More learning

If I thought I will live on a feast of R1’s and Fireblades everyday, I was severely mistaken. Tests for these are few and far between. Our staple diet consists of incognito, midsize commuters and dual-purpose bikes. Maybe that tells us something. As much as R1’s grab the headlines, the bread-and-butter for any manufacturer is actually the cheaper bikes that gets updates only once and a while, but sells solidly year after year. For some reason south Africans think you have to have a superbike if you want to have a bike at all (even if you need to do shopping with it everyday), while a bandit 600 is actually what you really need. The UK is the only other market that is as superbike crazy as us, but most other big markets go for dual-purpose and commuters.

Secondly, whatever it is I though I knew about bikes is under revision. Reading a about a bike and how it fits into the market place is just not the same as actually experiencing it. And I have at least one other guy going through the same experience. Like the more dual-purpose bikes I ride the lower down the ranks the BMW F650 falls! Its really a piece of shit now! I rode the Suzuki DR650 that was last updated in 1996 for a week, and I even prefer that to the F650!

Had a supermoto the weekend as well (Suzuki DR-Z400SM - an offroad bike with road suspension, brakes and tyres), and it was a helluva lot of non-sensical fun. If bikes had anything to do with sense, we wouldn’t be riding them at all, and with no other bike is that as apt as a supermoto. It thought it was gonna be a piece of irrelevant shit; based on what I picked up in other magazines.

It similar with a lot of bikes I rode so far; I had certain informed (from reading) assumptions about them, and very rarely were they turn out to be accurate.

My moto now is; don’t say anything about a bike until you ride it. Don’t take what you read in a magazine as definitive; not because they talk shit in the magazine, simply because your experience might be different to what the journalist experienced, bearing in mind different tastes and skill levels.