Real world rides, real world riders

“That’s because you ride like a d***head...”

I pointed out the bits that scored highly with me such as the forks, the brakes, the motor, the looks.

“What’s it like on fuel economy then?” my friend asked.

Now, I should explain here that there’s at least 25 years between us. My mate has been there and done that. He’s raced at the TT and owned more bikes than I can shake a stick at. He also calls a spade a spade and doesn’t see much sense in spending money where it’s not needed.

“A bit rough,” says I: “It’s been regularly giving me low 20s back. I can nudge that average up a bit but I’ve got to plod around on it.”

“Yeah, but it’s only thirsty because you ride it like a d***head.”

He has a point.

The Triumph’s thirst did surprise me at first.

I know that, on paper, it shouldn’t be that different (if different at all) to the bike that went before but I was catching myself having to fill up on what felt like every decent, hard ride I undertook.

But looking back through my notes on the bike it did correlate. When the Triumph was thirsty it was only because I’d been ‘winding it on a bit’.

I hear a lot about fuel consumption and modern bikes. I wonder if it’s the bikes or us who have to change our outlook on the subject.

If we draw comparisons with the car world then you wouldn’t expect for one second a car like an Aston Martin or a Ferrari to return good mpg ratings. Likewise you’d never expect a Vauxhall everyman of Ford middlemanagement to reach down into your underwear and have a rummage every time you headed off your driveway.

But with a lot of bikes out there we tend to want the best of both worlds. We seem to expect strong motors capable of stirring the soul in a way that you have to spend hundreds of thousands in the car world to get near but we expect frugal sips from the petrol tank even when we’re wringing the throttle.

On the other hand there are bikes out there that will slip along using not much of the go-faster juice but could barely pull the skin off a rice pudding.

But I genuinely think we’ll see this change soon. No, I’m not going to blather on about electric bikes (I personally think that hydrogen cells are the future) but I think that, given the way big tourers are going right now, we’ll soon have feisty motorcycles under us that don’t beat up the pocket.

But we must be very careful not to look at modern mpg figures with rose-tinted specs.

As a two-stroke nut in my youth I would always run my bikes on the best oil I could.

At the time a litre of TTS fully synthetic would cost just over £7 and I would think nothing of going through a litre of that during an afternoon ride with the throttle on the stop. Three tankfuls of fuel in that ride out too... don’t tell me modern bikes are thirsty by comparison.

Last year our own Bruce found a modern Honda that could keep going on a mere cupful of petrol (a tiny Varadero it may have been, but it’s no slouch) so there are bikes out there that don’t require a pocketful of petrol money every mile or two.

What do you reckon to modern motrocycles? Do you want more mpg? Or should we leave it as it is and have a mix of bikes that are thirsty, yes, but excite us and others that sip from the petrol cup and still provide an enjoyable experience on two wheels?

This month we start our new Touring section of MSL, it all kicks off on page 97 – I hope you enjoy it.

The idea behind it was a simple one.

Rather than have massive trips across foreign climes and nothing else I wanted to make sure we showed bike touring in a way that we could all relate to. So every month we will bring you tales of a great motorcycle ride here in the UK (ideal for a weekend’s or single day jaunt), another ride a bit further afield – such as Ireland,
France or somewhere mainland Europe (a three-day or four-day ride), plus a story about one of those massive, other-world, other-continent trips that make us all want to sell the house and get out there.

Let me know what you think to the new section – I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Have a safe ride

Tony