BORIS

spent three days at a recent club racing event full of motorcycles from the Eighties . Great day out . I love it , but not for the racing . I go there to look at the bikes . Specifically , the fire-breathing , ill-handling , Neanderthal-like cave-beasts from the early Eighties . Even more specifically , any of them breadbox-tanked Suzuki GSX1100s upon which I learnt to be a motorcycle hoodlum . They speak to me . They remind me of myself , and things that once were and can never be again . I stand off from them and behold them in deferential silence . I ’ m like a primitive brute standing before a totem of his savage and bloodthirsty god . I feel like I should kneel , but that would be a sign of weakness . And these primeval werebikes do not deal well with weakness . So I stand . I hold my head high . You may have murdered and maimed many of my brothers , o thug-god . But you didn ’ t do me . Thank you . The bike ’ s lines are achingly familiar , and viscerally handsome in their own brutish way , even if many of them have been heavily modified to make them handle better . Today ’ s technology is a wondrous thing . It is powerful modern voodoo , because it can make even these old death-bulls far better mannered than we could thirty-five years ago . Though we are starting from a relatively low baseline . I ’ d modified mine , of course , pouring my measly teenage pay-packet into fork-braces , stupid Italian shock absorbers and Pirelli Silverdot tyres . I ’ d already gone as far as I could afford ( and legally register ) in terms of performance , and while the bastard now went like a comet , it handled more and more like an asteroid with every jump in horsepower . So I began to direct my paltry dollars into handling . I was dumb enough to imagine the standard brakes were fine , but there were few affordable options in that area in the Eighties , anyway . I did fit braided lines , which was one mod that did actually make a proper difference . Naturally , all of my handling ‘ improvements ’ primarily acted in a placebo fashion . I would tell myself it was handling better with typical teenage fervour and ignorance , and therefore that was what I believed with all my heart . In real terms , and with the wisdom of hindsight , no matter what I did , my GSX still handled , by today ’ s standards , like a bison falling out of a tree . The frame flexed like a bodybuilder , the forks were small-diameter vacuum cleaner tubes , and the cutting-edge alloy swingarm was a cruel Japanese joke . The GSX weaved psychotically in corners and would either shake its head in displeasure , or move directly into vicious tank-slapping bastardry if it was offended at my ham-fisted inputs . I told myself that the super-expensive Pirelli Silverdots were the last word in grip ( because they were ) and would screech in horror whenever the back-end

88 KIWI RIDER