out to your vehicle, to the battery.
00:03:12And thank you, Battery Tender, for your support.
00:03:16All right.
00:03:17Moving into crazy bikes that got killed.
00:03:20Or didn't.
00:03:21Or didn't.
00:03:22But, yeah, there's some that are still going.
00:03:28The Suzuki GT 750 two-stroke triple.
00:03:3371 to 77.
00:03:34That's a pretty good run.
00:03:35Yeah.
00:03:36This was a motorcycle that had distinction.
00:03:44I mean, three 70 by 64 millimeter cylinders are capable of some real punch.
00:03:51And when this motor was modified for AMA 750 racing in 1972, hands down, the most powerful engine in the series.
00:04:05And state that way, water cooling didn't hurt.
00:04:10Yeah.
00:04:10Because it keeps pistons from becoming hot and gummy, which makes them stick to things.
00:04:20It's a question I have, though, because, you know, it's a two-stroke, so it's firing a lot more often.
00:04:27Yep.
00:04:27But it's also bringing in cool air into the crankcase.
00:04:30Is that not helping?
00:04:34Well, what they found when they went to direct injection on certain two-strokes was that the crankcase became really hot.
00:04:43And that's bearing friction.
00:04:46So without fuel evaporating down there, you know, pour alcohol in your hands like in COVID days.
00:04:54And your hands feel cold.
00:04:57Well, that's evaporative cooling.
00:04:58And fuel and air forming a mixture cools itself off.
00:05:05And that's why crankcases always were fairly cool.
00:05:10The big N bearing itself was fairly hot.
00:05:14But the thing about GT 750 was that it had no face.
00:05:19Because they didn't tell you that this is a sport tourer or that it was a sporting tourer or a touring sportsster.
00:05:32It was without identity.
00:05:35And I think that was made in an era when people believed in the automatic power of novelty.
00:05:47People will love this because it has a two-stroke engine or whatever.
00:05:54And I also heard that these motorcycles were treasured in Germany because the question was,
00:06:07who can get to Spain quickly enough at summer vacation time or at any other time of year to get the sea-facing rooms in the hotels?
00:06:20Will it be the Swiss businessmen in big-inch BMWs and Mercedes?
00:06:25Or will it be the young madmen on water buffaloes?
00:06:30You could run them wide open and they would just sit there and hum along like an outboard motor in a troll and just going 100 miles an hour.
00:06:40Well, it was such a time.
00:06:41It was a real time of technical flexing.
00:06:43You know, you had the company, the Japanese companies were, you know, they were established.
00:06:49They were making some money and they were like, okay, what can we do?
00:06:54Yeah, novel.
00:06:55What can we do that's different?
00:06:56You know, you look at, well, we'll get to it later.
00:07:00But there was the rotary.
00:07:02Honda came out with the CB750A automatic, you know?
00:07:07Yep.
00:07:08I mean, so it was a time where people were flexing and they were also, I think, looking for their next phase of identity.
00:07:16Yeah.
00:07:16You know, what will the company mean?
00:07:17You know, Yamaha had some really big hits in the 70s, but, you know, their big bore four-stroke stuff was a little bit.
00:07:27What is it?
00:07:28Yeah, it was like, what is it?
00:07:29It was sort of this conceptual idea of, like, the 1100 triple shaft drive.
00:07:39And it was high performance, but, you know, it wasn't a super bike.
00:07:43So, yeah, I think everybody figured that out.
00:07:47But, you know, it was just an interesting time.
00:07:49Suzuki, you know, got to GS750 and we had a pretty robust, you know, experience there.
00:07:55But back to the water buffalo.
00:07:58One of the problems with any two-stroke with more than one cylinder is that the widths, say, if you're building a CB750, you're going to crowd the cylinders together and the cam drive between them, in this case, as closely as you can.
00:08:12But a two-stroke has transfer ports coming out of the side of it.
00:08:17They're like the handles on a cup or a mug.
00:08:20So, what Suzuki did was, if you imagine looking down on a row of three of these, they rotated them, eighth of a revolution, so that the transfer loops didn't conflict for the same space.
00:08:42So, they were able to crowd the cylinders that much closer together and minimize the kayak paddle motion that an unbalanced, that is, no balance shaft triple has.
00:08:58Plus, it was quite a massive engine, so I expect that it was smooth enough.
00:09:04Well, I mean, it was a time where we didn't really pay attention to vibration that much.
00:09:11Sure.
00:09:12You know, we inherently looked to reduce it with the four-cylinder, as Honda did.
00:09:18I mean, there's still buzz there.
00:09:19You know, that's secondary, right?
00:09:21Yep.
00:09:22But primary was pretty well taken care of.
00:09:24Ducati did it with the 90-degree V-Twin, which just is magically smooth.
00:09:29And BMW.
00:09:30Yeah.
00:09:30And Norton kicked out, you know, the Commando, and when it took it up to 828 cc's and then rebalanced the crank and then mounted the whole thing in a,
00:09:41you know, like a rubber, the engine.
00:09:43A bowl of gelatin.
00:09:44Yeah, a bowl of gelatin.
00:09:45You know, the engine and the swing arm were kind of unitized, and that was separated from the rest of the chassis with gigantic rubber doohickeys, rubber mounts, and then shims or vernier adjusters that allowed the engine to.
00:10:07Move in just a single plane.
00:10:10Yeah.
00:10:10In a single plane.
00:10:11So it would rotate like this, and they changed the balance to work, the balance factor on the crank to work with those rubber donuts.
00:10:18And it's like somebody throws a switch at around, you know, depending on how you have it adjusted and stuff, but 3,000, 2,800, 3,200, somewhere in that range.
00:10:26It gives you a real good feeling of life.
00:10:29Shake, shake, shake, shake, shake, and then quick, you rev up.
00:10:33I'll tell you what, a good running Norton Commando in third gear, rolling on at 2,800 and taking that up to 3,800, 4,000, a little bit more, that's a thing of beauty.
00:10:44The torque curve on that bike is pure.
00:10:47It's really nice.
00:10:48It's nothing by today's standards, probably 50 foot-pounds on our dyno rear wheel, somewhere in that range, 45 to 55, depending on how they're running, and a thing of beauty.
00:11:01But the point is, we weren't doing anything with balance, and so I think a great big triple that sounds relatively understressed and massive is a way of controlling vibration without a balance shaft.
00:11:14What's remarkable about this engine is that as powerful as it was, it was extremely simple.
00:11:21Each cylinder had two transfer ports, just as though it were the original DKW RT-125, which just had those two little transfer ports.
00:11:34In the Suzuki, they were big, but they so aimed and directed those ports such that a rising column of fresh charge adhered to the non-exhaust cylinder wall, cruised up to the cylinder head, arced over.
00:11:58These cylinder heads had no squish, they were just a smooth curve, and it worked fine.
00:12:03I made a set of Suzuki copy heads for my H2R, and they worked just as well as the squish heads.
00:12:13Then that column of fresh charge aims downward to the exhaust port, and as it's going out the exhaust port, here comes a returning positive pressure wave from the exhaust to say, this far and no farther.
00:12:29So the exhaust port closes without undue loss of charge.
00:12:35They got the cylinder filling down on this model so that it made good power.
00:12:40And Gary Nixon said of the AMA Superbike, or not Superbike, AMA 750 class bike, that'd be a pretty good little engine that works so damn hard to ride.
00:12:52Because in the one hand, you might have a copy of Gordon Jennings' two-stroke tuner's handbook.
00:13:00I do.
00:13:01Which seems to imply that long, gentle tapers will give you a wide power band.
00:13:08GT750 road race engines had long, gentle tapers, and the engine was tuned to a razor's edge.
00:13:14So some clash there of ideas with reality, but they were remarkable engines because of the power they were able to get from them.
00:13:30They didn't necessarily do everything well as racers.
00:13:35They started out with a modified stock frame.
00:13:39They weren't at all pleased when they got to Loudoun, and Irv Kanemoto gave Gary Nixon a special short wheelbase C&J frame with adjustable everything.
00:13:52And Gary proceeded to win the race in a manner not consonant with the wishes of the factory.
00:14:00It's always a danger in racing.
00:14:03You let these people who know about racing, things that no engineer knows, that's why you need them, you let them have your latest product, and they're going to find defects and fix them.
00:14:16Yeah.
00:14:16And you may find, is that egg on my face?
00:14:22Yes.
00:14:22It's terrible to get beat by privateers when you're the factory.
00:14:26As with any, as with any of these idiosyncratic motorcycles, there's a small group of people who just love them to pieces, and they ride them.
00:14:41So everybody has to have big sales success.
00:14:46And of course, X6 was a good seller.
00:14:50A lot of the two-strokes, such as Yamaha's RDs, just sold in tremendous numbers.
00:14:58Well, you mentioned RD, and you were talking about two transfer ports, and the 400s have seven?
00:15:06They have A, B, and a finger, yeah, a reed port.
00:15:13So sort of four and a half or five, you could say.
00:15:18And of course, the reason that you have separate ports rather than just continuing to make a horse wider is that you want to direct the streams differently.
