Flies On The Visor

Every year, EICMA descends on Milan, and the motorcycle industry collectively decides the world needs more horsepower, more electronics, and more aerodynamic winglets. YouTube will duly bring us hundreds of videos of new bikes being sat on, presenters crouched by the front wheel or standing behind the bike like a priest at an altar, monologuing to the congregation.

EICMA and Motorcycle Live will be full of shiny new machinery, headline-grabbing technology and motorcycles priced somewhere between a house deposit and a small yacht. But the season’s most important bike could be the Norton Urban 450. Show season means manufacturers unveiling their latest creations and explaining why 200bhp is perfectly sensible for the school run. But the most significant motorcycle isn’t necessarily the fastest, prettiest or most expensive.

At some point in the adventure bike arms race, manufacturers can no longer simply bolt on another aluminium pannier, add a few extra horsepower, and declare victory. The New Tiger 1200 suggests Triumph knows this all too well, because instead of giving its flagship adventure bike a gentle facelift and a new colour scheme, it appears to have taken a long, hard look at the entire package and decided to fiddle with pretty much everything.

In a world where everyone is telling us that sports bikes are a thing of the past, Honda has unveiled the new CBR500R FOUR for 2027. While most other people are championing parallel twins, there’s something rather appealing about a compact four-cylinder engine that likes a good old-fashioned rev – and yes, I’m biased.

I knew the job was going too well. Any time a motorcycle project starts with the phrase “This’ll only take an hour,” you can be sure you’re about to lose a weekend, a chunk of your sanity, and increase your collection of swear words. In my case, all I wanted to do was remove eight cylinder head bolts so I could fit a complete Delkevic exhaust system. Eight bolts. A child could count them. At some point in the bike’s murky past, someone had replaced these bolts with stainless‑steel Allen bolts.

Few things are more satisfying than squeezing the brake lever as you slide up the inside of someone, and beat them to the apex. Few things are more alarming than pulling that same lever and thinking: Oh look … Here comes the corner. That was the problem with the brakes on my 2008 Suzuki GSX650F. The lever wasn’t the most inspiring.

Track days come in many different forms. Some leave you to your own devices. Some focus on instruction, while others are events in themselves, built around a shared love of motorcycles of all types and ages. Cadwell Moto, which happens every year towards the end of September, is definitely in the latter group: a wonderful celebration of motorcycling, supported by people from all over Europe.

Something rather odd is going on at Britain’s petrol pumps. If you haven’t noticed how light your wallet feels after filling up, the petrol price memes all over social media are asking, WTF is going on. So we went digging, and the first thing we ran into was the normal exclamation about the price of a barrel of oil. Yet the price of a litre of petrol doesn’t seem as connected to the oil price as we had hoped. The price for a litre of petrol seems to have developed a financial life of its own.

There is, of course, a perfectly sensible way to get from Scotch Corner to Rothbury … The A1. Wide, straight (ish) and tends to flow well once you are north of Harrogate. It is designed to get you from one place to another, efficiently. It is also boring. From our office going north, the first 100 miles to the tea-and-fuel stop at Boroughbridge are the worst. Yet the A1 is the best way to do it. Nut up – shut up and get it done. But after Boroughbridge, there are so many options.

After a couple of days off from Mallory (See Part One) and some enjoyable alone time in the garage checking Screamer (my GSX650F) to see if I’d broken anything, I’m off to Cadwell Park for another No Limits Track Day. Unlike the day at Mallory, the journey starts in glorious sunshine, which is always a good sign. Cadwell Park has its own weather system. On a previous evening session at Cadwell, I decided discretion was the better option than being on track in torrential rain.