#JohnBurns

It’s important to keep things in perspective; the coronavirus isn’t the first disaster to befall us and you know it won’t be the last. Well, I mean it could be… Wherever you live, you can probably find all kinds of things that have gone spectacularly tits up over the years in your own backyard. The bigger the town, the bigger the pile of massive cock-ups, as the English like to say. It’s a good word. Especially now that there’s no traffic, and we have motorcycles, why not let’s go visit? Our deepest condolences to those of you living in places where you’re not allowed to ride.

(WARNING! This is an opinion piece by MO’s Senior Content Editor and does not represent MO’s official position on anything at all.)

One nice thing about the motorcycle market’s troubles is a resurgence of the kind of fun little cheap bikes the codgers are always pining for. Case in point: the MT-03, the naked version of Yamaha’s sweet little YZF-R3, and the newest member of its “Masters of Torque” naked-bike family – here to take the fight to the KTM Duke 390, Kawasaki Z400, BMW G310R…

Just because they cancelled South by Southwest doesn’t mean MO would let a little thing like a global pandemic keep us from our appointed rounds, and so it was off to Austin, Texas, to ride Yamaha’s new entry-level Master of Torque last week. (Or maybe it should’ve deterred us, since on my day to fly home again, we got word that the US MotoGP round, scheduled for April here in Austin, was also postponed due to coronavirus. Then the IoM TT, then the run on toilet paper… And now my throat’s a little scratchy… maybe this thing is not a Chinese hoax?)

The pie, everyone agrees, is shrinking, and nobody can agree on how to bake a new one. Many, if not most industry people seem to have concluded millennials are just cell phone-addicted slackers, though slackers is not the word many of them use in private conversation. What it’s all about now, then, is conquest sales, and when the Germans start talking conquest, people listen. One way to conquer is by lowering prices, which would seem to suggest the slackification could be a money-related issue, wouldn’t it? I can’t remember the last time BMW admitted to taking aim at a specific competitor, but for the new F 900 XR in our lead image, it’s the Yamaha Tracer 900. For the barer-boned F 900 R, it’s the Kawasaki Z900 – both rich targets and great bargains. 

We’ve now sung the praises of the modular helmet enough that all regular readers probably have the chorus down: It’s excellent to be able to flip up the whole front of your helmet when you want to talk to people or quaff a refreshing drink while you’re stopped for gas, etc., without having to take the whole thing off your head.

Lately, it’s like time travel around here. A couple years ago we put the then-new Kawasaki Z900RS up against the Suzuki GSX-S1000 in a slightly apples-to-oranges comparo, Retro or Not(ro), which the Kawi won by a hair. Now that Suzuki has their own retro based upon the GSX-S in the Katana, we felt like we had to do it again. Our duty.

Ride in a warm place. The end. But if you insist on living where it gets cold in the winter, there are plenty of strategies to continue riding way down below freezing. We don’t recommend doing that, only because single-track vehicles don’t handle well on ice, but the fact is, it’s not that hard to rig yourself and your motorcycle for cold-weather riding.

How can any red-blooded American not love Suzuki, the blue-collar working motorcycle so many of us thrashed as youths, left parked in alleys with no loss of sleep, covered in fur for a brief period there in the (I think) ’90s… In spite of all the abuse we dished out, Suzuki’s loyalty was never in question.

Is an ebike cheating? Of course. But would I be sitting on the beach now after a strenuous-ish 15-mile ride from my house without it? No. I’d be napping on the couch in my usual after-lunch tradition. I had a regular nice $500 Specialized hybrid bicycle there for a while, until it got stolen, and I did the 30-mile round trip to the Santa Ana River mouth quite a few times on it (and wrote about it here). But it took a lot out of me and the biggest part of a day by the time I was done lying around for a couple hours afterward, recuperating and rehydrating.

You read the review, now see the movie! Filmed in an exotic location in full Technicolor last November, and featuring an all-star cast of one, it shouldn’t be too painful to watch because it’s only barely four minutes long. No animals were harmed, though my right ankle still hurts from being yanked off the Triumph Rocket 3 GT’s forward-set footpeg.

How it happened I know not, but in the excitement of new Indians, Svartpilens, and whatever else I rode this past year, the freshly upgraded 2019 Honda PCX150 escaped my attention. When my mistake hove into view, I immediately alerted the Honda authorities and borrowed one up.

Let’s just get this out of the way right up front: If you can’t immediately dismiss the $85k price tag, you’re not the target customer. So far Arch has only produced 45 motorcycles, and there are plenty of potential customers around the globe who could purchase all 44 without blinking an eye. The KRGT-1 is motorcycle as designer watch or collectible artwork, and if the whole point isn’t exclusivity, a huge chunk of it probably is. I wouldn’t know, since I can’t get past the price tag.

Triumph sprang a 3500-word manifesto re: its new Tiger 900 on us just before the press introduction of the new bike last Tuesday in St. Louis, which we ran in its entirety. Now that we’ve had a few days to digest all the newness of the thing (five things really: Tiger 900, Tiger 900 GT and GT Pro, Tiger 900 Rally and Rally Pro) here are our main take-aways.

Well, you always want more, don’t you? That’s how Triumph Chief Engineer Stuart Wood justifies the world’s biggest-engined production motorcycle, and that’s what the new Rocket 3 wants to deliver. From the 2294 cubic centimeters of the original Rocket to 2458 cc, now there are three 4.3-inch pistons producing a claimed 163 lb-ft. of torque and 167 horses at 6000 rpm, and that’s what it’s all about.