Sunday 30 September 2012
Saturday 29 September 2012
Arachnophobia
Today's
odd vehicle is the Can-Am Spyder Roadster. I spotted this one outside Edinburgh this morning.
I have seen others, but this one was fitted with panniers and looked like the
owner was on his way to or from an event.
It is an
extremely odd machine to follow down the road. The suspension bounces all over
the place and the rider was shifting around a lot even though it doesn’t lean
like a regular motorcycle.
Sorry for
the blurry photo, it was taken while I was driving. I probably shouldn’t be doing
that, especially as the resultant photo doesn’t appear to be worth the risk.
Rare Beast
Back
in 2010 at the classic motorcycle show at Stafford I came across these three
shiny brand-new Norton Commandos, the 961 Sport models, on the New Norton
Motorcycles stand, and very nice they looked too in their red, black or silver
paint schemes. As you can imagine, they were attracting quite a lot of attention.
The
bikes were not yet available to buy, but you could pre-order one for future
delivery. I did remark at the time that Norton had prior form for this sort of
thing. Why would anyone want to risk placing an order with yet another reincarnation
of Norton Motorcycles for a 15 grand motorcycle, which may or may not actually
exist, and with an unspecified delivery date? Hadn't we seen this particular
shell-game from Norton before?
Anyway,
a couple of years on and I see in a recent motorcycle magazine that many of the
original customers who placed an order with Norton over two years ago are
getting progressively fed up with missed deadlines and no bikes to show for
their money. Many have requested their money back, and not all of them are
getting even that. There are also concerns being raised about the build quality
of those bikes that have been delivered.
Well
yesterday I actually saw one on the road for the first time. It was black and it
sounded glorious as it pulled away from the traffic lights. I think that I might have a better understanding of why folk handed over their money and were prepared to wait so long for something that looks and sounds like that. The fact that it has the name 'Norton' on the tank is another obvious big draw. It's just a pity that the company doesn't seem to have the business accumen or funding to do what Triumph managed to do.
Thursday 27 September 2012
Wednesday 26 September 2012
Tuesday 25 September 2012
Braveheart
Monday 24 September 2012
Old Dog, New Tricks
Another
new machine for Saturday morning was this Belgian registered Jawa 660 Sportard.
If you're at all familiar with Jawa motorcycles then this is not the first thing that comes to mind when you mention their name.
While looking over the bike the owner came over to talk to us. It turns out that he is the importer for Belgium. This particular machine is powered by a Minnerelli/Yamaha engine. There is a fairly decent review here and also a link to Jawa Ireland who actually sell them.
He did say that there are plans for a 1000cc machine in the future featuring Jawa's own engine.
He did say that there are plans for a 1000cc machine in the future featuring Jawa's own engine.
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