Too Old For Adventure
Something came over me in the past week and I don’t know that I can explain it. I got an email from the local BMW motorcycle dealership saying that on September 18 they were having a special event to celebrate the new BMW R18. This is a massive new transverse twin with 1,800 ccs of displacement. That means each cylinder has about 900 cc’s (almost a full liter) of displacement between the piston and the cylinder head. That’s one big cylinder. In the old days, BMW had a one-cylinder 500 cc bike nicknamed a thumper. Those were the days of kickstarting before electronic starters were common. Saying that today makes it seem like the old crank-start cars. It was, after all, fifty years ago that kickstarting began to go away in favor of push-button starting. That thumper was such a huge cylinder with such outrageously high compression that you had to be careful how you kickstarted it or it might send that kickstart level up and break your leg like it was a twig. That R18 beast had caught my eye when it was first released and I have certainly been curious about it. This ad from the dealership was offering all four models of the R18 for people to come in and test drive.
The allure was irresistible. That bike had my name written all over it. It was a BMW transverse horizontal twin, which has been my ride of choice for a long time, and it was massively big. The last time I felt this way about a motorcycle was when Honda released the first Valkyrie. Their ad was a full two-page spread of the yellow and black monster six-cylinder machine with eight feet of wheelbase. Their ad had a very simple tag line…The Fat Lady Has Sung. I sat on one at the motorcycle show at the Jacob Javits Center in New York and ordered the first one to be delivered in New York City. That was a head-turning bike to say the least. Everyone wanted to look at it and sit on it, but only a few were brave enough to ask to ride it. The R18 Day seemed to have a similar effect on people. There were people there gawking, but only a few of us actually took the bikes out for a test ride.
The four models are a basic, stripped down bike with a solo speedometer, the classic model with added soft-sided bags, the “Bagger” that looked like a Harley Road King with twin hard bags (these with imbedded sound system speakers on top) and a much fancier digital dashboard, and then the full-dress Trans-America with all that the Bagger has plus a top box and God knows what other do-dads. I’m not sure it would have made a difference since they all four had the same seating configuration, but I chose to test ride the Bagger. The first thing I noticed on turning it over was that it immediately felt like a Harley with that hesitancy in starting and then that catch when the spark ignites. Since I always start a bike with the clutch pulled in, the next thing I felt was this bone-rattling vibration coming through the clutch level. It was almost painful it was so strong. That did not impress me. I also know from driving a horizontal twin that there is always some lateral rumble and vibration, something I have come to feel as comforting more than anything else. On this beast, that lateral shudder was like a freight train, and I must say, it was not all that pleasant, but not too off-putting either.
The real issue became evident as I sunk into the seat and the cruiser seating position. This was, after all, BMW’s Harley-killer, so being a cruiser was what was intended. BMW’s prior attempt at a cruiser, the R1200C was roller out during a preview on a James Bond film where Bond was played by Pierce Brosnan, generally thought to be the weakest Bond. That cruiser was equally ill-considered and never went very far. My big problem with the ride was the rocker-arm gear shift. In olden days, bikes had these rocker shifters and the idea was to make up shifting easier by giving you a back pedal to stomp on to push your bike into a higher gear. The cost of that is that to downshift you have to stomp on the front pedal since pulling up on the back pedal is ergonomically impossible. I was sitting so low that I couldn’t bring my foot up high enough to downshift. In stead, I would roll to a stop at the light and bend down and pull the back pedal up hard until the gears dropped to where I wanted. That is no way to enjoy a ride, even one that is just around the block. I got that monster back to the dealership as fast as I could and the idea of swapping my Kawasaki Versys 1000 for it went out of my head.
But it was Saturday afternoon at a motorcycle dealership, so I looked around and wondered if there was an alternative. I hate going into transacting mode and finding myself unable to transact. I did not want it bad enough to take an R18 for $30k and then find myself unable to ride it. BMW has an entire line of smaller bikes, but it is hard for me to ride anything less than a 1,000 cc bike with any sense of authority. And while this would not be my primary bike, I want to be able to ride it and enjoy it nevertheless. My problem is that all the other bigger BMWs are very pricey and involved and I wanted a simple back-up bike. And then, magically, there it was, a bike I had noticed and admired for some time, the R NineT, which uses the old 1200 horizontal twin that I used to have on my old RTs. This was a stripped-down cafe racer type of bike that has a distinctly urban feel. It is simple, with a single speedo instrumentation (with a bit of hidden digital data), a skinny seat that wouldn’t take you much more than 100 miles comfortably and very little else. It is basically an engine and gas tank on two wheels…and little more. I loved it and just hoped I could ride it comfortably.
I took a new metallic gray one for a test ride and fell in love with it. It was comfortable, upright and quite exciting. Even though I had ridden that engine, I had never done so on a stripped down bike like this with a fat back tire. This was an exciting bike to ride and it was priced at about half of its bigger and more fancy brethren. It was the perfect solution for my back-up riding needs. So, no surprise, I did a deal on the spot to trade out my five-year-old Kawasaki with only 3,000 miles on it for this brand new RNineT. One of my objectives in the swap is to have only one place I have to go to service my bikes. I was not impressed by the generic bike repair shop where I had to take the Kawasaki. This new purchase was going to solve a number of issues I have in my motorcycling hobby, so I felt very good about everything. Today I rode the RNineT home and left the Kawasaki behind forever.
I found myself wondering if a man of almost 68 should be buying another new motorcycle. Was I too old for the adventure of buying and riding a new bike, especially one set up and geared for young urban professionals with skinny backsides? Naw. My motorcycling guru, Arthur “Living Legend” Einstein, who tips the scales at almost 90 years would laugh me out of the room if I ever said such a thing. When Arthur was my age he was buying a new Triumph Sprint, which makes the RNineT look like an old man’s bike. I will never be too old or at least I will never admit to being too old. For now, I plan to go out and ride the hello out of this little whipper-snapper of a bike.