00:15:32You're missing it, Spotify, I'm telling you.
00:15:34What Kevin just did with his face was awesome.
00:15:39So, and that's another story for another day.
00:15:43Yeah, I'm just thinking we have a transfer port podcast, probably, the theory and execution.
00:15:50Yeah, there'll be three listeners.
00:15:53Well, you know, it's intense.
00:15:56I want to sell it.
00:15:57You know, I want popular podcasts, which, by the way, folks, share this with people who might like it.
00:16:02I want popular podcasts, or as our producer likes to say, bangers.
00:16:06And, you know, you guys took the TZ750 and ran with it.
00:16:11You know, we appreciate that.
00:16:12That's like at 80,000 views.
00:16:14So we want bangers, but we also want to support the core audience.
00:16:18You know, we want to talk about Peter Zylstra and the XR750 and get into the molecules of metallurgy, because there's so much history that isn't Moss Disco, isn't like, ooh, so shiny.
00:16:30Like, we're going to do a couple, like, we've got concept bikes coming, we're going to do a list of insane concept bikes, and we have this list going.
00:16:38We want to do some entertainment, but we also want to do the transfer ports, or stay tuned for combustion chambers.
00:16:46Yes.
00:16:47So, what's next?
00:16:49Well, I wanted to say, I think, you know, the Water Buffalo kind of suffered from a couple things that led to its demise.
00:16:55And one was forthcoming emissions standards, and as you said, it didn't have a face.
00:17:01It didn't connect with the rider's concept of themselves, I guess.
00:17:08That's, to me, that seems to be one of the most, my observation after being in the motorcycle industry for a long time and watching bikes come and go,
00:17:16if the motorcycle doesn't evoke a visual that resonates with the person's self-image or desire to change self-image, then it doesn't succeed.
00:17:31Think about BMW GS as the very opposite.
00:17:35Yeah.
00:17:35BMW for years made excellent, very conservative, almost imperceptible motorcycles,
00:17:42and they wondered why their sales weren't there.
00:17:46And then they decided to let their engineers loose on something they were already doing themselves in their spare time,
00:17:54and the GS model, which has those big, long legs for off-road operation.
00:18:04How many people go off-road?
00:18:06Don't care.
00:18:07That thing sells like one-third of all sales.
00:18:11Yeah, it's amazing.
00:18:12When you hit it with the personality, when you create an identity or a story in which the reader wants to be an actor, you've got something.
00:18:24Yeah.
00:18:26I mean, BMW did a few things.
00:18:29You know, they did the R90S, and they put some pretty cool paint schemes on there,
00:18:34and they really put a lot of sizzle into an otherwise touring-oriented bike.
00:18:39I mean, they came out with the R75, and that was a big change for them, but they really kicked it up with the 900, right?
00:18:47You know, and they put the fairing on, and they gave it this sporting personality, and it changed BMW's image.
00:18:54And then, you know, you have the GS.
00:18:56And I think BMW's brand evolution following that is that they did have a really loyal following going,
00:19:04and they could build these bikes.
00:19:06You know, RTs, I want the qualities of an RT.
00:19:09RTs are great.
00:19:10That's their sport touring, basically, flat twin.
00:19:12It's their biggest flat twin touring bike.
00:19:15And they had a good audience, but they were so focused on that audience that it wasn't really any kind of outreach.
00:19:22GS was a huge outreach program, and it funded, I think, you know, it gave them the basis to experiment
00:19:29and the basis to take risks such as we're going to build a four-cylinder super bike.
00:19:34Just as, just as the 50cc step-through funded everything that Honda did in a big way, it just connected them to people who needed that product.
00:19:50Yeah, the Cub really, yeah.
00:19:51And it just became a hose dumping money into the company, allowing them to do big R&D.
00:19:58Yeah, all that stuff.
00:20:00All the grand pre-wasting.
00:20:01All that cool stuff.
00:20:02Yeah.
00:20:02Which we, which we revere.
00:20:05Yeah.
00:20:06It just shows the importance of high volume, moderate cost, two-wheel products.
00:20:15And we're seeing.
00:20:15And hitting, hitting the market.
00:20:17Yeah, hitting the market.
00:20:18On the market.
00:20:19Yep.
00:20:19It's pretty cool.
00:20:20Anyways, let's go to the next bike.
00:20:22So we've decided why the GT 750 Water Buffalo stopped.
00:20:28Yeah.
00:20:30Oh, this is a good one.
00:20:31Honda Rune, 2004, 2005.
00:20:34This was a really, this, this came out of the Zodiac concept, which we'll talk about in our concept podcast forthcoming.
00:20:42Uh, the Zodiac was a show bike, uh, Japanese companies in the late nineties and early two thousands were just doing crazy things.
00:20:54There was lots of money in the industry.
00:20:55The Tokyo Motor Show was spectacular, the Tokyo Motor Show was spectacular, the stuff coming out.
00:21:00So Honda had this Zodiac and it had this, uh, link front end, trailing link front end and, uh, crazy styling.
00:21:10The Rune was basically conceptually like that.
00:21:13Although I believe Zodiac was V-twin and then the, the Rune was the flat six.
00:21:17It was the gold wing engine and it was just chrome.
00:21:21It had full, these full skirted fenders, crazy styling.
00:21:25And it had that Zodiac style front end.
00:21:28And I remember talking to the guy at Honda who's, who insisted that it get that front end and the, like the production cost on it was something crazy.
00:21:38Like the front end alone was $1,800 to manufacture, which, you know, like I, I shuddered to think what we could have gotten a fork for at that time, 80 bucks.
00:21:50I mean, for, for, for mass production, um, crazy expense, beautiful.
00:21:58Well, the thing is that, uh, often valid is the remark often heard, which is Honda builds motorcycles for customers they wish they had.
00:22:10And, uh, an example is that there, there was, um, an ad firm that they must've done business with in the eighties who said, we feel that there is a silent sea of potential motorcyclists who want a car bike.
00:22:32They want it to be silent, clean, safe.
00:22:36And they built Pacific coast.
00:22:41I've seen two Pacific coasts ever.
00:22:46First, there were, uh, executives of the American Honda on their way home on their long distance ride from Daytona.
00:22:56There was one there.
00:22:57And then, uh, maybe 10 years ago, I saw one across the street from the library in town.
00:23:03And I went over to talk to the owner and he said, uh, yeah, he said, uh, it fits a place in my collection.
00:23:10So, and I like to ride everything that I have.
00:23:14Yeah.
00:23:15They were actually motorcycles, a very high utility.
00:23:18And that's the, that's the thing is that's not resonating with us.
00:23:23Yeah.
00:23:24Practical concerns are so low on the list.
00:23:27I mean, they're there and what they usually are is justifications for buying the bike that you really love.
00:23:34So it evokes the feeling and the passion.
00:23:37And then you can say to yourself, well, it gets good mileage and it has a top trunk or whatever, whatever it is that you like about it.
00:23:46Yes.
00:23:46Uh, you can justify it from practical terms and that's, uh, that's how we go.
00:23:51And, you know, the rune, I think the, you know, during that time to that 2000 era, Harley Davidson was, I mean, the whole industry was ramping up to, to the crash basically in, in, uh, 08, 2006, Harley was, Harley sold nearly 400,000 motorcycles.
00:24:09I think around three 80 is what the number is.
00:24:12Wonderful stuff.
00:24:13It's amazing.
00:24:14It's amazing.
00:24:15And, um, it's driving the industry and everybody, especially during that time.
00:24:21You know, when you look back into the late nineties, you had 2000, you had the Vulcan 2000, you had all these people building giant cruisers bigger than the last, um, looking for a piece of that giant cruiser market.
00:24:34And Harley kind of stayed the course.
00:24:36They always kept their bikes in a, in a more human scale.
00:24:39They're still big and heavy, but they carry it low and they never, they never expanded.
00:24:43Like a Vulcan 2000 is impossibly huge.
00:24:46I'm a big guy and it was huge.
00:24:48The rune, pretty big bike.
00:24:50Uh, the rune had the advantage of being a flat six and carrying that weight low.
00:24:54And it did, you know, Honda's, Honda's fit and finish.
00:24:59They've done some really spectacular things with their suppliers, their chrome, their paint, you know, BFRs of the era, beautifully finished bikes, really nice paint.
00:25:09Like you went, Oh, liquid, you know?
00:25:11And the rune was spectacular in person.
00:25:15We had a rune test bike, wrote a big test on it.
00:25:18Uh, Steve Anderson, I believe did that.
00:25:19And then we needed, we performance test these things.
00:25:22And so Don Cane shows up and we're at the old building in Newport beach and here's, here's the rune.
00:25:27And I just wrote it to work.
00:25:28It's warmed up and I'm just enjoying it.
00:25:31I'm going to write about it a little bit.
00:25:32And I'm, he's like, Oh, I got to test that thing.
00:25:35I'm like, yeah, cool.
00:25:36Here, uh, check it out, dude.
00:25:37It rides, you know, rides nice, you know?
00:25:39And so he hops on it and in full Don Cane fashion, he gets a very quick feel for it and then throws the clutch.
