Motorcycling: What sparked your interest initially?

Racing BMX bikes as a kid. I needed more power so i started motocross racing got bored and I figured I was an Adrenaline junky so I started racing road bikes for different clubs and now I'm humbled cause I want to see my son graduate from USC so I do track days and canyon runs now.

I literally said to myself, why not? I loved riding bicycles as a kid. Took a safety class for my motorcycle license and realized im a natural.

ca. 97 a friend of mine suggested we take MSF one weekend together, been riding ever since.

1. Similar to road biking, just louder and faster and you don't need to be in shape.

2. Mature enough to use the power responsibly now, well at least more responsibly than 20 years ago.

3. Didn't need to sell a vehicle to make room for the bike.

4. Cheap hobby.

5. Midlife crisis, it was this or a convertible!

2013RedSabs said:

1. Similar to road biking, just louder and faster and you don't need to be in shape.

2. Mature enough to use the power responsibly now, well at least more responsibly than 20 years ago.

3. Didn't need to sell a vehicle to make room for the bike.

4. Cheap hobby.

5. Midlife crisis, it was this or a convertible!

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Cheap hobby? 25K for a duc is cheap for you? 1.5K for gear? hahhaha well, good for you. Starting this up was expensive for me but I dont regret it a bit

DarioDuc said:

Cheap hobby? 25K for a duc is cheap for you? 1.5K for gear? hahhaha well, good for you. Starting this up was expensive for me but I dont regret it a bit

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Ha ha, I figured someone would take the "cheap" bait!!

Trust me, this is waaaay cheaper than building a street legal race car. Plus it brings the added benefit of a warranty.

What is this? A dating site now?

Grew up in the dirt. Had the same mini bike from the movie "Dumb and Dumber" when I was 6, had no suspension, giant tires. Got a PW80, got stolen. Got an XR100, was a lot of fun on trails. Then an XR250, even more fun on the trails. Went in the Army, rode a sportscar, looked at bikes... Camaro $30K, Ducati $13K (2010 Ducati 848). Bike more fun... Bought that, put 19,000 miles on a brand new bike within one year. Sold it. Bought the Panigale.

I do it all. Bike nights. Town cruising. Backroads. Highway. Drag Strip. Shows. Rallies. Rain. Shine. Sometimes a little snow. It's a open sense of freedom and motorcycles to me, are like ........ to Bill Clinton, sensual... intense... and likely to get you impeached (in trouble). But they are worth it! I have to ride almost daily or I get real bad anxiety. It also brings other guys together and you get that bit of brotherhood, something I miss rather much from the military. So in all ways, I love motorcycles!

It was a long decent into the darkness for me.

My mother as long as she was alive always forbid me from having any inclinations about motorcycles.

First it was riding my first pushie around at the age of about 7 with the clothes pegs holding some square bits of cardboard box against the spokes whilst attached to the frame.
Couldn't get the sound right though

I think i was really screwed after seeing the movie "Stone" with Rebecca Gilling going topless when it first came out at the drive-in back when i was a kid.
I may have been about 10 years old at the time, and my parents had to smuggle me in because i was not old enough to see the movie because of the rating, but too old to get in as only little kids under 5 were allowed.

About this time, my father took me to the speedway one night. I can still hear the noise and smell the burnt race fuel.

The next thing i know, i'm customising my first real full sized pushie which had gears (Sturmy Archer 3 speed) and front and rear hand operated brakes. That bike was was really too big for me, but i had to grow into it. I customised it with some chrome mirrors, a battery operated horn, and some dynamo powered lights. This was funded out of every cent i could earn from doing odd jobs.

Later on i was spending school holidays at my Aunts' motel when some bikers stayed for a night. They had been on some sort of a road trip on their big Jap fours (Hondas, Suzukis and Kawasakis).
I had the free reign of the motel and that night i was hanging around, lurking and hanging around some more and looking at the bikes when one of the bikers said would you like to sit on one.
I said yes to that in a heart beat.
The next thing i'm getting helped onto this massive thing that i could hardly reach the pegs on with my legs wraped around the frame/engine, and barely reach over the tank to hold on to the bars.
Talk about being intimidated by a machine.
But i was truely inspired.

A couple of years later new neighbours moved in across the road.
Their son had a Mini Bike with fat tyres and a recoil start kirby engine in it with a centrifugal clutch drive. Naturally i became friends with them
When we could get hold of a can of fuel, we rode it a lot down the road at the vacant land which was originally owned by a man who trained trotters back in the old days.

I wouldn't have had it any other way

Cheers

I grew up always hearing from my family "motorcycles are bad, dangerous, killers, pointless" etc (my parents and grandparents especially). They were probably saying it because we've lost a handful of relatives in motorcycle crashes over the years. Well I guess all the negative talk about bikes made me want one even more (want what you can't have kind of idea).

When I was about in middle school I met a buddy of mine who I still hang out with today. This buddy had a cabin in northern Wisconsin with an ATV, 3 dirt bikes, and 2 snowmobiles. He taught me everything I could know about those types of motorsports (including riding). So I was instantly hooked! I started watching MotoGP and motocross after that.

Jump to college and my aunt married a Harley guy who eventually convinced me to buy a bike. I bought a Harley Night Train in 2009 (without ever having much experiencd with road bikes) but I didn't regret it. I haven't looked back since and an now on my third bike.

