Trivia: Motorcycling's tenth decade - 1990-’99 - Renaissance

Massimo Tamburini created his masterpiece, the iconic Ducati 916, just as the Cagiva Group ran out of money in the early '90s. While still finicky to maintain, the 916's fit and finish was a far cry from the first desmo twins, which were pretty crude. In a test of the Ducati 750GT, one U.S. magazine noted that there was a large fly trapped in the gas tank's fiberglass gelcoat. TPG stepped in to acquire the Ducati brand with perfect timing - thanks to designs like this, the company went from being a niche marque that appealed only to gearheads, to a global luxury brand.

Motorcycle sales peaked in the early ’70s when the baby boomers were reckless teens and twentysomethings. The late ’70s and ’80s saw a long decline that finally reversed itself when the ‘boomers hit their mid-life crises. With a flood of money pouring into both domestic and import dealerships, there was a demand for bigger and more comfortable cruisers as well as faster and more exotic sport bikes.

Harley-Davidson sales increased 400% between ’90 and ’99. The resurgent market came too late for Italy’s Cagiva company, which found itself in a cash crunch. The private investment firm Texas Pacific Group took a controlling interest in Cagiva’s famous Ducati line and turned it into one of the world’s most recognized luxury brands. TPG saved a great company, allowing it to give us some of the most beautiful bikes ever made. In 2005, they took it public at huge profit. As Gordon Gecko said, “Greed is good.”

Trivia: Motorcycling's ninth decade - 1980-'89 - The GSX-R prompts Kevin Cameron to wonder, "Where do we go from here?"

The modern superbike originated with the 100-horsepower Suzuki GSX-R750 in 1985 (arriving in the U.S. market a year later.) How stunning was it? The Honda RC30 may have had gear-driven cams, but the “Gixxer” put genuine racetrack performance under anyone with $4,500 to spend - about half the price of Honda's V-4. The GSX-R weighed just 388 pounds – two pounds less than the minimum weight specified in the rules for the AMA’s Superbike class. It was as addictive as cocaine and, in the wrong hands, about as destructive a habit.

I still remember the first time I saw and heard one at full chat. I was walking north on fifth street, in Calgary, where it passes under the railway tracks. Some hooligan, seeing a couple of hundred yards of open street with no chance of being observed by the cops whacked open the throttle. The bike made a sound I'd previously heard at GP races. The hair stood up on the back of my neck.  

When Cycle World snuck one down from Canada, Kevin Cameron wondered where the industry could possibly go next. Where it went was - the next year - to 1100cc. How times change... A couple of years ago, a late-'80s GSX-R1100 showed up at a Streets of Willow track day. Looking at it, I thought, "Wow, I'd love to throw a set of saddlebags on that thing. It'd make a stylin' sport-tourer."

Trivia: Motorcycling's eighth decade - 1970-'79 - the Japanese invasion gets reinforcements

Throughout this decade Yamaha, Suzuki, and Kawasaki all established themselves as serious rivals to Honda – to the chagrin of Harley-Davidson (which lobbied hard for protective tariffs) and to the ultimate demise of the entire British motorcycle industry.

The iconic ‘70s muscle bike was the Kawasaki Z1. The company had a 750cc four-cylinder bike in development when Honda unveiled the CB750 in ‘68. So they went back to the drawing board and created the 903cc Z1. It reached the market five years later. The bike was developed for the U.S. market and - under the code-name 'New York Steak' - it was extensively tested here (Yvon Duhamel handled speed/endurance test runs at, if memory serves, Talladega.) The dual-overhead cam motor made an honest 80+ hp and propelled the bike to 130mph. More to the point, it started selling faster than the Honda CB750, too.

Trivia: Motorcycling's seventh decade - 1960-'69 - Meeting the nicest people...

