Category: Diary (Page 2 of 7)
Semi-random thoughts and observations on the world as seen by enthusiast riders and drivers, or at least by this one. Your mileage may vary.
A little personal context here: I don’t do commercial track days any more: I’m just fed up with the testosterone-soaked antics of too many people who don’t have the gumption or skill to go racing but who seem to think that a track day is a competitive environment and an excuse for poor and deeply inconsiderate behaviour to others – it only takes a few to screw it up for everyone.
Five years now of Multistradom. And all is not entirely well in the state of Ducati Ecosse. Frankly, I’m a little hacked off.
After years of evangelising the whole Ducati Thing and telling all and sundry that their reputation for expiring gracelessly in embarrassing places was a perceptual hangover from a dim and distant past, the Multistrada 1200 has stopped me in my tracks – in short, this has been the worst finished and least reliable motorcycle I have owned from the modern era. In fact, the only one of my machines that provided any real competition in the “What is going to fail next?” department was my 1957 Royal Enfield. Continue reading
I’m a great fan of the smaller capacity Ducati sports bikes. I hold to the principle that a sports bike, like a sports car, is one with which you have to fully engage and whose performance should be exploitable – albeit with concentrated practice – on the roads or tracks on which you or I use it. That immediately disqualifies most modern litre-class sports bikes and and high-end sports cars – the combination of huge horsepower and software intervention that makes them ridiculously capable in the hands of riding and driving gods on the Nurburgring simply frustrates us mere mortals who are (usually vainly) trying to get them to a place where they can be bothered to wake up and take an interest.My first bike on my return to motorcycling was a Ducati 748 and, despite having since ridden examples of all full-fat Ducati sports bikes made since then, I’m still enamoured of the balance of power, handling and usability of this machine and its ilk. OK, so the current ‘small’ Ducati sports bike – the 899 Panigale – puts out 150bhp – more power than ANY road-going Ducati built prior to 2007 but, relative to the axe-murderer 1199 Panigale, the principle still applies. Continue reading
Welcome back, again. It’s been a while. Again. I started this blog in late 1998, to share thoughts and experiences as a motorcyclist returning to the fold after a long lay-off, as many of us then were. Things have been a little quiet though these last few years, mainly due to the exigencies of restoring a 200-year-old Highland farmhouse and the consequential distinct lack of riding time. A deal of spectacularly bike-unfriendly weather hasn’t helped either, but here I am again, blog moved from my old faithful co-located server of the last nine years to a nice new cloud thingy, whence I can continue pontificating on the life, the universe, riding and driving. Of course stuff gets lost along the way: for the moment most of my posts still need to be updated with their photo galleries for the new system. Which will take a while, especially as I’m doing the same for a bunch of other blogs. I hope it’s easier in another decade.
So please bear with me on missing content and broken links. For the moment at least. Normal sarcasm will be resumed shortly.
Four years? I can’t quite believe it. Where’d they go? Although, looking back suggests that starting and building a couple of companies alongside the renovation of our old Highland farmhouse is going to swallow up a chunk of years with but a passing whoosh. Which is my excuse for what’s sitting in front of me – an exactly four-year-old Multistrada 1200S which shows a pathetically low total of 8,000 miles. Actually, it displays a mileage of 700, because the clocks have been replaced under warranty. Of which more anon. But those are many fewer miles than I used to do in a year – my 46,000 mile ST4s sits smugly alongside in the stable, on its charger, currently awaiting a light restoration and rodent extraction before being put back into circulation. As mine was one of the first of this new generation of Ducatis off the production line, it’s probably now worth taking a critical look at what’s not worked as well as I might have hoped as well as summarising my thoughts about the bike now and whether my initial opinions have changed.
Kneel on a rug with your hands on the ground in front of your shoulders. Now imagine the rug to be a low-flying magic carpet, responding to your demands at the speed of thought, where faster and slower are products of instantaneous desire and turning is as simple as looking to your goal. Hold that vision. Now go ride a Ducati Panigale. See? And that of course is what I’ve just been doing — courtesy of the ever-helpful Blair at Ducati Glasgow, I’ve been having a play on their Panigale S demonstrator. Continue reading
Think Mouse: winter is coming and it’s time to seek out a place to store food, make a nest and curl up until the spring sunshine brings you out, blinking and shivering, into the pale day of a new year. So, being a diligent mouse, you seek and scurry, until you’ve found the ideal spot: a dark, sheltered chamber with just two circular tunnels into it. Even better, it’s carpeted with a thick, ridged, woody substance that’s warm to the touch and which can easily be shredded to create a cosy, safe nest. And, right behind this Mouse Four Seasons, there’s a dry pit which is perfect for storing nuts and seeds. And so the months pass…
I had to curtail a ride today due to a nail in my front tyre – with it going from 36psi to 10psi in 3 miles, I wasn’t going to get thirty miles home unaided. Called the AA (via Ducati Assistance) from Springkerse. Three hours later they turned up, with a truck with a comedy bike attachment that hung off a piece of wire and looked like one of the ore carts that Indiana Jones used to get chased through mines in. Rather less comedy when the guy was fiddling around with the securing straps and the bike promptly tipped sideways out of the device and onto the ground. Result: mirror; bar end; hand guard, pillion peg/hanger, pannier mount and, best of all, gouging one of Marchesini’s finest forged alloy wheels on the way. Just as well I wasn’t wearing my shiny new Observer’s jacket at that point – I would have brought the IAM into serious disrepute.
0/10 also to J K motorcycles in Stirling for being “too busy” to help, despite my being 400 metres from them. 10/10 though to Strathearn Tyres in Crieff, who stayed open until I finally turned up then fixed the problem promptly and efficiently – they even managed to have a spare Diablo Rosso Corse on standby in case the nail had caused internal damage to the tyre. And a big fat kick in a very sensitive place to the bloody AA, who were, in timing, design and execution, culpably useless.
I’ve had my Multistrada for just over a month now — time enough to find out the good, the bad and the incomprehensible about it. And yes, it IS as good as the reviews say it is (my own full review has been much-delayed by the simple fact that I’ve been out riding it!) but it ain’t entirely perfect, so here’s my thoughts to date on what can be improved in future and what needs to be fixed by Ducati right now. It’s a very short list, considering that this is a brand new bike designed to appeal to a much wider market than Ducatis of yore — and, by definition, a market less accommodating of Italian, ah, idiosyncrasies. But here they are, in all their ignominy — let’s see what Ducati come back with:
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