00:25:47They just got on it, throws it.
00:25:49And it's like, what is it?
00:25:5020, 25,000 bucks, throws the clutch, smokes the tire and does a, a rolling like power slide in the, in the parking lot because he's Don Cane.
00:26:00Bravo.
00:26:00And, um, yeah, it was pretty good.
00:26:02Beautifully, you know, beautiful riding bike, but, um, hard, hard to sell.
00:26:07Didn't, didn't last.
00:26:08Well, it could be looked upon as a throw beyond cruisers.
00:26:15Let's just see what this does.
00:26:18We'll make something so extreme.
00:26:21Remember Steve Anderson's law.
00:26:24Motorcycles are, uh, radiating.
00:26:27Petals of a single flower and you would imagine that all these qualities that are represented by the petals would average out to the center and most people would buy the center.
00:26:40People buy the extremes.
00:26:45The extreme is attractive.
00:26:48The center is beige boxes with keys on them.
00:26:54No, we don't want that.
00:26:57And on the one hand, it's an attempt to outdo Harley with a concept.
00:27:03On the other, you're going to get egged if you sell your Harley, buy a Rune and show up for the ride.
00:27:10Because you, you, what, what, what, what have you done?
00:27:16Well, it doesn't, it doesn't necessarily, you know, it doesn't fit the Harley narrative.
00:27:20And that's what Harley's great success is, is building a narrative that has this, a certain story.
00:27:25And I think there are some people who would go out and buy a Rune and be having with a Rune.
00:27:30It would be probably additive to what they've already got.
00:27:33You know, it's not, it's, it's not your only bike.
00:27:36It's not the one bike solution.
00:27:38Anyway, it was a beautiful expression of, of a little bit of maybe corporate hubris, like, oh, we can do anything.
00:27:45And, um, spectacular fit and finish, really interesting concept.
00:27:50And at a time where people were doing crazy things, you know, you look at Yamaha, uh, redoing with the most unfortunate timing, timing, uh, redoing the V max and coming out in 08, 09 after the crash.
00:28:05Cause this is all planned beforehand.
00:28:07It's the same with the VFR 1200, you know, very expensive 1200 sport tour, sort of not fully vetted on.
00:28:18I don't think it ever decided, you know, what it should be.
00:28:22I think they were thinking like maybe super high speed something, but then it was a sport tour.
00:28:27It was sort of MotoGP meets luxury, pretty nice bike to ride, but man, it, it came out and it just was not a great time.
00:28:39It was very expensive and everybody was suffering financially and motorcycle sales halved in about a year.
00:28:45So it's just, it was, it was unfortunate.
00:28:49We are, we're going to stick on the Honda theme and switch to the, uh, the DN 01, 08 to, um, 2010, DN 01 is a favorite of mine.
00:28:58I wrote the test on it and, um, you know, I, I really, as a tester, I try to come in with an open mind.
00:29:06I try to wear the hat of whoever might be the customer here and I, you know, just approach the product and say, I'm going to use this as a two wheeler.
00:29:15What does it do?
00:29:16How does it do it?
00:29:17What does it communicate?
00:29:19And I actually really liked riding that thing.
00:29:21It had this swash plate.
00:29:23It's sort of like a air conditioning compressor, a 10 piston air conditioning compressor.
00:29:28It has a, has a wobble plate with these variable stroke barrel, uh, hydraulic pump.
00:29:34From aviation, from aviation.
00:29:37Oh, yeah.
00:29:39And that was the transmission that was gearing and it just kind of did its thing.
00:29:43Change the tilt of the swash plate.
00:29:46See, all the pistons are being driven by the edge of the swash plate as it does this, uh, crazy, uh, penny on the table motion.
00:29:56And the variable output goes to a hydraulic motor that drives the load, in this case, the rear wheel.
00:30:03So, so as the, as the, the tilt of the swash plate is increased, so the rear wheel speeds up because more volume is being sent to it.
00:30:13So, and this, this, this drive was licensed from, uh, Badalini in, in Italy, which is an agricultural machinery company.
00:30:21And, uh, well, there's a note that I'm going to send any, if I work with anybody in product development on consulting or whatever, it's like, don't go to the agricultural companies for your ideas.
00:30:33But the great thing is, the reason that motorcycles have more than one transmission speed is that the engine does not have the same torque from zero to maximum.
00:30:46Um, like an electric, like certain electric motors do.
00:30:51So we have a starting gear and a, uh, running gear, the two speed, like Indian won the 1911, uh, TT with a two speed gearbox.
00:31:02Dual range, hydromatic.
00:31:03And, uh, these, the more speeds you have, the more narrowly you can tune the engine.
00:31:13The final ideal is to have an infinitely variable transmission so that it doesn't have discrete ratios at all.
00:31:21And in fact, you can set this thing up so that the engine sits at constant speed, peak power RPM, for example, and the transmission, uh, changes the ratio continuously as you accelerate.
00:31:39People hated it.
00:31:40I have, I, it's true, but I have an appreciation.
00:31:43And for the rubber band CVT, I love it's perfect in a scooter.
00:31:49It's perfect in side-by-sides, off-road stuff like that.
00:31:53And it's tunable.
00:31:55It's very dumb.
00:31:57It doesn't need electronics.
00:31:58I mean, can, you can have it.
00:32:00You know, that's what, that's what Nissan does with their metal belt CVT.
00:32:03It's all electronically controlled.
00:32:04And that's why you can put gears, gears in it.
00:32:07Uh, Aprilia did it with Aprilia did it with the mana eight 50, which was a CVT motorcycle.
00:32:12Kind of a utility bike.
00:32:14Pretty fun to ride.
00:32:15And you could, you could do gears with that.
00:32:17They impose the ability to control that.
00:32:20But if you just do a primary with weights and a secondary with a, a helix and a spring, they
00:32:26just, all it gets is the torque on the shaft.
00:32:29And then you, you play with all of these ratios.
00:32:31Um, I put, I put, I put a real fancy one on, uh, the K&M Defender that we have for UTV
00:32:37Driver, our off-road, uh, publication, four wheel off-road publication.
00:32:41And, um, it's built by KWI clutching and they take the stock parts of a CVT and they blueprint
00:32:54the core pieces of it.
00:32:56They blueprint it.
00:32:57So your, uh, your sheaves are perfect.
00:33:00There's no deviation.
00:33:02So you're engaging with the belt very precisely.
00:33:05They have this thing called the float.
00:33:07Yeah.
00:33:08They have this thing called the float.
00:33:09No yaking.
00:33:10Yeah.
00:33:10They have this thing called the float mod where, uh, it allows one of the sheaves to
00:33:15float on a spring.
00:33:17So the, the, at, at full ratio, the belt becomes off center, but with the float mod, it follows.
00:33:24So you have less, you have less deviation.
00:33:27Therefore the belt runs cooler and the engagement is better.
00:33:30You can tune the weights very easily on the primary to change the engagement.
00:33:35And then the helix and spring are tuned and it's really, so getting to it, it is, it is
00:33:41not shifting.
00:33:43Your relationship with the engine is different and we love shifting in motorcycles.
00:33:47We love shifting motorcycles.
00:33:49We love the various sounds we've just been imprinted.
00:33:52But, uh, anyway, CVT, when it's working, it's great.
00:33:56It's simple.
00:33:57Yeah.
00:33:57It's simple and wonderful.
00:33:58And the weights like on that, on that can am, I tuned it target 6,500 flat out.
00:34:05And that's, that's how you tune it.
00:34:07You get out on your flat dirt road and you nail it.
00:34:13And if the RPM goes good and then it hits at 6,500 and it holds 6,500 until you run out
00:34:18of ratio and the RPM goes up to your top speed, you've hit it.
00:34:23And if it doesn't go to 65 and that's where you want it, you add these, uh, rare earth
00:34:27magnet weights into these little cylinders and they just go quick and they're, you know,
00:34:33you poke them out with a stick to get them out cause they're strong and they won't come
00:34:36out and they'll stay right where you put them.
00:34:38And so you can, you can tune to your arts.
00:34:40So CVTs are great, but we love, uh, we love a transmission and the DN01 essentially is
00:34:46a CVT.
00:34:46I mean, it's, uh, you know, it's, it hits that single ratio and, and kind of goes, what?
00:34:52Infinitely variables, like a snowmobile.
00:34:54The engine, when you hit the thumb, it goes into a big honking noise, which is peak power
00:35:01RPM.
00:35:02And let me tell you,
00:35:03snowmobile pulls away.
00:35:04Retired exec at Harley Davidson, Jerry Wilkie, uh, is a big fan of snowmobiles and, uh, he's
00:35:10got a place up North in Wisconsin and holy cow.
00:35:14He's like, you got to ride this.
00:35:16And he had a, uh, I think it was a skidoo, uh, it was the 800 two stroke and he's like,
00:35:23just watch yourself.
00:35:24You know, I was riding a Yamaha of previous generation, which is pretty low.
00:35:28It was like the evolution of dirt bikes.
00:35:31You know, the, you know, sleds were, were low.