...And of course I can't forget to mention I thought bikes were cool and I liked the chick-magnet aspect.

It was a cumulative effect:

The seed was planted growing up near Silverstone circuit in the UK. A lot of the bikes would come through our village and stop at the pub. I vividly remember a pair of Laverda Jotas parking up near my house, one classic orange and one green, and thinking they were the coolest machines on the planet. My dad would also take me to the F1 and 500cc GP (or whatever they wherein the early 80s) and I loved the glorious noise and smell of burnt fuel. I also loved the Ducati's,super sports and Guzzi Le Man Mk1

The catalyst to buy was the Cagiva Mito which I saw for the first time in a friends magazine and I bought it sight unseen within 30 mins. Strangely it was exactly the same with the Panigale and I thought of the Mito when rang up about the bike.

I went on to own the Le Mans, Laverda Jota and 900SS after the Mito. Wish I'd never sold them

2013RedSabs said:

Ha ha, I figured someone would take the "cheap" bait!!

Trust me, this is waaaay cheaper than building a street legal race car. Plus it brings the added benefit of a warranty.

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Well when you put it that wayyyy.... I guess its CHEAPer

I had bone cancer at 29 ( chondro-fucken-sarcoma )10 years ago on my index finger ( yes seriously ) and was told that if it had spread there was a possibilty that I wouldnt make it.

All my life prior I never considered a motorcycle as it was too dangerous. After my rehabilitation ( amputated ) the first thing I did was go out and buy a motor bike ( an R6, 848 and now my 1199 ) as I realised life is way too short and there is so many ways to go out so just do what you enjoy. That same year I left my job and started up my successful business which is 10 years going strong...so what I lost, I gained, in many ways I may have not

desmodromic system said:

My interest was ignited by two movies.

1. Top Gun

Seeing tom cruise ride his kawasaki towards the horizon with a pretty lady in the back + top gun theme song really made me want to ride a motorycle.

2. Terminator 2: judgement day

Seeing Arnold catapult his harley 30 feet of the ground + a sawed of shot gun would really ignite an 11 year olds fanatasy!

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I want your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle

My interest was ignited by two movies.

1. Top Gun

Seeing tom cruise ride his kawasaki towards the horizon with a pretty lady in the back + top gun theme song really made me want to ride a motorycle.

2. Terminator 2: judgement day

Seeing Arnold catapult his harley 30 feet of the ground + a sawed of shot gun would really ignite an 11 year olds fanatasy!

desmodromic system said:

My interest was ignited by two movies.

1. Top Gun

Seeing tom cruise ride his kawasaki towards the horizon with a pretty lady in the back + top gun theme song really made me want to ride a motorycle.

2. Terminator 2: judgement day

Seeing Arnold catapult his harley 30 feet of the ground + a sawed of shot gun would really ignite an 11 year olds fanatasy!

Click to expand...

Haha! That's funny, now you mention it Top Gun was an influence, great scene, and I wanted a Fatboy after seeing Terminator!

I was about 8 in 1969 when my brother got a minibike and that hooked us both. It had a solid frame and a lawn mower engine. So started riding and progressed with various bikes.

Then in about 1973 I came out of watching the movie "On Any Sunday" and Kawasaki Australia had put a display in the foyer of a Kawasaki Z1 900. I looked at that baby and said I am going to have one of those. In 1979 at 18 years of age I got one but it was the 1976 model with the twin front discs.

Trumpet next door ...

Back in the early 60's, my mother hated my next door neighbor's kid who had, first, a Honda Dream 305 with the pipes cut off, and then ... ahhh ... a Triumph Bonneville with, of course, the pipes cut off. Growing up at the Jersey shore, we didn't have the noise pollution (music?) restrictions we have nowadays and I fell in love with the sound. (Did the baseball-cards-in-the-spokes thing, too - you couldn't have too many...) I was hooked. Finally, in college, my first bike: a '71 Fiat 124 became a '74 Suzuki GT380. Sporting? Nah. Bulletproof? Yes! When I rode it home for the first time, my mother wouldn't come out to look at it; as far as she was concerned, if she couldn't see it, I didn't have it. Sold it before going on my first deployment in '78 and then, 26 years and 2 daughters later (trying to be a responsible parent), my first Ducati, an '03 ST4s. Added the Panigale last year. Getting older, going faster. Life's too short.

Ok...true baseball cards in the spokes story...

When I was a boy of 7-8, my paternal grandmother dropped off a bunch of items from my grand father's possessions. One was two ammo boxes filled With baseball cards from the early 1900's. These cards didn't even have fotos on them; they were color renderings /prints of the players. The cards as I recal, were massively thick. my brother and I thought they were cartoons; and garbage compared to the Topps cards we would five finger discount from the local stationery store.

So with our Schwinns having extended forks by cutting off the forks of junk bikes and jamming them onto our forks; we had instant choppers! But...no motors...we ran out of the stolen cards we had to clothes pin to the rear frame. And mom wasn't giving us any coin at all to buy any!

Well, we got the bright idea to use those thick monster old (and ultimately very valuable) baseball cards with the renderings on them. Man!! What a sound those suckers made! They were the Termis of baseball cards but they disintegrated very fast....but we had hundreds!!!

It was fun and expensive to mod the bikes that way, but who knew at the time?....in retrospect; i wouldn't change a thing! We had the best "motors" a chopped Schwinn could ever have!!