Who Says You Can’t Combine a 1978 BMW Airhead and an old Honda scrambler on the Same Ride?
By Geoff Drake
Originally published in BMW Owners News.
The other day my riding buddy Ken and I went on one of our regular shop crawls—you know, where you visit multiple motorcycle shops in one day, vowing not to spend any money, and break your promise by the time you’re 10 feet inside the door. Ken was on his streamlined, very fast, farkle-encrusted Aprilia RS 660, looking as if our next destination was a track day at nearby Laguna Seca Raceway. I, on the other hand, was on my 1975 Honda CB400F, looking like I had just stepped into the stone circle in the TV show, Outlander, and come out, blinking, in some future era, slightly bewildered. Apparently here, in this decade, motorcycles have electronic ignition, tubeless tires, and two camshafts. Who knew?
Outside, a couple of young guys approach to check out the bikes, in a time-honored ritual known to motorcyclists the world over. And which bike do they gravitate toward? Ken’s Aprilia, of course, as befits their age. They pepper him with the usual questions, like: How fast does it go? Have you ever taken it to the track? Is it possible to adjust the valves without having to go to motorcycle mechanics school? And so on. Meanwhile, my little Honda sat, forlorn, off to one side. The CB400F may have been the Aprilia of its day, but as far as these guys were concerned, it held all the allure of a flip phone.
Moto-Eclecticism
This kind of thing seems to happen to me all the time. Over the years, I have variously owned minibikes, sport bikes, standards, dirt bikes, trials bikes, sport tourers, and adventure bikes. When I was a teenager, I owned a 10-inch-wheel Honda CT70 and a Triumph 650 in rapid succession. In motorcycles, as in life, I’ve always moved according to a strange logic. By the same token, I like music mixes that go from Chris Stapleton, to Miles Davis, to Mississippi John Hurt, and finish with a Bach cello suite. Go figure. Squirrel!
Riding wildly different motorcycles usually cleaves the audience cleanly in half. Young guys come over and proclaim bikes like the Aprilia “sick”. (Like you, I had to look this up: it means very cool). Meanwhile, they proclaim the CB400F—well they don’t proclaim it anything, because, in their estimation, it isn’t worthy of a proclamation.
Displacement, age, type of bike—it doesn’t matter to our little clown show. We ride. People point. Some laugh. We’re happy.
We’ve also conducted our little odd-couple show at our local OHV park, Hollister Hills, where Ken rides his fast and sensible Yamaha WR250F, with 11 inches of fork travel, while I ride my 1986 Honda TLR200 Reflex. Not surprisingly, I like the tight, twisty stuff, as befits a trials bike. Ken struggles a bit in these conditions. On buff singletrack and fireroads, the Reflex handles the whoops with all the aplomb of a 40-year-old trials bike with 6 inches of suspension travel. Which is to say, not at all. Fortunately, Ken’s a nice guy. Let’s just say he waits for me at the trail junctions.
Ken also owns a Honda Trail 125—the modern homage to the legendary Trail 90, of which more than 725,000 were built in the U.S. alone. He’s installed an enormous Harbor Freight top box to the back—an upscale take on the venerable milk crate. Riding behind this motorcycle is very entertaining, as the tires are roughly the same width as those of a modern e-bicycle. With the giant box affixed, the whole package looks like a flatbed truck carrying a sprinter van, poised to roll over in the next turn.
Sometimes, things break. The most modern bike is usually the rescue vehicle, carrying tools and capable of the rapid speeds required to summon help or retrieve the Trailer of Shame. A few weeks ago, my 1978 BMW R100/7—which could dust the little Honda at the slightest provocation—began dripping oil out the “weep hole” in the final drive, just below the axle nut, and onto the tire sidewall. Obviously, this made me a bit nervous.
Ken’s Trail 125, meanwhile, puttered along like it was ready to go directly to the Darien Gap, circle the earth, and take another lap. Modernity has its benefits, even in a small yellow package with 80-mm tires. As has been repeated by motorcyclists through the ages when speaking of Hondas: “You can’t kill the thing.” I know this to be true, because I’ve tried.