00:35:35And then as they got higher performance, they got more travel and they got taller.
00:35:39Anyway, he sent me on that 800 two stroke.
00:35:41He's like, we're going to come up to a power line road.
00:35:43So we're, we're riding through the woods and I'm like, holy cow, this thing's amazing.
00:35:46And it's super fast, but pulling out onto the, basically the drag strip, this high tension
00:35:53line road.
00:35:54So it's a maintenance road.
00:35:55That's just flat and straight.
00:35:56And he's like, yeah, watch out, but hit it.
00:35:59And I hit it and it was like zero to a hundred in seconds.
00:36:02I mean, it was, it was steam coming out the back.
00:36:05It was so great.
00:36:07Nelson went to a, went to a Bombardier demo.
00:36:11Um, and he said, one of the other journalists, when he hit the thumb button, he stayed still
00:36:19on the snowmobile left.
00:36:20It just, it jerked itself right out of his hands.
00:36:25And Nelson said, that was the fastest accelerating anything that I'd ever been on.
00:36:31So don't, um, make superior sniffing noises about CVT because what multi-speed gearboxes
00:36:42attempt to do, a CVT actually does accomplish holding the engine at its point of best performance.
00:36:49Yeah.
00:36:50Well, we don't need to make sniffing noises, Kevin, because we don't buy them.
00:36:54Yeah.
00:36:56We don't have to do anything, but they, they generally don't sell.
00:36:59So the D&O one was this very, uh, low concept, long, uh,
00:37:03Darcy, Darcy looking.
00:37:05Yeah.
00:37:05Yeah.
00:37:06It had sort of the, you know, um, future, futuristic Japanese comics type design.
00:37:16Fuel tank and, and front fairing were sort of made into this big, uh, gummy, gummy barrier.
00:37:22Yeah.
00:37:23Thing.
00:37:24And.
00:37:25It was, uh, fantastically expensive.
00:37:26It was some, something around 13 to 15.
00:37:3015, 15, five was what I saw.
00:37:32Yeah.
00:37:32Yeah.
00:37:3215, five.
00:37:33Um, so it was very expensive and it really, uh, it communicated to the American market.
00:37:40I'm a giant scooter.
00:37:41Yeah.
00:37:42And, uh, so I was, I, I was kind of singing the defense of that thing as I wrote it.
00:37:48Cause when I tested it, it was, uh, probably January.
00:37:52It was sometime in California winter, which you think like, Oh, okay.
00:37:55It's 64 and slow, it's a little chilly.
00:37:58Uh, but in fact, you know, where I was riding, um, there was snow on the ground.
00:38:03I, I wrote it out to, uh, Borrego Springs and I came up through, uh, Ranchita, which is,
00:38:08uh, at the top of the ridge above where the drops into the desert.
00:38:12And I didn't, you know, I, I didn't even think to check the weather.
00:38:15It had been a little cold and rainy, you know, in, in, uh, near our offices, you know,
00:38:20Newport beach, orange County.
00:38:21And I took my big loop and I, I crested Ranchita after riding up S22 and there was snow and
00:38:30I was cold and I'm like, well, I can't, you know, to go back through the desert was extra
00:38:34hours.
00:38:34And it was like four in the afternoon is going to get dark at five.
00:38:38And I didn't want to, I didn't want to, you know, I was like, no, that's too far to
00:38:41go back all the way around.
00:38:42So I'm like, I'll just forge ahead.
00:38:43You know, it's, it's not going to stick too much on the roads.
00:38:47Well, I got to places where I had to cover, uh, I had to cross a sheet of ice.
00:38:51It's basically packed snow and frozen, that frozen water we never see around here outside.
00:38:57And it's only in your cocktails.
00:38:58And, um, I got to the sheet of ice and I, I really favored the ease of rolling on the
00:39:05throttle and the control of the torque and the lowness of it.
00:39:10And I was able to go across this thing without crashing low CG.
00:39:13And I thought, well, that's, you know, that's a pretty wide out, far out use case, but you
00:39:20know what?
00:39:21It's fun.
00:39:21That was pretty good.
00:39:22So I'm running around the office saying like, you know what, this thing's actually, it's
00:39:26really useful and it's kind of fun and, and it's very easy to ride.
00:39:31And some of the other guys are like, ah, it's a scooter.
00:39:33And I'm like, nah, it's, it's not a scooter.
00:39:34And I kept saying that.
00:39:35And then, uh, David Edwards editor at the time, my boss said, huh.
00:39:40And, and his perfect, in perfect David style, he just thought about that and he went off
00:39:45and he was writing his editor's note on the test.
00:39:47And I was genuinely positive about it.
00:39:49I said, you know, this is, it is expensive.
00:39:51You can't get around that.
00:39:52And will this resonate with the market?
00:39:54Is this asking a question?
00:39:55No one asked.
00:39:56The answer was yes.
00:39:57Um, you know, but I said, from a technical perspective, it's pretty good motorcycle like
00:40:03substance.
00:40:04And, you know, David went off and noodled and he said, yeah, it's cool to ride or whatever.
00:40:07But Hoyer says, it's not a scooter is what he said in his editor's note.
00:40:11And he said, unfortunately he's right because it doesn't have any storage.
00:40:15And he was totally right.
00:40:17Here's this thing that looks like a scooter and you open the seat and there's no place
00:40:21to put anything.
00:40:22You can't carry anything on it.
00:40:23And so, you know, chef Alan Greeley, formerly the golden truffle, like he wrote a Honda
00:40:28Helix for years.
00:40:30Why did he do that?
00:40:31Cause it was super easy to ride.
00:40:33You could just pop on it.
00:40:34It had leg protection and it had a giant storage container.
00:40:39And some of those were so good and so big that manufacturers put stickers on them and
00:40:43said, no pets.
00:40:44Like, don't put, don't put your kitty in the under seat storage.
00:40:48Chairman now, not good.
00:40:49And so, um, he once picked up lobster though, live lobster, he was cooking for somebody
00:40:56and he took off across LA on his Helix cause in LA you can lane share and he knew he could
00:41:01get to the lobster, pick it up and get back and not be subject to traffic.
00:41:05And the DNO one didn't have that.
00:41:07So, you know, it truly was a question that no one asked, but it was a time where Honda
00:41:14was experimenting with looking for market extension.
00:41:20You're always looking for the new customer.
00:41:21We have a good core audience of people who are enthusiasts and want to buy the motorcycles
00:41:26we buy that we keep, pardon me, that we keep buying.
00:41:30We keep buying cruisers, sport bikes are selling not too bad, uh, affordable nakeds, adventure
00:41:36bikes, you know, we're there, but you're always looking for what's your next market.
00:41:40And that's what BMW did getting away from RT adding GS was like new market, new type of
00:41:47bike city electrics, CEO two, CEO four, we're looking for a new market.
00:41:53So that's what Honda has always done.
00:41:55And they've, I think I have a lot of respect for their flex there and doing that and DCT
00:42:01and auto clutch and all the stuff that they've been doing.
00:42:04But, uh, sometimes you get, uh, sometimes you get a D on one and I, you know, gosh, you
00:42:09wish these are the times when you wish you could just open the books and say, what'd
00:42:12you lose on that?
00:42:14That's what I was going to say.
00:42:15Yeah.
00:42:17What did it cost the tool for, to make that, uh, transmission?
00:42:21Yeah.
00:42:21And did they use it for anything else that it ended up in, I don't know.
00:42:25Oh, it was in four wheelers.
00:42:27Rototillers.
00:42:27Well, seriously, man, I went to Honda's 50th at, uh, 50th anniversary party, uh, in
00:42:351998, Joe Parkhurst was there.
00:42:38This was before I was with cycle world.
00:42:40I was with cycle news and I got, I got to go to the 50th and it was magnificent.
00:42:44It was the RA 71 V12 formula one car warming up in the pits, piercing, vibrating your organs,
00:42:52taking the breath out of your chest as it revved up impossibly loud, impossibly quick
00:42:59revving, uh, all the champions riding around at Motegi on two 56 NSR.
00:43:07Freddie was there.
00:43:08They had signs in the corners, giant signs that said downshift because they wanted the
00:43:15guys to make the bikes make noise.
00:43:17And you can't, since you can't run outboards at Motegi and you can't run rototillers,
00:43:23they put them in the back of their utility K trucks and they drove them around.
00:43:27So they had this incredible parade of stuff going to like Honda power sports generators
00:43:34in the back of trucks.
00:43:35It was a, it was a really big flex, just like the DNO one.
00:43:39Unfortunately, no one bought it.
00:43:40Well, Suzuki rotary RE five, this is, this, this, this was Suzuki's early mid seventies soul
00:43:54searching, you know, they, they had a hustler X six, just a really good, solid value, reliable,
00:44:03made good power, a lot of fun, simple.
00:44:06And they sold the daylights out of them.
00:44:07I think it really helps Suzuki anchor itself in the minds of American consumers.
00:44:12Yeah.
00:44:13And they're like, okay, we got to expand our reach.
00:44:15What are we going to do?
00:44:16We're, you know, we're technical, we're the future and rotaries, you know, we're coming
00:44:20in.
