The Cup Cake as Lean Angle Sensor

(Originally Published in On the Level, the magazine of the BMW Riders Association.)

Just over the Santa Cruz mountains from my home on the Northern California coast, in the trendy little town of Los Gatos, there is a store that sells cupcakes. Not just any cupcakes. These are legendary for their size, embellishments, and pure decadence. Each one is a veritable Vesuvius of sugar, and brings to mind the Bob Dylan song, “Brand New Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat.” They are monuments to calorie consumption.

What does this have to do with motorcycling? Between my house and the cupcake place, there is an equally delicious array of twisty roads through the Redwoods. I count at least 10 that will leave the center portion of your tires almost entirely unscathed. You could take the legendary Highway 9, home to a steady stream of Silicon Valley refugees on Ducati Panigale V4s or driving Tesla Model S Plaids at supralegal speeds. There’s also Black Road, Bear Creek Road, Alma Bridge Road, Eureka Canyon, and Alpine Road—a thicket of twisty, pothole-ridden pavement that’s ideally suited for going exactly nowhere. Or to the cupcake place.

You could even go via a delightfully smooth switchback road that summits 3,486-foot Mt. Umunhum, one of the highest peaks in the Bay Area. Even the biggest, fastest road (Highway 17) is a blast—if you don’t do it at commuting hour, when it’s the primary route between the Silicon Valley and bedroom communities on the ocean.  

All these roads also happen to be ideally suited to what my friend Tom likes to call my “Old Crocks”: a 1978 BMW R100/7 and horsepower-challenged 1975 Honda CB400F. Both vintage motorcycles look resplendent parked on the street next to the café. It’s crucial to find a spot where the bikes are in plain view, since much of the pleasure involves drinking coffee at an outdoor table while admiring one’s own motorcycle.

Downtown Los Gatos is a little like a catwalk in a fashion show: it’s a place for highly polished and preened people to display the expensive results of the CrossFit gym and the clothing store. My presence—in a faded and bug-encrusted Aerostich suit with more than 200,000 miles—is in sharp contrast to the finely coiffed refugees of the Silicon Valley here on a brief sojourn wedged between consecutive Zoom meetings. In comparison, I’m here on an open-ended coffee run wedged into a broad expanse of nothingness. My nearest deadline is dinner, and even that is flexible.

Inevitably, the sidewalk ritual also involves fielding questions from passing codgers like myself. The conversation almost always starts with a person walking down the sidewalk, spying the bike, and coming to an abrupt halt, as if due to a lightning strike or coronary arrest. The next two statements follow in an inevitable succession: 1) “What year is that?”; and 2) “I had one like that! I wish I never sold it!”

Of Pink Boxes and Black Boxes

There’s a problem with twisty roads: they are not kind to cupcakes. Despite being cradled in a well-fortified, cupcake-specific pink box, taped shut and firmly wedged into my top box amidst spare clothes, tool kit, electrical doo-dads, and other detritus, the cupcakes rarely arrive home intact, or even vertical. My wife opens the box with a sense of grave anticipation. Sometimes it’s merely capsized. Other times, it’s entirely inverted and looks like it has been churned in a Cuisinart or centrifuge, slammed up against the side of the box in a sad, flattened sugar mass.

“Must have been a good ride,” she deadpans, extricating the remnants with a spatula. “Glad you had fun.” Fortunately, cupcakes that have been slamming back and forth inside a pink box on the way down China Grade taste just as good as the intact ones that “normal” people eat.

You could say that the cupcake serves as a kind of analog lean angle sensor. My modern BMW R1200 GS does in fact have a lean angle sensor, literally contained in a black box that influences traction control and braking in ways that I appreciate but don’t really understand. In contrast, the scientific principle that governs the pink box could be understood by nearly anyone, including me. If you lean the bike over too far, things inside tip over, bits of frosting and cake everywhere. In contrast to the black box, the pink box has absolutely no effect on traction or braking. But it does make an impressive statement. In lieu of a black box, my vintage motorcycles have only the pink box.

I co-wrote a book with Superbike champ Reg Pridmore, called “Smooth Riding.” It’s a philosophy I believe in. But even though I pride myself on silky smooth clutch, shift, brake, and throttle control, I’m no match for the pink box. It’s always a mess in there.

It occurs to me that we can measure our rides in miles covered, the absence of chicken strips, the striations in a knee puck, a number on the dyno, or the riding companions left in our wake before the next lunch stop.

Or, we can settle for the inverted cupcake.  At this point in my life, it’s all the bragging rights I need.