Inevitably many of my conversations with the HD crowd, after failing miserably defending what they ride, end in “yeah but the resale is why I REALLY bought it, after all I can damn near sell it for what I paid for it.

That may have been true a couple of years back before the economy tanked, when Lemmings who just wanted to be part of something would buy anything as long as it had the Logo® on it, even motorcycles.

Fast forward to today when a quick check of the craigslist classifieds verifies what most of us who actually bought a motorcycle for it functional value already knew ; 20 grand was way too much for a brand new under engineered boat anchor 2 years ago and guess what,  so is 12 grand for the same bike today.

Today 12 grand and my Honda Metro secure a Ducati Multistrada – a V-Twin the likes of which HD may only have prickly, sweaty wet dreams thinking about because even all of Ferdinand Porsche’s hired mega minds can’t duplicate many decades of motorcycle race development. Father Time doesn’t take bribes.

So for all the Lemmings who bought a HOG just to be part of something, and for the rest of you biker trash just dumb enough to have plunked down 20 large on a tired namesake I’m sorry, but your underpowered boat anchor just ain’t worth what it used to be. Sorry, Harley Sucks…

“Idol of idiot-worshipers!”

-William Shakespeare

As I lay in bed last night thinking about what I would really love to do with my money if I were Warren Buffett or Bill Gates wealthy and, aside from owning a pacific island inhabited solely by illegally cloned Jessica Simpson lookalikes,  it wasn’t too difficult to imagine starting my own ground-up motorcycle manufacturing company. Scour the nation and hire the brightest engineering students and engineers, machinists and millwrights, designers and artists, financiers and bean counters. Pay them a salary they couldn’t refuse, house them in a Ferrari-like factory complete with indoor trees and underwater dancing girls where all could brainstorm, eat or bark at the moon in a think-tank like atmosphere.

My initial design for a motorcycle would be a road bike in the 400-600cc displacement category, single cylinder or twin, slightly relaxed sport bike ergonomics with a great emphasis on compactness and especially light weight.  Not unlike a 450 based Super Single but with a higher revving engine design more compatible with street applications. The Aprillia RXV/SXV line of engines in my opinion are ideal, if only Aprillia put it in a pure road chassis. There is a huge hole here in the US for a bike of this size/application and would be a great base for future development of multi-cylinder vehicles. Target dry weight of about 285 lbs. and with a 550cc four-stroke engine developing 85 HP at the crank. Tall order yes, but building a twin, perhaps a very compact parallel twin to keep the weight down and the RPM’s up, would make owning one of these worth the tradeoff of a considerably heavier but more powerful 600cc inline four.

Race development would be limited to the Supermoto or the Flat Track world, until Harley-Davidson once again lobbied the AMA to eliminate the competition in Flat Track by further narrowing the rulebook to allow only push rod engines as the overhead cam seems to elicit girlish squeals and Cro-Magnon like guttural sounds from Harley-Davidson engineers as they are thoroughly convinced the motorcycle world is evolving towards push rods, unless you include the Porsche-Rod. Of course another entry-level class could emerge in Roger Edmonson’s new and highly unimproved AMA.

All of this of course is wishful thinking, we are stuck here in the US with the Harley-Davidson Motor Company and their stale-minded approach as to how to improve a boat anchor. More concerned with selling Harley-Davidson beef jerky (HDBJ) than improving their breed. Worse yet the world is convinced that ALL motorcyclists here in the US enjoy cruiser type bikes, so all of the REALLY cool bikes that Europe gets are deemed as undesirable here and thus never see our shores.  Instead of my Honda Metro i could hop on a Honda CBR 125R on my daily trip to the grocery store, STILL get great mileage and maybe even bump my knee on a curb on the way down there. But it aint gonna happen, because us flag waivin’ US motorcyclist all love our HOGS, don’t we? Harley Sucks

“I throw thy name against the bruising stones”

-William Shakespeare

Ever wonder what goes on inside Harley Davidson’s R&D department? Me too, the budget must be broken down something like this:

1) chrome

2) wider rear wheel/tire

3) do we really need TWO front disc brakes?