00:44:20There was the Audi stuff that wasn't an Audi at first.
00:44:25I'm pointing on what product it was in, but NSU.
00:44:29Yeah.
00:44:30But they, you know, they had rotary cars and Mazda was playing with it and they were,
00:44:35they were building cars for sale.
00:44:37And so Suzuki tried the RE five and it was, it was weird.
00:44:45Straight up say it, the gauge had, was kind of in the cylinder and it had this top that
00:44:50you could roll back and, you know, it was just a really weirdly interesting product, but
00:44:56it had technical problems in addition to sort of people asking, what is it?
00:45:01Sure.
00:45:03Well, the tip seals on the roughly three-sided rotor, a piston ring is constantly oriented
00:45:14the same way against the cylinder wall.
00:45:16So, but the tip seals on a rotary engine were constantly changing their angle to the cylinder
00:45:23that are the, the outer figure eight shaped housing.
00:45:28And this imposed special requirements on the friction between the two.
00:45:40And then there were apex seals where the wall seal and the tip seal, there had to be something
00:45:46to fill in that little corner.
00:45:48And I think about that every time I put in an air conditioner, but, uh, it was 400, it was
00:45:57a 500 CC four-stroke.
00:46:00Now, some people look at a rotary engine and they see, uh, ports through either the faces
00:46:08or the periphery, uh, or the periphery, the housing, uh, and they assume that it must be
00:46:14a two-stroke because ports through the cylinder wall, but in fact, it is a four-stroke and it
00:46:23had some strikes against it because the combustion chamber at full compression was a kind of, a kind
00:46:29of loon, uh, uh, like a, a thin, uh, lips together smirk and out at the corners was a quench zone
00:46:42where combustion was not necessarily complete.
00:46:47So it, it never really got smiles from the EPA, but I went to, I went to, uh, uh, a Kawasaki,
00:46:59was running some stuff at Fuji circuit and there was the Mazda race car there that day.
00:47:05What a noise.
00:47:08So the engine didn't make it.
00:47:11Yeah.
00:47:12The 787B, I think the, their Le Mans car was legendary for the sound.
00:47:15And I think that's one of the things that makes people also misled about what the combustion
00:47:20process is, uh, because it has a sort of two-stroke sound, but different.
00:47:27Of course it does because it's the Apex is opening the exhaust port so rapidly.
00:47:33That's why it contains a lot of high frequencies.
00:47:36Yeah.
00:47:37Yeah.
00:47:37It just shocks out the exhaust and they can be incredibly loud.
00:47:41Whereas a four-stroke starts to push the poppet valve open very slowly because it has to
00:47:48accelerate it.
00:47:49This is a physical object.
00:47:51So it goes, rather than bark, which, uh, a fast moving edge, uh, opening a port, there's
00:48:03nothing, it's, it's fabulously quick.
00:48:06So that makes that sharp sound.
00:48:08Lots of high frequencies there.
00:48:11So once again, uh, they didn't call it wang dang doodle or, or anything like that.
00:48:18It had no face, it had no image.
00:48:21It was just new and some people must've bought them.
00:48:27Yeah.
00:48:28They were on the market for a little while.
00:48:30They were noted for smoothness.
00:48:32And they should have, that's right.
00:48:34They would be very smooth.
00:48:35Noted for smoothness and, you know, good power, but they had heat problems and, uh, you know,
00:48:41they had the exhaust system had air intakes on it to kind of run so that when you were
00:48:46moving, you, it was like ducted cooling basically around the exhaust to take air in and kind
00:48:52of blow it out the back.
00:48:53Otherwise you got real cooked.
00:48:56So.
00:48:57Wonderful to produce a tiny amount of thrust.
00:48:59I guess I suppose it did.
00:49:01We're going to, we're going to jump forward in time to the Yamaha Niken, uh, to be fair,
00:49:06is being sold in Europe still, but it was the leaning, uh, leaning three-wheeler.
00:49:12So it leans like a motorcycle has two wheels in front, which is, I think the best idea for
00:49:16three-wheelers.
00:49:17I think the one wheel in the front, the trike is less technically satisfying from the riding
00:49:23perspective and maintaining a lean.
00:49:25I think, uh, if you remove leaning from what sort of looks like a motorcycle, I think you
00:49:32remove a lot of the charm for people who love motorcycling.
00:49:34There's an, another market for three-wheelers that's represented by, you know, various things
00:49:39from Can-Am and, and Polaris.
00:49:42And, uh, there is a market segment that wants those, you know, Rikers and all that have,
00:49:48have sold well.
00:49:48Uh, Niken, you know, I think there's a, you pointed out that it is kind of an outreach.
00:49:58It's looking for a customer that would perceive greater safety and stability and, and having
00:50:07two contact patches at front would have to help and having three points of contact would
00:50:13have to help, but.
00:50:15And there's wheelie control, all that extra weight up front.
00:50:21Yeah.
00:50:21But we wheelied it.
00:50:22We've got a, we've got a great, we got a great image of, of folks wheeling a Niken.
00:50:27So.
00:50:27And then of course there's the, the feeling that you've had too much of the punch and you're
00:50:33seeing double because it's very strange to look at a motorcycle with two front ends for
00:50:39the first time it's, uh, again, as, as, uh, you've pointed out, it's looking to extend
00:50:50your market into, uh, with it, put things within reach of people who are, you know, motorcycles.
00:50:58I, I've always wanted, I don't know.
00:51:01They, how do you balance them?
00:51:03What do you, and a motorcycle that does everything for you is what?
00:51:09What we're moving toward because of this desire, because of the necessity of, uh, having all
00:51:18the sales possible, uh, provided you can pay the tooling cost.
00:51:23Agreed.
00:51:23Agreed.
00:51:24You know, adding automatics, you have BMW's automatic shift assistant and Honda's DCT.
00:51:29Those are two, I'd say our two best automatic versions that are using gears and a clutch or
00:51:35two clutches.
00:51:36Uh, we're adding all of the stability enhancements.
00:51:42Those two units operate the clutch for you.
00:51:45Honda's got the automatic clutching going on the CB650R and it's a great system.
00:51:52It does a very good job.
00:51:53And it's sort of, after it lets out the clutch for you in first, it's like the world's smoothest
00:52:00quick shifter.
00:52:01It's, it's a good system, but not everything.
00:52:04I don't think we're, I don't think we're trying to do everything because when I look at the
00:52:10experiments of BMW with the self-balancing motorcycles that would balance for you, they
00:52:16had some concepts and then they also messed with a GS that would ride itself around the
00:52:20parking lot, uh, automated, which I think was a technical exercise for them.
00:52:24I think they were just saying like, how do we do this and what do we get from it more
00:52:29than like, oh, we should do this.
00:52:31But, um.
00:52:31It just looked wonderful.
00:52:32I went to that thing in Vegas.
00:52:34Oh yeah.
00:52:35This motorcycle is just cruising around this parking lot, uh, doing all kinds of maneuvers
00:52:40and then it comes to a stop.
00:52:43Um, it just, uh, otherworldly.
00:52:48Nobody's there.
00:52:49Ultra.
00:52:49Yeah.
00:52:49Ultra impressive.
00:52:51Um, my take, my spiritual take on motorcycling is the reason it's so engaging is that it, uh,
00:52:57it does engage your balance.
00:52:59And of course the reason BMW gave for doing this project was to better understand what
00:53:07riders do, what they have to do, because it's possible, um, within living memory to make
00:53:16fundamental errors about motorcycles.
00:53:18For example, the notion that was put forward by Elf with their strange alternative motorcycles
00:53:27that the lowest possible center of gravity is the key to handling.
00:53:34And when Honda built the NSR 500, the first year, 1984, it was slow maneuvering, slow and
00:53:42changing directions because by putting the fuel on the bottom, they had moved it away from
00:53:47the center of mass.
00:53:51And we have assumptions that we've carried with us that have not been questioned.
00:53:57We probably still have some left.
00:54:00And so I think BMW were quite right to do this study, to find out what it is that riders
00:54:06do to control motorcycles.
00:54:08Right.
00:54:08Cause you can ask, yeah, you can ask a rider, but a lot of times they don't know and they
00:54:14certainly wouldn't know the subtleties.
00:54:16And so if, if you're trying to get the motorcycle to do something and you're trying, you have
00:54:21to put the programming in, you have to give it some way to, to do what it does.
00:54:26And therefore you have to understand the process so that it can be coded and hooked up to sensors
00:54:32and given the opportunity to balance the motorcycle and failure will be obvious.
00:54:37Well, the Niken, the Niken used the triple out of the FZ09, MT09, great motor, just pretty
00:54:52fun bike to ride.
00:54:53I mean, it, I think it is conceptually difficult for folks, you know, motorcycle people to say,
00:54:57yeah, I got to have that.
00:54:58And, uh, it was probably different enough that it didn't do a lot of market expansion
00:55:03for them in the United States.
00:55:06Europe is really interesting because it, it's, even though it's a developed market and an advanced
00:55:12market, it's utility, the engagement of that motorcycle person every day in their motorcycle.
