#JohnBurns

I got my first Ogio gear bag when I went to ride the first Yamaha R1 in Spain. I believe that was late 1997, and I’ve left the same bag to the tender mercies of international baggage handlers probably 50 times in those 20 ensuing years – and probably twice that many domestic trips. It’s still perfectly fine. No holes, no tears, no puncture wounds, no busted zippers, no problems. Even the rollerblade wheels spin as freely as my own little imagination as I wheel my trusty Ogio through the world’s airports…

“Tire testing” is rapidly becoming my favorite thing to do here at MO. It always involves going on a great ride, sometimes even a race track, and no one can really accuse me of getting it wrong, can they? Especially when the main claim is greater tire longevity. I’d like to hang around Austin and eat more barbecue and put 6,000 miles on these new Dunlops, but oh dear, look at the time…

I was a little surprised my kid liked the new Honda Rebel 500 as much as he did last week, but then all of us are surprised by our offspring, aren’t we? His daily driver lately is my old Yamaha R1. He finally got around to getting his motorcycle endorsement last month – on our borrowed KTM Super Duke GT… so he does have quite a varied motorcycle background for a kid who’s only 23 years old. In an effort to understand the younger moto-mentality, and as a service to all the manufacturers trying to figure out what the hell millennial motorcyclists want, anyway, I drilled further into my child’s mind to get down to the Top 10 of things.

Indian continues to bring the battle to Milwaukee with a pair of new baggers: the 2017 Chieftain Elite and Chieftain Limited – baggers being such a big deal they’ve spawned their own magazines and websites, and why not? They’re a great balance of form and function, combining the ability to cruise the dirty boulevard in style, then hightail it out of town without having to leave all one’s worldly goods behind. We could call them “American Sport Tourers,” really.

Hemlines and exhausts go up and down, radiators come and go, but the Monster hasn’t really ever gone out of fashion since it hit the runway, dang, has it really been 23 years ago? 1994 brought us Miguel Galluzzi’s original naked bike, and there’s been a veritable plethora of Monsters over the years ever since. Also Monsterinos, as Ducati likes to call the smaller-displacement ones.

Harley’s new Street Rod was our excuse to go to Daytona last week, but while we were there we got to ride The MoCo’s new Road King Special too. Okay, so, yeah, the Street Rod was a bit underwhelming, but it would be fun to sit all the commenters heaping abuse upon H-D for that bike on one of its FLs for about a 10-minute ride. I think it would shut most of them right up. Well, actually it probably wouldn’t. I think we’ve all learned how hard it is to unseat deep-rooted preconceptions lately.

As a lifelong rooter for the underdog, I really wanted to like this one. Almost three years ago, I was a big fan of the original Street 750, which wasn’t so easy because it did have a couple of glaring shortcomings. But it was such a friendly little approachable motorcycle I liked it anyway – then H-D gave it a better front brake and cured its main malfunction. But the critics still panned its lack of cornering clearance, its mundane parts manifest and its frankly sloppy fit and finish. All legit complaints, but I always liked the little Harley’s potential. The cut of its jib.

Next week (Wednesday, to be exact) I’ll be riding the new, 2017 Yamaha YZF-R6 (look for my review Friday). Now, because we’ve already featured the 1999 R6 in a past Church feature, this week we fast forward to the second-generation R6, which our own John Burns got the chance to ride in late 2002. A sharper tool than the original R6 as far as racetrack chops go, after reading this piece stay tuned to my review of the 2017 model to compare and contrast. Something tells me the two models will be very similar in many ways…

A week or two ago I had the pleasure of “testing” some new Dunlop tires up north of the L.A. sprawl – all up through recently rained-upon green backroads and citrus farms reeking of orange blossoms, around Fillmore and Santa Paula, looping around Lake Cachuma (filling back up with water!) and Ojai, back down along the ocean and through the Malibu canyons – all on a brand new KTM Super Duke GT, all under blue skies with temperatures hovering in crispy low 60s. Nearly as good a day on a motorcycle as you can have, really. When you’re working, anyway.

Dear MOby,

Suck it up all you Harley haters, and behold the new Street Rod – pretty much what we wished the original Street 750 could’ve been in 2014.

Hello there MOby!

A few months ago I whined bitterly about the lack of space inside my expensive new Schuberth E1 helmet for the earpieces of my favorite Ray-Ban Wayfarers. Dean Siracusa did not hear my pitiful plea, but about a month later my old pal (from the days when Road & Track shared a building with Cycle World) dropped me a serendipitous line re: his new business venture.

Dear MOby,

Frankly, we at MO would not know that the biggest complaint among sport-touring riders, especially performance-minded ones, is tire life. That’s because we rarely put more than a couple thousand miles on any bike before it goes back to its maker. But we can see how tire life would be a real problem for big powerful beasts like FJR1300s and the sweet new KTM Super Duke GT – upon which I had the excellent fortune to sample Dunlop’s newest rubber upon.