Ken also owns a 1972 Honda CL350—you know, the beautiful, high-pipe version of the ubiquitous CB350. If I accompany him on my Honda 400, BMW R100/7, or Yamaha RD350, we can actually exist in the same decade, as if Nixon were president and gas cost 40 cents.
Another riding friend, Todd, owns an absolutely stunning Triton, which famously combines an air-cooled Triumph twin engine with the legendary Norton “Featherbed” frame of the ‘50s. All Tritons are handmade, which means that many are Frankenbikes, thrown together with the stylistic aplomb of, say, a vintage MZ, a German brand that was so profoundly ugly that it’s almost beautiful. Things are not this way with Todd, who also happens to be a bicycle framebuilder and machinist. The things he does with a lathe and a mill are beyond my comprehension, and his Triton looks like something you would find behind plate glass in a museum.
When Todd takes his Triton, I generally ride my modern BMW R1200 GS because, well, it’s the only way I can keep up. Todd is 20 years younger than me and lays across the tank holding onto the clip-ons with no more discomfort than most people feel when watching TV from the living room sofa. When I’ve tried his Triton, I’ve needed weeks of massage and chiropractic merely to sit upright in a chair again and speak in complete sentences. Nonetheless, we make it work.
Last week Ken and I rode to Pinnacles National Park on Highway 25, a favorite road that contains a couple of long straights with great visibility, where it is a legal requirement (or so I’ve heard) to crack 100 mph, at least for a moment. With this accomplished, we pull up in front of the campground store to eat our sandwiches, and spy a couple of young guys riding a 14-year-old Buell 1125R sportbike, and a GasGas enduro—with knobbies. Our kind of people! It’s rare to find young folks with such eclectic tastes, and in a way, I feel sorry for them. They have the disease. Next thing you know one of them will be cruising around on a Honda Rune and the other one will be astride a Puch Moped. But they’ll be smiling.
This love of motorcycling in all its guises is something that can’t be cultivated. It comes from decades of exposure, like the moles my dermatologist keeps carving off my back. But I wouldn’t want a life without sunshine, nor would I like a life without myriad motorcycles, old and young, from a half-dozen countries. These are the things that empty our bank accounts, jeopardize our marriages—and enrich our lives.
The Weird Bike Summit
Once per month, a group of misfits (myself included) gather in Monterey, California, to show off old, odd motorcycles. Here you’ll find German, Italian, Japanese, and American bikes from every imaginable decade. They need only one qualification: they’re motorcycles.
At a recent gathering you’d have found a mighty, bellowing BSA Gold Star, a Kawasaki Mach III “widowmaker”, a BMW R60/2 with Steib sidecar, a diminutive Hodaka Ace 100, a Laverda Jota 1000, and a rare, Yamaha XJ650 Turbo. Many owners have a barn full of bikes and employ the time-honored Velcro registration trick, where a single license plate gets affixed to the bike of the day, then moved to the next one, to avoid registration and insurance fees.
I’ve been hatching a new plan for the meetup: Ken and I could trailer my vintage trials bike and my 1969 Honda Z50 to a spot a mile away. Then we could arrive, in a state of glorious confusion, with Ken standing on the pegs like multiple world trials champ Tony Bou, and me hunched down on the little Honda, doing my best imitation of Jeff Ward in On Any Sunday. Even better, I’d find a speed bump that would enable me to arrive with the front wheel in the air. Appearing this way, before 20 hotshots, just might be the pinnacle of my motorcycling life. It might also result in a spectacular crash. But it will have been worth it, don’t you think?
The Bikes that Remain
All of this has me thinking: there are a lot of moto-categories I’ve yet to explore. For instance, I’ve never owned an ice-racing bike with its inch-long spikes, or a turn-left-only, wide-open, brakeless, speedway bike. What would I do with such a machine? I dunno. Probably ride it with Ken. I could lend him the Mini-Trail. We’d be perfect together, don’t you think?
Or maybe I need one of those specialized hillclimb bikes—you know, the ones with the enormous, extended swingarms and lumpy chains wrapped around the rear tires for traction. Wouldn’t it be cool to go rattling down the road on one of those? I’m thinking it would be just the thing for trips to the post office or 7-Eleven. I’m sure you agree.