In ’62, American Honda sold 40,000 motorcycles through its 750-dealer network. When management set a target of 200,000 units the following year, Honda’s ad agency, Grey, knew they had their work cut out for them.
Grey’s creative types proposed a set of print ads showing students, women and couples – not the “typical” motorcyclists – on Honda’s 50cc step-through Cub. The ads proclaimed, “You meet the nicest people on a Honda”. In 1964 Grey produced a “nicest people” TV ad that ran during the Academy Awards.
The campaign not only launched Honda in the U.S. market, it redeemed the image of motorcycling as a whole.
Try as I might, I can't find that first, 'nicest people' TV ad anywhere. If anyone can get their hands on a digitized version, please post it to YouTube. Honda continued to play on those general themes into the '70s, with this commercial starring a pre-Scientology John Travolta...

...and this one in which riding god Malcolm Smith portrays a friendly (but not too friendly!) priest.

These commercials are, to be sure, the products of a different time. But where's the OEM that will step up again in this dark hour for the industry, with a new-rider campaign anywhere near as successful as 'nicest people'?

Trivia: Motorcycling's sixth decade - 1950-'59 - "What are you rebelling against?" "What have you got?"

After the war, G.I.s came home with ready cash, an appreciation for the motorcycles they’d seen “over there” and – shall we say – a heightened sense of what constituted excitement. In 1947 this led to the so-called “Hollister motorcycle riot”. That event received national prominence when a beefy drunk, slumped on his motorcycle, was pictured in Life magazine.

In 1954, the reputation of motorcyclists was sealed by The Wild One, a film based on Hollister and starring Marlon Brando as a disaffected rebel.

Ironically, in the late ‘40s the Hells Angels were still an AMA-sanctioned club that organized races and rallies. But by the time the ‘50s drew to a close the ‘Angels were outlaws who made Brando’s “Johnny” seem like a schoolboy. It’s not clear if art imitated life, or if life imitated art.

I've written about the real history of the Hollister riot at some length, and I'll eventually compile those essays into a 'Best of Backmarker' entry for this blog. But this oh-so-gay photo of a young Brando reminds me of a jibe that was edited out of a Backmarker entry a few years back. You see, in the summer of 2008, I caught a story in the LA Times about one of those Christian biker 'gangs' tangling with some Hells Angels. That prompted me to write...

I note that today’s LA Times reports “the Anaheim-based Christian motorcycle gang known as the Set Free Soldiers found itself in deeper trouble Wednesday when its leader and half a dozen members were arrested on suspicion of attempted murder.” Police charged the Christian bikers with attempted murder after a melée in a Newport Beach bar in which two Hells Angels were stabbed.

     In a way, this news almost makes me feel better about those so-called Christian bikers, who I always felt were just a bunch of posers. It seems at least some of them are genuine badasses. Plus the Times’ coverage goes a long way towards answering a question I’ve often pondered, which is, who would Jesus kill?

Trivia: Motorcycling's fifth decade - 1940-'49 - you're in the army now

Allied Forces in North Africa reported that the shaft-drive Zundapps and BMWs used by the Wehrmacht (which were usually set up as sidecar outfits, with a driven third wheel) were incredibly tough and useful. Captured specimens were returned to Milwaukee, and Harley-Davidson developed a test batch of 1,000 XA-model opposed twins. By the time the bike was ready for prime time, it was clear that the Willys Jeep, at under 1,300 pounds(!) was not much heavier than a sidecar outfit, but it was more powerful and had a larger payload.

America’s belated entry into WWII kick-started Indian again and breathed new life into Harley, too. Both companies filled open-ended military procurement contracts for all the bikes they could make, at the standard cost-plus-10% rate. Harley alone sold over 90,000 45 cu. in. WL models.

Trivia: Motorcycling's fourth decade - 1930 to ‘39: Motorcycles cure depression, but not The Depression

Excelsior (which made fine big V-twins) and Henderson (known for smooth inline fours) both went bust in ’31.

Indian had been acquired by the wealthy E. Paul duPont but even his resources couldn’t prevent a precipitous drop in sales. The company had sold 40,000 machines to the Army alone in WWI, but shipped just 1,660 motorcycles in 1933. Indeed, Indian never really regained sound health.