00:55:20Like we went to Paris in November and, and we went to Rome in a different November.
00:55:27And we're going through the city when it's raining and it's cold.
00:55:30And it's like, it's just kind of that smeary European, almost winter, just kind of gross
00:55:37some days, beautiful and other, um, and people are riding around with, you know, big, uh,
00:55:42muffs on their grips and they're on a scooter and they have like essentially a skirt, like
00:55:47a cover over their legs that stays with the bike and they, they're riding to work, you
00:55:53know, they're, they're wearing, they're wearing a kind of groovy European scooter helmet with
00:55:59a bold, double face shield and, you know, doing their thing.
00:56:03And that's, you know, you could see the Nike in there, like, oh, I'm going to ride through
00:56:06the city every day and I'm going to ride in all weather.
00:56:10And I think having the third wheel up there was pairing the fronts, you know, that way
00:56:15it was kind of interesting.
00:56:15And it leaned, which kept it charming from a motor motorcycle perspective.
00:56:19And of course, with the motorcycle, the, with the conventional motorcycle, the front
00:56:25end, um, is the end that you don't want to lose.
00:56:29If you lose the rear end, that's often manageable.
00:56:32You can save that when the front goes, um, it helps if you're Freddie Spencer.
00:56:40Yeah.
00:56:40I'd say that.
00:56:41Yeah.
00:56:41The tail wants to do what a caster does.
00:56:44It wants to be back in line.
00:56:46Yep.
00:56:47But the front don't care.
00:56:48Um, next up is, uh, what an interesting concept.
00:56:57So Olen's had, um, in 2004 built a two wheel drive WR 450F.
00:57:07It had a hydraulic drive system that sent some of the drive to the front wheel.
00:57:11And we'll talk about some of that split because we also have to talk about Cristini who did
00:57:16this, uh, mechanically, uh, like with gears and shafts, same thing.
00:57:22Yamaha ran this thing in Dakar.
00:57:23Um, I believe it won some stages and it got seventh overall, so not a bad success.
00:57:31Um, I don't recall if we tested the Olen's version of this, but essentially, you know,
00:57:37you think about one wheel motorcycles being pushed by one wheel.
00:57:40And just as it is with a four wheel drive car, like a rally car, I've drove, uh, I think it
00:57:45was an Evo seven, the Mitsubishi, um, Evo seven, uh, the Lancer, the closest thing I've
00:57:53ever driven in a car to a motorcycle, lightweight, loud, no sound deadening.
00:57:58It was a homologation special or it was, you know, inspired by that anyways.
00:58:02And, uh, I don't, sorry, I don't know enough about the car to, to do a podcast on that
00:58:07specifically, but if you set that thing in four wheel drive, uh, it had incredibly, it
00:58:14had basically cut slicks, DOT cut slicks is what the tires look like.
00:58:18We had a test car at road and track that, uh, I got to, I got to try.
00:58:22It was unbelievable.
00:58:24So you'd go into a corner and on a two wheel drive car, you sort of had to be careful.
00:58:30You'd turn it.
00:58:30You had good front end feel without drive to the front wheels.
00:58:33You could really feel the steering, but you, your cornering technique was sort of breaking
00:58:38and then getting on the throttle and feeling it get pushed through the corner and steering
00:58:43with the fronts.
00:58:43When you go rally style, it's clawing the front end around the corner, you're turning
00:58:48and you just mad it.
00:58:49And it pulls like the front goes like they had probably vector turning and all this other
00:58:53stuff, but it was crazy good.
00:58:55And that's kind of what the Cristini did.
00:58:56The Cristini had particularly in low traction situations where you're.
00:59:00Rock crawling, or if you're starting on a hill or off camber, it was game changing.
00:59:07The Cristini was nice because it was all mechanical.
00:59:10His prototypes used a lot of industrial off the shelf components.
00:59:14There were very few custom parts.
00:59:17Uh, the, the fork lower.
00:59:19So the Cristini system, Ohlins was hydraulic.
00:59:22They had a pump run off the engine and it sent drive, controlled drive.
00:59:27And then it had a free wheel so that if, uh, you're going faster than what the sort of
00:59:33the drive ratio was on the front wheel, it would just act like a motorcycle so that it
00:59:38didn't have drive.
00:59:38You didn't have engine braking at the front because that would F you up.
00:59:41Um, Cristini did that, I think with essentially like a bicycle cassette type mechanism in the
00:59:48front so that the front wheel, if the rear was driving it faster, Cristini settled on
00:59:5260% drive to the front wheel.
00:59:54So it was going 60% as fast as the rear.
00:59:58You found that a hundred percent caused push.
01:00:01It just made it not ride like a motorcycle.
01:00:04So you've got the benefits.
01:00:06Uh, if the rear spun up, it sent more drive to the front.
01:00:11It had clutches.
01:00:12It had shock.
01:00:13It had shock relieving clutches in it so that you wouldn't blow apart the mechanism.
01:00:17If you landed from a jump with the throttle pin, a lot of really interesting things and
01:00:23it worked well, but how many of those are there as good as it was?
01:00:31We loved it.
01:00:32We, we sent our off-road editor, Dakar stage winner, finished third in Dakar, Jimmy Lewis,
01:00:38uh, various other experienced dirt bike riders, our photographer, current photographer, Jeff
01:00:42Allen, great off-road rider, loved the system.
01:00:46And they were like, this is, you know, this is the future of dirt bikes, man.
01:00:49This really, this really makes it easier to do a lot of things, but we're not seeing it.
01:00:55And of course, the thing is that, um, with a conventional motorcycle, as you,
01:01:01roll on and second or third gear, eventually the front wheel comes up on pavement with good
01:01:08grip.
01:01:10So having the front wheel driven has no advantage.
01:01:14The advantage shows up when, um, you have a slippery surface, dirt, uh, snow and ice, you name
01:01:25it, uh, having two times as much unsatisfactory traction has got to be better than just what's
01:01:35coming from the rear wheel.
01:01:36Would it not be 1.6 times, Kevin?
01:01:39Not to check your math too hard, but if it's 60%, it's, it's not two times traction.
01:01:45No, what I mean is two wheels rather than one.
01:01:48I know.
01:01:49Okay.
01:01:51Uh, so conventional motorcycles, so many of the far out project bikes that have been built
01:02:00have two wheel drive as if one day, all motorcycles will have two wheel drive.
01:02:05And they present this thing that looks like a tuna with a seat on it and handlebars.
01:02:11And you think, hmm, two wheel drive, off-road tuna.
01:02:20I, I, I, I, this is foreshadowing folks.
01:02:25This is foreshadowing the crazy concept bikes, uh, podcast, but lots of them have two wheel
01:02:30drive.
01:02:31Oh yeah.
01:02:31What you have to, yeah.
01:02:32You've got to do something unusual.
01:02:33You can't just, what do you do?
01:02:35You're not going to, you know, build another CB seven 50.
01:02:38Come on.
01:02:39Yeah.
01:02:40So, um, where are we now?
01:02:43Oh, where are we?
01:02:44Let's get to the next and final.
01:02:51We'll do, do a couple more.
01:02:52I think getting the, uh, Pirave's mono tracer, this is, this is the poster child for the cabin
01:02:59motorcycle.
01:03:00So this, this was the Swiss deal, um, 80 to a hundred thousand dollars enclosed, um, BMW
01:03:101200 RS power.
01:03:12So beautiful.
01:03:13So slippery looking.
01:03:15So teardrop.
01:03:16Um, you're in a castle, crazy air, very aerodynamic, tremendous wheelbase and over a thousand pounds
01:03:28of weight.
01:03:29So it's, some people just fell in love with this.
01:03:35This has to be what's happening.
01:03:37Uh, because a conventional motorcycle such as a MotoGP bike or any motorcycle on the street
01:03:46just crams itself through the air because it has a drag coefficient that is many times
01:03:54greater than that of a World War II airplane.
01:03:59And it, the, the, the monotracer or Ecomobile has a, a 0.19 drag coefficient, which is so
01:04:16much better than any motorcycle that it's, it's just like, well, why don't we give up?
01:04:20The reason we don't give up is because we don't want a thousand pound motorcycle and we don't
01:04:28want one with, uh, uh, that's eight, 10 feet long.
01:04:33Well, as, as, uh, the folks in Caltech pointed out when they were doing wind tunnel testing
01:04:37for, uh, Harley with Harley back around the, uh, the Harley Davidson midget, we talked about
01:04:43the XR TT that, you know, we had a podcast on that 68.
01:04:47Yeah.
01:04:48Yeah.
01:04:49A vertical piece of plywood has a better pushing through the air, pushing through the
01:04:54air in the tunnel has a, has a better drag coefficient than a, an unfaired motorcycle.
01:05:00Yeah.
01:05:02Because at least the piece of plywood is smooth.
01:05:06Whereas a motorcycle has all this stuff sticking out of it.
01:05:09Oh, trash and whirling, whirling tires and wheels and a body stuck on it.
01:05:15Um, but it's small.
01:05:16Yeah.
