Every Thursday a group of sport bike riders from 20's - 50's or 60's gets together here in town at Dusty's a local burger joint. I hadn't managed to make a single ride with them this year, until last night. Got off work, pulled on my jacket and helmet and met 'em about 5 minutes before we headed out. Very fun people, with some very neat bikes: Ducati, Suzuki SV 1000, a good crop of Japanese liter bikes. One of my son's high school teachers on his big bad black Suzuki. A purty young gal on her Ninja 250 sport bike, and my Scrambler 900. I think there was more steel and chrome on my bike than on the other eight bikes in our group...
Headed out quickly, to make the most of the fading twilight. Very well behaved group in traffic, then up a local canyon road with excellent twisties - a favorite motorcycle road around here. Got up that pretty quickly, passed a few slow moving trucks and cars going up. I was impressed - every bike passed legally, even signalling. No wheelies, nothing stupid, just brisk riding. We did go through some real nice turns at legal but high speeds, pretty much ignoring the speed recommended on the yellow signs... Then across the Waterville Plateau, a few miles of dirt road, and back down some big sweepers to town again. Maybe 50 miles total, and came back down the mountain road in darkness. Saw only a few deer, but we were riding slowly in the darkness, nobody felt like tagging a deer with their forks.
It was real interesting, riding the Triumph with that group of mostly high-performance bikes. A few observations:
The Triumph is way down on horsepower, at about 50 hp compared to 100 - 150 in the Japanese liter bikes.
Torque is the friend of the Triumph, at modest rpms it pulls hard and can exit a turn or initiate a pass very briskly. Nice. Real nice for me, because more rpms don't really produce any more power from my bike. It gets to a certain point, and that's it - there just isn't any more horsepower, so the torque at low and mid rpms is nice.
Engine braking with the two-cylinder Triumph is strong, as is with the aforementioned SV 1000. I noticed we rarely used our brakes slowing for a turn, just a downshift or two and some engine braking. Good thing, because my brakes are nowhere close to as powerful as the brakes on those sport bikes!
Handling on the Triumph is quite good, it will lean, lean, lean... I had no trouble keeping up with the sportier bikes in turns. Maybe due to the wide bars, I was also able to transition, right to left and back, very quickly. Nice...
All in all it was a real fun ride, and I wish I'd been able to go with the group a few more times over the summer. Sorry, no photos. Was fun because it was different from most of my rides - we pushed the speeds more than I usually do, and it was a good test of riding skills on a variety of surfaces and road types. When some of the guys uncorked their super bikes out in the boonies, I just watched their taillights fade away, didn't even try to keep up. Caught up in the next series of turns anyway - or when we stopped to look around a bit at the sunset. Dang that was fun!
Regards, Guy
Headed out quickly, to make the most of the fading twilight. Very well behaved group in traffic, then up a local canyon road with excellent twisties - a favorite motorcycle road around here. Got up that pretty quickly, passed a few slow moving trucks and cars going up. I was impressed - every bike passed legally, even signalling. No wheelies, nothing stupid, just brisk riding. We did go through some real nice turns at legal but high speeds, pretty much ignoring the speed recommended on the yellow signs... Then across the Waterville Plateau, a few miles of dirt road, and back down some big sweepers to town again. Maybe 50 miles total, and came back down the mountain road in darkness. Saw only a few deer, but we were riding slowly in the darkness, nobody felt like tagging a deer with their forks.
It was real interesting, riding the Triumph with that group of mostly high-performance bikes. A few observations:
The Triumph is way down on horsepower, at about 50 hp compared to 100 - 150 in the Japanese liter bikes.
Torque is the friend of the Triumph, at modest rpms it pulls hard and can exit a turn or initiate a pass very briskly. Nice. Real nice for me, because more rpms don't really produce any more power from my bike. It gets to a certain point, and that's it - there just isn't any more horsepower, so the torque at low and mid rpms is nice.
Engine braking with the two-cylinder Triumph is strong, as is with the aforementioned SV 1000. I noticed we rarely used our brakes slowing for a turn, just a downshift or two and some engine braking. Good thing, because my brakes are nowhere close to as powerful as the brakes on those sport bikes!
Handling on the Triumph is quite good, it will lean, lean, lean... I had no trouble keeping up with the sportier bikes in turns. Maybe due to the wide bars, I was also able to transition, right to left and back, very quickly. Nice...
All in all it was a real fun ride, and I wish I'd been able to go with the group a few more times over the summer. Sorry, no photos. Was fun because it was different from most of my rides - we pushed the speeds more than I usually do, and it was a good test of riding skills on a variety of surfaces and road types. When some of the guys uncorked their super bikes out in the boonies, I just watched their taillights fade away, didn't even try to keep up. Caught up in the next series of turns anyway - or when we stopped to look around a bit at the sunset. Dang that was fun!
Regards, Guy