4) more chrome

Incredibly, without a racing program to speak of (flat track doesn’t count) or any significant changes from model year to model year ( I.E. lack of R&D), Harley Davidsons are among the most expensive motorcycles in the world. I can’t think of another motor company that puts as little thought into their machinery year in and year out as does Harley, yet people continue to buy them in significant numbers based solely on a sound or the perceived wannabe factor (and you let me know what that is if you figure it out).

Therefore I can only come to the conclusion that the person who would throw down 20 grand on a heavy, slow, evil handling motorcycle using 1950′s technology can only be described as not knowing very much about motorcycles. And that’s ok, I can drive a car and not have to know very much about cars to do so. But would I drive a marginally updated version of a ’62 Ford Falcon, pay twice as much money for it than the competition, a competition that produces a car that is many, many times superior in EVERY way, then drive around the neighborhood in packs telling everyone how great it is? No, I say, not even I am that naive.

And yet there has to be words to describe these people. And who better to describe them than a man who to this day remains nearly unchallenged in the art of insult, a man who lived nearly 500 years ago yet was far ahead of his time, William Shakespeare. Starting with today’s post, I will try to leave you with words from William the Great regarding Harley Davidson and those foolish enough to buy one, because in the end, Harley Sucks.

“Assume a virtue if you have it not”

-William Shakespeare

Like many Americans, it truly chaps my ass that we as a Nation have chosen to be non-competitive when it comes to the world of sport motorcycling. Enthusiasts such as myself longing for an American brand of motorcycle that can accelerate, stop, turn without scraping chrome and weigh in less than Greyhound bus have waited way, way too long for this to happen. Sure Harley Davidson sells nearly every damn bike they build, but for REAL motorcycle enthusiasts, people who demand performance and quality from a bike, American currently has almost no selection of performance based motorcycles, save For Eric Buell and his beautiful Rotax based 1125 V-twins. But even Eric will admit that without the benefit of race development he cannot hope to someday compete with the all dominant Japanese/European motorcycles for finish and dependability.

In fact we are so far behind the rest of the world in motorcycle development, we are quite incapable of duplicating many of the techniques that are required to produce high-output, reliable, lightweight and superb handling machines. Just ask Buell who went to Austria for his high output engine or Harley Davidson themselves who enlisted Porsche to build the V-Rod engine. All of the brave souls who have tried and failed to build a competitive American built off-road motorcycle have too fallen by the wayside as we are light years behind the world in that respect, again no way to compete when your product costs more and is inferior in too many ways.

American needs an entrepreneur not drunk with the smell of leather to develop, build, then race evolve a ground up design like Michael Czysz or Kenny Roberts have done, although these were almost entirely full race programs but at the very highest level. Roberts could probably build and market a street version of the KR, the one before Honda let him buy into the 211/212 program, although it would almost certainly be Bimota bookoo bucks unless he could build and sell a zillion of them. Hell I’d buy one. Anything is better than my selection of US bikes now. Anything…

I would like to thank Christopher T. Shields of goingfaster.com for the inspiration in moving forward with this blog and pushing it onto the ‘net.  I stumbled upon his site while doing some research on the Harley V-Rod. His site mirrors my sentiments almost EXACTLY towards the vacuum that is the US motorcycle market regarding performance based motorcycles and Harley Davidsons in general, maybe even some of the people who ride them.  For instance, I’m 50, been riding since the late 60′s, started racing motocross in 1973, enduros in the 80′s, have had countless different brands and sizes of bikes and have well over 300K miles on the street, but there is always the woefully enlightened Renaissance man on a hog that will occasionally walk up and blurt out to me “you ain’t nothin’ ’till you ride a Harley”, and, not knowing even who the hell he is talking to , really believes it.  That is part of the fuel that drives this blog, the other part is the fact that my knowledge of motorcycling far exceeds 99% of the people that ride a hog. It’s the other 1% I’d REALLY like to talk to. Thanks again Christopher, you REALLY make me laugh man…