01:05:17The thing about aerodynamic coefficient compares the drag of what you have, the motorcycle is
01:05:24a small thing with that of the same frontal area as a flat surface, roughly speaking, that's
01:05:32what it is.
01:05:33So, uh, motorcycle is equivalent to just a piece of plywood plowing through the air.
01:05:42Um, but in MotoGP, they get those things up to 225 miles per hour.
01:05:49They've got the horsepower to just push on.
01:05:53Yeah.
01:05:53Crush the air.
01:05:55And, uh, 225 miles an hour is a lot more than the, than a commercial airliner breaking ground.
01:06:03Um, the pilot is about to say gear up, which brings us to the question of what do you do when
01:06:10you stop the Paravis, uh, tracer?
01:06:14Um, it has little, um, training wheels that fold out and hold you up.
01:06:23Um, so, um, you know, gear up, gear down.
01:06:28We had a guy, uh, many years ago come with a, his homemade capsule type motorcycle and you,
01:06:36uh, it had outriggers like that, that were electro hide hydraulic assist.
01:06:43So I sat in the cabin and I held my little handlebar and it was just, you know, it was
01:06:49kind of a frumpy sort of, you know, fiberglass body in line.
01:06:54Uh, I want to say it was based on a Kawasaki, uh, single and, um, you, you swung your legs
01:07:04forward and it assisted in getting, uh, the outriggers out.
01:07:08So you manually had to do this.
01:07:09They were relying on your mapping to do this.
01:07:11Whereas the monotracer you're inside and it was doing it for you, pointing out that
01:07:15one of the reasons the monotracer was so long as it was a two person unit, you could have
01:07:19a passenger and the passenger road behind the rider.
01:07:22So you got to make room in the wheelbase, just like with the out gurney alligator, you
01:07:27know, you, you're making, you're forcing the body and the engine all in between the axles.
01:07:32So you got to make it longer.
01:07:33Yep.
01:07:34Um, but this, this thing was real interesting to ride and kind of fun.
01:07:38Um, you had to, you had to let out the clutch and, and go.
01:07:43And then as you started to go, you had to kind of taught the, the wheels were, uh, like
01:07:48some landing gear on tail dragger aircraft where they have a little bit of wobble in
01:07:52them so they can land in a crosswind better.
01:07:55Uh, the Cessna one 95, there's a kit that, or a kit that goes on that.
01:08:00Caster.
01:08:01A little bit of caster.
01:08:03And so that's what the wheels would do.
01:08:05And so you'd be sitting and the wheels weren't, weren't the same level as the four and aft
01:08:11wheels, the normal riding wheels.
01:08:13They were slightly up because you needed to be able to get it on balance to read, to
01:08:17retract them.
01:08:18You needed to have your brain engaged in balance.
01:08:20So you, you'd be kind of like a little bit kicked to the side at a stop.
01:08:25The light would turn green.
01:08:27You'd hit, you'd hit the clutch, hit the throttle and start going.
01:08:30And you kind of had to like toss it up, like give a little tug on the, on the bars
01:08:34and then we'd toss it up onto balance.
01:08:37And then you're holding this giant swing thing with your legs and you'd pull your legs
01:08:42back and then the things would retract.
01:08:44The outriggers would retract.
01:08:46And then because your feet are busy, you were shifting with a button, like an air shifter
01:08:53or something.
01:08:53I don't remember the technical details there.
01:08:55It was really interesting to ride and, you know, it was sort of, again, what's the
01:09:01point?
01:09:02Probably weather protection.
01:09:03And then for him, it was safety.
01:09:04It was being in a, you know, being in sort of a roll cage on a motorcycle and being, wearing
01:09:09the seatbelt, that that might be slightly safer than being cast into traffic.
01:09:14If you hooked, hooked it down the road.
01:09:17Um, I asked him, I asked the guy who did it, I said, well, how much have you spent on this?
01:09:22And he looked at me, he was really, he was a cool guy.
01:09:24And he said, uh, if I told you, you'd either think I was an idiot or I'm a liar.
01:09:33So I'm not going to tell you.
01:09:37Um, and he was, you know, he went around all the manufacturers and pitched it.
01:09:41And, um, just as Cristini was doing, pitching it to all the manufacturers and, um, it never
01:09:48caught on the enclosed motorcycle.
01:09:51The, this Honda, or this Honda, the BMW, uh, C1, the, you know, the roof, the roof scooter
01:09:59with the windshield wiper, they actually sold some of those.
01:10:02I still see them, uh, in Europe when I'm over there.
01:10:04$13,000 at one time.
01:10:06Yeah.
01:10:07Pretty beat, pretty beat down these days, but they're still out there going.
01:10:11I mean, it has merit.
01:10:12If you got to ride a scooter, having a roof, isn't the worst thing in the world.
01:10:17Yes.
01:10:18But I, you know, my self-image does not say, man, you need a scooter with a roof.
01:10:22Cause you're going to look awesome.
01:10:24It's going to fulfill, it's going to fulfill my dreams of being a pirate or a cowboy or a
01:10:29spaceman or a road racer.
01:10:31Yes, indeed.
01:10:32No.
01:10:33Um, ooh, I, I kind of want to talk about the GTS 1000 Yamaha.
01:10:42It's sort of overlaps with the Bimota Tasey and it goes back to what you said about, um,
01:10:50Elf and lowering the center of gravity, the Elf Grand Prix bike.
01:10:54Yeah.
01:10:55I remember Ron Haslam riding one of those.
01:10:58You rode many of them.
01:10:59Yeah.
01:10:59They build a fresh one every year.
01:11:01Yeah.
01:11:02So swing arm at the front and, uh, you know, a bunch of linkage between the handlebars that
01:11:07put your, into, you know, your steering input into an arm that rotated this thing on a center
01:11:13bearing that allowed the front wheel to turn a certain amount.
01:11:16The kingpin was inside the hub.
01:11:19It was an inner hub and an outer hub with bearings, large diameter bearings between them.
01:11:25And the front of the swing arm had a, uh, like an axle and it had a kingpin on it.
01:11:31And that kingpin engaged bearings that were inside the hub.
01:11:35So you could steer the front wheel through an angle that is, uh, somewhat less than with
01:11:42a normal motorcycle because you'd have to build a bow legged swing arm.
01:11:46To have it steer more.
01:11:49And the great thing about hub steering is that the, the, uh, the eye or, uh, angular mass
01:11:58of the front end is tremendously reduced in the, when BMW built the slash five bike, which
01:12:05had a telescopic fork and they gave up the sidecar, uh, adaptable fork, the one with the long
01:12:12leading links, there was a 57% reduction in perceived inertia, uh, that opposed to your steering effort.
01:12:23So, uh, the hub steering does away with all the fork tubes and all that business, reducing
01:12:32the, the steer inertia, the, the steer inertia even more.
01:12:37So those bikes can get away with, uh, break and trail numbers that are different from what
01:12:44you'd expect in a telescopic fork bike.
01:12:47Yeah.
01:12:48James Parker did the GTS 1000.
01:12:50He was, he was a notable alternative front end proselytizer out there doing interesting
01:12:57stuff.
01:12:57And very busy, built a lot of stuff.
01:13:00So he must've known a great deal, um, at the end.
01:13:04But it's, again, this was a motorcycle that, uh, Yamaha did not provide with a personality.
01:13:14It was simply very different.
01:13:17Oh, wow.
01:13:17That thing doesn't have a telescopic fork.
01:13:19Oh, that's interesting.
01:13:21How interesting was it?
01:13:23Well, you know, it's different.
01:13:25It's different.
01:13:26Yeah.
01:13:26I mean, it had a, it had a futuristic vibe.
01:13:29You know, I was in, when that thing went debuted, I was in a, I was in a very intense period
01:13:34of wanting to ride many kinds of motorcycles and dreaming of all these exotic futures.
01:13:40And it, it resonated.
01:13:43I think what it did for the Yamaha brand was a lot of what Honda has tried to do with all
01:13:50of their technical pushing is, is that we are a technical company.
01:13:53We are, we have ideas that will enhance your experience.
01:13:57And, uh, I, the industry was driven by tech, you know, the industry was driven by improved
01:14:05performance last year, plus 5%.
01:14:07Here's the answer.
01:14:09That's going to make your front end work like no other results that are positively unreal.
01:14:16Yes.
01:14:17So it was, uh, that's a crow or roller rocker, uh, ad from way back in the day.
01:14:23The results are positively unreal.
01:14:26That's gotta be positive, right?
01:14:28Um, but, uh, you know, it rode nice.
01:14:31It's got, you know, the GTS 1000, then Tasey.
01:14:35We've tested varieties of Taseys and they're interesting to ride.
01:14:39They are, um, people have raced them, but, uh, no one's using it.
01:14:44There were, there was one wealthy gentleman who had three houses and he said, I like that
01:14:53bike so much.
01:14:54I bought three of them because I spend time at each of my houses and I, I want that bike
01:15:00to be there.
01:15:02So I'm sure that guy was, I'm sure that guy was one of the personas are popular right now
01:15:08where the manufacturer thinks of different personalities, people, they make it like a
01:15:14theoretical person, like an architect living in Brooklyn makes $500,000 a year, likes food,
01:15:23you know, and they just build out this thing.