Harley-Davidson managed to get through the depression on the strength of strong fleet sales. The Motor Company dominated the market for police motorcycles and introduced the 3-wheeled “Servicar” delivery vehicle in 1932. Harley even sold fan-cooled versions of its big V-twin engines for use as industrial powerplants.

One bright spot in this otherwise, well, depressing period was the adoption of The Motorcyclist as the official magazine of the American Motorcyclist Association. The magazine, which was already well established, still exists today. Among motorcycle magazines, only the German monthly “Das Motorrad” has been published longer.

Jay Leno shows two local cops what a state-of-the-art police bike looked like in 1931. This is the Henderson I rode; Jay rode the blue Henderson four at lower right. No, they did not follow us to the garage to write a ticket. (That said, Leno does have the dubious honor of being the driver of the oldest vehicle ever stopped for speeding in California.)

Trivia: Motorcycling's third decade - 1920 to '29: The motorcycle goes upmarket

The roar in “Roaring Twenties” was the sound of an overheated stock market, not motorcycles. However, it was a great decade for hundreds of now-vanished manufacturers.

George Brough was a motorcycle maker who really captured the spirit of the times. His Brough Superior models were “the Rolls-Royce of motorcycles” and that wasn’t an empty boast – the bikes were so well made that when Charles Rolls and William Royce examined one of them, they gave Brough permission to use their names in his advertising.

Most Brough Superiors were sold with engines outsourced from James A. Prestwich. Those “JAP” motors were supplied to many other builders, but Brough’s came in special tunings that allowed him to guarantee that his SS100 model would really go 100 miles an hour. Each of Brough’s machines was specially fitted to its owner, like a custom suit. They were fast, comfortable and built to last, so it’s not surprising they remain sought after to this day.

Mister, we could use a man like T.E. Lawrence again... 'Lawrence of Arabia' met his demise when he crashed one of the several Brough Superiors that he owned.

Trivia: Motorcycling's second decade - 1910 to 1919: Scott shows that a motorcycle can be more than a bicycle with an auxiliary motor

Alfred Angus Scott was the holder of more than sixty patents. His eponymous motorcycles were among the first to feature kick-starters, chain drives, and multi-speed gearboxes. He usually used simple two-stroke motors that were water-cooled – about 60 years before such cooling was “pioneered” by Suzuki and introduced with great fanfare on the GT 750. The bike illustrated is from the mid-'20s, but Scott's basic layout and technology hardly changed over the decades.

Trivia: Motorcycling's first decade - 1900 to 1909

It’s convenient for motorcycle historians that the history (so far) of the motorcycle coincides almost exactly with that of the Twentieth Century. The title “the first motorcycle” is usually awarded to a machine built by Gottlieb Daimler and William Maybach in 1885. But their contraption could also be described as the first car. It had two ungainly wooden wagon wheels fore and aft, with smaller stabilizing wheels off to the sides.

The operator straddled it like a motorcycle, but it didn't lean to turn. It's your call whether this is the first motorcycle, or the first car, or just some precursor to both.

Hildebrand and Wolfmuller produced the first commercially viable motorcycle in 1894. This was also the first time the word “motorrad” (German for motorcycle) was used. Any modern motorcyclist would immediately recognize it as such: it had a gravity-feed fuel tank mounted above an internal-combustion motor; it rolled on air-filled rubber tires; the rider controlled it by means of a twistgrip and levers on a handlebar.

Power was transmitted to the rear wheel by steel rods, connected directly to the crankshaft. The rods were assisted on the return stroke by rubber bands! Despite its impressive displacement of 1488cc, Heinrich Hildebrand’s motor only produced about 2.5 horsepower. It’s not surprising that for the next twenty years or so, most motorcycles also had bicycle pedals, for assistance on hills or when extra oomph was required to pass a horse that was feeling his oats.

It was a rare occurrence when a Hildebrand & Wolfmuller 'motorrad' came up for auction last year in England. It's striking that another one will be offered by Bonham's in Las Vegas, tomorrow! If you're planning to attend, please let me know what it sells for, and what condition it was in.