Change is rarely radical or fast. In my lifetime I guess that there probably has been some changes that qualify as that, but, off the top of my head, I can’t really recall what they were. And so it is that, if you follow motorcycling for many decades, as I have, you only really notice the gradual changes when you stop and stand back from the continuum and assess it from a distance.
In the last 10 years there has been a gradual change in the road bike market that is more dramatic than what we thought it was as it happened, but now seems to be so in hindsight. My dad used to say, “Life is lived forwards and understood backwards,” and that is certainly true.
The change to which I refer is the steady atrophying of the 4 cylinders sports bike market and the gradual rise of a phenomenon that most of my generation had thought was long since gone, the two cylinder road bike.
When I started riding, the two cylinder bike was in its death throes. The British manufacturers who had dominated the market with a bewildering array of two cylinder bikes of all capacities and varieties, were gasping their last and nobody (well hardly anybody) was bemoaning their passing. The big 4 cylinder offerings from Honda, Suzuki, and Kawasaki wre dominating the market and these forerunners presaged an era where, if you wanted to be competitive, you had to have a four. And it didn’t really matter if it was an I4 or a V4, as long as the engine had 4 pots, it would do.
There were hold-outs, of course, Ducati stuck rigidly to their V-Twin layout but there were only a minor player and their bikes were much too expensive for the average rider’s pocket. Harley kept to their V-Twin layout also but, once again, their market was a niche one. No, if you wanted to get somewhere and, especially if you wanted to get there in a hurry, you had to have a “4”.
And the Japanese manufacturers made sure that, regardless of what capacity of bike you wanted to ride, there was a four cylinder engine option. You could buy a 250cc 4 all the way up to a 1000cc 4, stopping at every capacity station along the way. Some of them even offered different 4’s within the same capacity spot.
Sports bikes got more powerful meaner, faster, lighter and more race-ready. And, that was the beginning of the downward slide. I mean, as I have often said, do you REALLY need a 1000cc 200bhp bike for the road? A bike that could comfortably exceed the open road speed limit in first gear? A bike that needed GP-like electronic aids in order for you to tame it adequately? A bike that threatened your licence every time you took it out of the garage? And the answer to all of these questions is, no.
AND, while this was happening, populations in most urban areas (where most of us live) grew dramatically without any corresponding (or ANY) improvement in the infrastructure, further threatening riders’ opportunities to enjoy their hyper-bikes. Policing of our roads increased along with this as governments, unwilling to admit that the roads were part of the problem and unwilling to IMPROVE the roads introduced more and more draconian measures to try and stop riders for using their bikes as they were intended to be used.
So, what was the answer? Well, many started using their too powerful for the road bikes on the track. Track days became more popular but there is only so much money you can spend to blast around a track that you already know well, shaving milliseconds off your best time and wearing out your, by now, very expensive sports bike.
The other problem is that, in order to be able to FIND some nice roads to ride, you now have to travel further and further from home to be able to do so. On any weekend you can name, the crowd at the Famous Robertson Pie Shop will be made up of almost completely Sydney riders who have had to travel considerable distance, waste considerable time and petrol and watch the clock as the day ticks by in order to be able to retrace their steps to deep within the suburbs JUST so they can get a decent bit of road on which to ride.
Unsurprisingly, the sports bike market is in decline, for all of these reasons and plenty more (I can’t afford $25000 to buy a Gixxer, can you?). So, what has taken its place because the bike market still appears buoyant? Well, adventure bikes have become the flavour of the month. You mightn’t be able to go as fast as you could on your sports bike but you can get away into the bush and go nuts without endangering your licence. And you CAN ride your adventure bike in the city as well (truth be known, the vast majority of ADV riders never get their bikes dirty, anyway).
But ADV bikes are big and heavy and some of them are so wide now that you can’t filter on them like you can on a smaller road bike.
Enter the new pretender, the two-cylinder sports bike. Yes, you heard me. Bikes like Suzuki’s new 8 (above) are being marketed as sports bikes and do have impressive performance even though they have nothing like the specific output of the superbikes they have now replaced.
You note that I haven’t mentioned environmental factors. It is becoming increasingly difficult for manufacturers to make sports bike engines that can conform to increasingly stringent emission requirements. Twins, it seems, can, firstly because they don’t have to have such high power output and secondly because they are, for the most part, brand new designs that are built, from the outset, to meet these requirements.
So it’s back to the past. Those of us who saw the twin cylinder Nortons and Triumphs vanish in the face of the Japanese onslaught are now seeing twin cylinder motorcycles emerging as a market force again. As my brother often says, “Whoda thunk it?”