Bikes of the past
My first street bike experience was aboard a Honda CBR600 F4i. I had only learned how to operate a motorcycle the day before, in the dirt on a tiny pit bike, and I was completely terrified to ride the Honda. The terror subsided about 5 seconds after I let the clutch out.
While not the pinnacle of sporting motorcycles, that F4i seemed to be wired directly into my brain. Before that ride, downhill skiing had been the most natural-feeling sporting activity I had ever experienced. That experience, the connection between the bike and me, was impossibly close to the feeling of skiing. I was hooked. I needed a bike of my own.
Through the kindness of a very generous boss, I ended up with a free motorcycle. Maybe not the sporting steed that I had so longed for, but something to get me out on the road. It was a Honda, but that’s damn near where the similarities to that F4i ended.
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That Shadow 650 VLX lasted about 2 months in my care. I sold it to a guy who was tired of riding on the back of his wife’s Harley, and needed a bike to learn on. I am not kidding.
With the spoils from that sale, and a little help from a friend, I bought an impeccably cared-for 1996 Kawasaki ZX-6r. Though nearly ten years old by the time I bought it, the bike had only 13,000 miles, and the motor was nice and stong. Now I was on the track to recapture some of that sportbike magic.
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Sadly, the bike had a scary front end clunk, and steering almost as vague as the plot in a German art film. Those traits, coupled with the dated styling and angry hairdryer exhaust tone still left me jonesing for something more. That bike was sold to some guy with a flatbed truck, and the much-missed SV650 entered my life shortly thereafter. Then that Sv650 died on track, and was itself replaced.
That’s right. Two years of riding. Four bikes. One Incredibly Understanding Wife. Pretty incredible, huh?