01:15:25And they say like, this is how this motorcycle is going to resonate with that.
01:15:28And I'm sure that was the Bimota Tasey was wealthy industrialists with three houses, technically
01:15:34oriented.
01:15:35There's seven of those guys.
01:15:37If we sell three bikes to each of them for each of their houses, think of the volume.
01:15:44Yeah.
01:15:45Good stuff.
01:15:47So the first Tasey was pretty old, right?
01:15:49That was the concept for Taseys.
01:15:51Yeah.
01:15:51The concept from 83 or 83, I think.
01:15:55And, uh, wasn't produced for another, what, eight years.
01:15:59And it really looked like if anything is going to be the future, this has to be it.
01:16:07And when they went racing with it, the rider said, well, um, I want to say positive things
01:16:16here, but I guess I have to say the steering feels fake.
01:16:21And I'm not getting a lot of feel, a lot of feedback, a lot of information from the, from
01:16:28the front end, because it's like there's layers of, uh, chewing gum between us.
01:16:35And so, okay, well, we won't, we won't try to win races with it with the, with the elf Honda
01:16:44thing.
01:16:44The discouraging thing was that each year they would work on improving the bike and they
01:16:52would make changes based upon the stopwatch and the changes were moving back toward conventionality.
01:17:04And this deeply offended the revolutionaries who wanted radical high tech bikes to take
01:17:12over.
01:17:13And how can they take over if you're not making a winner out of the way it began while we're
01:17:22trying to make it faster.
01:17:24And they got fifth place in the 500 CC world championship twice with it during the 1980s
01:17:32with Ron Haslam as the rider.
01:17:35And that wasn't enough for Honda.
01:17:37So the elf Honda partnership kind of diverged, um, lesson learned.
01:17:45That wanting of the technical solution and the evolution back to conventionality
01:17:51reminds me of the, of the Buell EBR rim brake.
01:17:58Um, it wasn't moving toward conventionality.
01:18:02They were just trying to make it work, but it just never, it was a pretty good street
01:18:06break.
01:18:07It was in the, at the very end, it was a pretty good street break.
01:18:10And I think you talked to somebody who said that directly.
01:18:13I think it was, uh, Oh, what's his name?
01:18:17Went to zero.
01:18:18Yes, he did.
01:18:19Yes.
01:18:19That's the man.
01:18:20That's the man.
01:18:21He said, forget racing.
01:18:23It's, it's a perfectly good street bike break, which it is.
01:18:27Yeah.
01:18:28When they were doing the hero stuff and in super bike, uh, world super bike, they were
01:18:32running out of pads.
01:18:35You know, your, your velocity out at the rim was, was very high and they had a very high
01:18:40many, many piston caliper.
01:18:42And then they messed with, uh, pad compounds and all of that.
01:18:45And then ultimately I think they just said, Hey, Brembo, can we, can we just run a, and
01:18:50they did fix it.
01:18:52Yeah.
01:18:52And then they had breaks at the end of a race, but that last three twenties.
01:18:56Yeah.
01:18:57But the last, uh, the last, uh, EBR was pretty good.
01:19:01Although the, again, you know, man, EBR was a challenge cause it was small volume and the
01:19:08big disc, you know, has to be surface ground and has to be flat just as any break has to
01:19:13be flat.
01:19:13Yeah.
01:19:14Yeah.
01:19:14And, uh, we had a, we got a test bike with a finish problem.
01:19:18Um, and so it had a tremendous vibration, uh, while breaking cause the, yeah, it was, it
01:19:25was shaking the bike up.
01:19:26Nonetheless, we turned excellent lap times and it might've been even better if the break
01:19:32hadn't been doing that, but yeah, we get so, uh, attached to our, our notions and dreams
01:19:40that sometimes it's hard to accept reality.
01:19:43If it's rejecting us, sure.
01:19:46Well, think of, think of all the romances that are based on a misconception.
01:19:52Yep.
01:19:53It's, uh, we, we call it, yeah, you don't want to be precious.
01:19:57So you can't be, you can't be your, your idea cannot be your little prep pet pet.
01:20:02Your idea cannot be your little pet.
01:20:04And this is the thing that happened with the alternative front ends and, uh, things like
01:20:09the Kawasaki's FUBAR twin swing arm bike, where are they today?
01:20:16The things that have come down to us are telelever, paralever, and the single sided swing arm from
01:20:23that era, late seventies, early eighties.
01:20:26Um, and the radical stuff did not produce improvement enough to justify doing it a different way
01:20:37and tooling all the different stuff that you would have to manufacture to implement those concepts.
01:20:44Everybody's got the stuff they need to make fork tubes.
01:20:48And that's what happens in industry.
01:20:53Once a concept is tooled and everyone's made that investment, which is not small, uh, inventors
01:21:00who come scratching at the window, can you, can you come out here for a minute?
01:21:04I got something to show you.
01:21:06Well, the other part of this is rider feel.
01:21:09Yeah.
01:21:10And the, and the way motorcycles communicate and how do they behave.
01:21:13So we grow up riding basically the same kind of motorbike that's been around since roughly
01:21:18really came into being around 53 to 55 swing arm, telescopic fork, steering head, all of its,
01:21:28you know, all of its shortcomings and its strengths.
01:21:32And we've beat down the shortcomings and expanded the strengths, but it's still the same thing.
01:21:38A little more active, you know, we're, we're getting variable ride height and we're getting
01:21:42you know, start starting aid device, you know, launch devices, all these other things, but
01:21:50it's still, I, I would love to get into somebody like Honda to see what kind of information or
01:22:00how much study BMW, the feel, how much is motorcycle feel codified, or are we just relying on a good
01:22:09test rider to say, no, this isn't working?
01:22:12No, there's no clutch feel here.
01:22:13We have to redesign the clutch so that I can tell when friction is engaged the very first
01:22:19bit, and then I can control it until it's fully engaged and make, you know, how is that,
01:22:24is that codified somewhere?
01:22:25Like, you know, with the alternative.
01:22:28We have, every, every sport has, there's the danger that an exceptional person will appear.
01:22:37And in MotoGP, it's, it's Mark Marquez, who's well on in years.
01:22:42He's done a lot of riding.
01:22:45For MotoGP.
01:22:45And the thing about this man is that on slippery surfaces, he is practically untouchable.
01:22:54Now, it can't be that he's lucky on slippery surfaces.
01:22:59Other people try to keep up on slippery surfaces and they tip over.
01:23:05So he is getting some kind of feedback that is not available to other people, that is not
01:23:13received on their radios.
01:23:15I don't know what it is, but there are many animal senses that supposedly we don't have
01:23:24or they aren't implemented in our genes.
01:23:29And I think there's two elements to this feel thing.
01:23:32Yeah.
01:23:33I'd love to see what, what is actually known about it.
01:23:38There's two elements to the Marquez factor.
01:23:40Uh, I relate it to my experience with Don Cane.
01:23:44So I'm, I've ridden fast and I've been, you know, fast at press launches, top three, top
01:23:49five, because Don was always there in the early days and Nick Einach was there and he's, Nick's
01:23:54a very intelligent person and he's got good reflexes and he's obsessed with riding.
01:24:00So he's applied his intelligence on how to ride, how to ride safely, what riders do, you
01:24:06know, that's why he started his school.
01:24:08Um, so I'm referencing off of them and I was, I'm, I'm good on a motorcycle.
01:24:13I went to Arma, Arma.
01:24:15I rode race last, you know, I rode race last year at Barber and I was able to take a bike.
01:24:21I'd never ridden on a track.
01:24:22I'd never raced.
01:24:22And I got, I won two races and then I got fifth in a pretty competitive class and six
01:24:27in that same form of the seven 50 class.
01:24:29So I did okay.
01:24:29But if I'm testing with Don Cane, I was always seconds off of his pace and he, there's where
01:24:37I'm going with this is I'm not pushing the motorcycle to the point where the information
01:24:43is even generated that he's using to do what he's doing.
01:24:47And I think that's for, that's what's happening with Mark Marcus.
01:24:50He's able to load the front end in a way that other riders are not.
01:24:54And he's getting information possibly that they're not, I think like, who knows?
01:24:59I don't know.
01:24:59Could be just all noise in my head, additional BS.
01:25:05Well, thanks for listening, folks.
01:25:09We'll wrap this up.
01:25:10It's a world record length for our podcast.
01:25:13We, we hope you're still here with us.
01:25:15Um, thank you for listening.
01:25:16Get down in the comments again.
01:25:18Uh, thanks to battery tender.
01:25:20Also check out Peter Egan's book.
01:25:22And of course, thanks to Octane Lending for sponsoring the podcast as ever.
01:25:26Wouldn't be here without him.
01:25:28Go get yourself some, uh, prequal on your next motorcycle.
01:25:31You can prequalify for a loan.
01:25:32And, uh, if you do, you can, uh, run out there and, and pick some up.
01:25:38Thanks for listening.
01:25:39See you next time.
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