AGV Backmarker: This Writer’s Life

You think you’ve had some hard crashes…

It’s Thursday morning in Encinitas’ E-Street Cafe in, the sort of place where 60-year-old customers arrive on skateboards. There’s a good wifi connection, good coffee, and a barista with a striking smile who made me think I should come here more often. B.B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone” is on the soundtrack. The thrill may be gone for him, but the pressure’s on for me; I think I might be setting some kind of record for late-filing of this column. Sorry, editor! I’ve got a great excuse, but I can’t come clean for a little while yet….

I wouldn’t blame the site’s hardworking webmaster if this column were posted late, so my faithful readers might not see it until Friday. By that time, NASA’s Centaur missile will have slammed into the moon at 5,600 mph and created a 350-ton dust plume that will rise six miles into space . Another spacecraft will fly through the cloud, conducting research that may result in the proof that there’s water on the moon.

The problem is that results could be confounded by other dust sources. Actually, I’m being blamed for raising an enormous dust cloud that has now reached the moon, the result of my Philip Island crash three years ago. I’m not sure how fast I was going when I augered that GSX-R1000 into the Australian surface, though it certainly felt like about 5,600 mph. I’ve warned NASA that if it finds any of that characteristic Suzuki-blue paint, or traces of my leathers, it should nullify the results.

Jay’s hot rod heads for Vegas….

I went back down to El Cajon to see Jeff Palhegyi do the final build on Jay Leno’s custom V-Max, which is being sold at auction this Saturday to benefit Bailey’s Café—a cool Brooklyn arts program.

Not all motorcyclists realize that the Yamaha logo is comprised of three tuning forks because the company started out in the piano business. Last week, as I was talking about the upcoming auction with Jay, he joked that “Bailey’s Cafe is an arts program, but since I didn’t have any Yamaha musical instruments to auction off, I decided to sell my Star V-Max, which at least was made by Yamaha.”

I repeated that to Yamaha’s Bob Starr, and the comment ended up in a press release. Yamaha’s musical instrument subsidiary then got in touch with the arts group, and did in fact donate a bunch of instruments. That was pretty nice of them—genuine generosity, as opposed to a PR stunt, since the Barrett-Jackson auction’s really focused on a bunch of gearheads who probably aren’t big instrument buyers.

Anyway, the bike looks pretty cool. The paint job was done by a really old-school hot-rod-style painter named Benny Flores. I overheard one guy in the shop ask Benny, “How did you get that smoke effect?” Flores cocked an eyebrow and answered, “With smoke.”

A press reveal with one catch. Er, make that “clutch”….

Yesterday, I went up to Torrance, where Honda unveiled the new VFR1200R. A new VFR is always big news in the little world of motorcycle journalism because the model has been Honda’s flagship since the mid-’80s.

If anything, this one’s getting extra attention because Honda hasn’t released the long-rumored V-5 replacement for the Blade—and because the early feedback on the Aprilia RSV-4 is so good. A few months ago, the UK magazine Bike openly mused that Honda had given up the lead in V-4 design to Aprilia.

Although Honda’s Jon Seidel downplayed the notion that the VFR1200F is a one-for-one replacement for the current (and frankly little-loved) VFR800, the presentation left little doubt in anyone’s mind that that is, in fact, the mantle the new bike’s expected to don.

For years, the 750cc Interceptor was pretty much universally acknowledged as the best all-around street bike. It was comfortable enough to ride all day, made adequate power, and handled well enough that Freddie Spencer used one for his personal bike at his track school. It grew to 800cc and got Honda’s V-Tec variable valve-timing system.

That was a disaster. V-Tec worked seamlessly in my old Honda Civic car, but even Honda’s technical might never really made it worth the weight and complexity it added to the motorcycle. I was glad to see that the designers of the new motor went in the opposite direction, incorporating the compact and relatively simple Unicam design, as seen on Honda’s dirt bikes. The heads can be smaller and the V-angle kept to 76 degrees. Nowadays, it’s all about packaging and mass centralization. That engine layout plays into that.

The new motor has a really innovative crankshaft. First, the rear cylinders are both “inboard” so the front cylinder spacing is wide, and the rear cylinders are close together. This allows the part of the bike you straddle to be nice and narrow, and lowers the effective seat height.

I’d expect the pairs of rods on a 360-degree crank to share a co-axial crankpin, but both of the pairs in this motor are offset 28 degrees. This out-of-phase crank timing, apparently, results in near-perfect primary balance, so the motor doesn’t need a counterbalancer.

I haven’t been following the rumors or seeking out the spy pics of this bike, so I didn’t realize that it was a shaftie. A conspicuously thoughtful colleague pointed out that everything about this bike suggests that Honda’s positioning it against BMW and the German company’s client base of serious, high-mileage (and high-minded?) riders. Honda’s got its own take on a shaft drive that “feels like a chain,” though in truth it’s been years since shaft-drive bikes handled, uh, funny.

The bike’s fit and finish, even by Honda standards, are beautiful. Honda has thus far offered no suggested MSRP, but it certainly looks as though it could command a premium price. (Interestingly, although the whole motorcycle industry is currently depressed, BMW sales have taken less of a hit than almost any other OEM, and BMW’s bikes sales are holding up better than its car sales; maybe that premium, value-loaded segment is a good target market in tough times.) I’d like nothing more than to be invited to ride it at the actual press launch, which will take place later this year. (That’s a hint, Jon; please invite me.)

So with an all-new motor that’s 50 percent bigger than its older sibling, how was it that the assembled journos were a little disappointed? Well, I expected to see a bike fitted with a dual clutch. Later this year, the VFR1200F will be the first big Honda with this tech. (A dual clutch will soon be offered on one of the company’s step-throughs.)

The dual-clutch VFR1200F will offer paddle-shifting, controlled from the left handlebar, or two fully automatic shifting modes. This is nothing like an old-fashioned automatic transmission—and hopefully nothing like the ill-fated somewhat-automatic tranny on the old CB750A.

Dual clutches have been around for years in racing cars and are now making their way into some pretty ordinary street cars. Conceptually, the way they work is simple: the odd-numbered gears have one clutch and the even-numbered gears have another. So as you’re accelerating through the gears, the next-higher gear is already engaged. When you up-shift, one clutch releases and the other engages, so there’s no interruption in power at all.

Honda is the first company to figure out a way to make this small enough and light enough for motorcycle use (though the non-slipper dual-clutch version will still be 22 pounds heavier than the single-slipper-clutch-equipped base model).

With motorcycles, the relationship between suspension and power transmission is much more dynamic than it is in cars. That’s why even the highest-performance bikes change pitch dramatically under acceleration while high-performance cars ride almost level. So in theory, a dual-clutch transmission has even more to offer bikes than cars. That’s why I was eager to at least see one, even though I knew I wasn’t going to be allowed to ride it. The dual-clutch option will be available some time in 2010. For Honda’s sake, I hope all the potential buyers of the soon-to-be-available standard version don’t wait to read the reviews of the trick one.

Last but not least…

No motorcycle journalist could fail to note regime change at Cycle World, where Mark Hoyer’s now editor-in-chief. As challenging as these times are in the motorcycle industry, they’re even more challenging in motorcycle media. When Hachette-Filipacchi sold off some its other specialist/enthusiast titles a few months back, I wondered if CW would be next on the block.

I hope Hoyer’s appointment means that the conglomerate’s still committed to the title. We’ve got some really strong magazines that focus on niches within motorcycling, but North America needs an industry-wide magazine of record, with the status that Bike has in the UK.

As they’d say over there, The King is dead! Long live the King!