Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Australian Motorcyclist

I’VE JUST COME back from Invercargill and the Burt Munro Challenge in New Zealand. One major reason for me being sent over to cover this fabulous event is that it’s had a change of date. Previously it was held in November (and bad weather). It’s now moved to a month with better (or more predictable) weather, namely February. You can read about the various events and what I thought about them further in this issue. You might notice that Lester’s regular column isn’t in this issue. He is having a rest at the moment and we’ve got some exciting ideas to fill the void. They mainly revolve around classic bikes which, as we’ve seen recently, are enjoying a huge boost in popularity. Sales at both Bonhams and Mecum auction houses…

IF YOU’VE PREVIOUSLY been to or followed the Burt Munro Challenge in Invercargill, NZ, you will have seen wet races – very wet races! Even ducks don’t like that much rain. So the organisers of the Burt Munro Challenge made the brave decision to change the date from the usual rainy November, to a more predictable (and hopefully drier) February, and it paid off big time! Thanks to Venture Southland tourism I headed over to Queenstown, picked up one of the beautifully presented bikes from Paradise Motorcycle Tours base (only a couple of minutes from the airport) and set off to Invercargill, which is only a couple of hours away. The next morning was the first event at Bluff – the hill climb – and I wanted to be there…

IT’S RARE TO SAY you can find a twisty road in the Northern Territory, but not far out of Darwin you’ll find the Kakadu Highway which runs from Pine Creek out to Jabiru. It’s around 210km of about as twisty a road as you’ll get in this area. PINE CREEK Pine Creek is a gold mining town which stumbled into existence when the teams building the Overland Telegraph Line in 1870 dug up some gold while digging holes for posts. Since 1870 it has had a variety of gold rushes with, at one time, more than 2000 Chinese miners working in the area and more than 15 mines all being dug in the hope of finding gold. Today it is a remnant of a past time. A quiet community where…

HERE’S OUR WINNER! “Gentlemen, Others, good morning,” writes Ross Halpin from Mitchell in Queensland. “Our Bear is at Rick’s Garage, Palmwoods, Sunshine Coast. Probably the 900th reader to so advise you. Never mind. Curiously, I’ve only ever known the place as a proper garage, going back to 1949. I used to walk past it on my way to school.And Rick’s must be fairly recent because it didn’t exist when we lived there to mid ‘06. Cheers and best wishes.” And for the winner, the spoils Well, not real spoils, of course. Really what you’ll win is this super stylish tee from the lovely folk at Rocky Creek Designs! LOOK DOWN LOOK DOWN THAT LONESOME ROAD… It’s a fairly long way to anywhere from here, as the map suggests, but it’s…

THE TAG “MADE in Italy” is a big thing. It really pushes the notion that stuff made in Italy is of the finest quality, and the new Benelli TRK 502 is an excellent example of exactly that. Its finish is excellent and the end result is a nice smaller-capacity road/ adventure bike. The Australian press launch made sure I got to sample a bit of everything – from freeway to super-tight twisties in Victoria’s Mornington Peninsula. Before I get into the details of new TRK 502, it’s probably worth mentioning some of the new Benelli models coming this year. The long-awaited Leoncino isn’t far away and although it will come fitted with road tyres, chucking a set of knobbies on it will bring it back to the prototype shown last…

THE OLD GLENN Innes/ Grafton Road is a former Cobb & Co route dating back to 1867. It provided the only access across the northern NSW ranges separating the tablelands to the west and the coast to the east. It remained the only access across the ranges until the Gwydir Highway opened in the early 1960s, providing a faster and easier route across the Gibraltar Range. Interestingly, as the accompanying map illustrates, the old route follows a southern arc whereas the new road arcs to the north: just two options of finding a traversable way across essentially the same set of ranges. Both routes get honourable mentions in The Bear’s 200 top rides (118 and 119). The Bear’s descriptions start at Grafton and go west to Glen Innes. I rode…

As I mentioned, I got a bike from the wonderful guys at Paradise Motorcycle Tours.They have a base located a couple of minutes from Queenstown airport. David picked me up from the airport, took me to their base and handed me the keys to the nice shiny red BMW R 1200 GS (Paradise Motorcycle Tours are an official tour partner of BMW Motorrad). David had it fitted up with panniers and topbox, along with a GPS which proved invaluable to get around Invercargill. A great thing about the Queenstown base is that you can leave any large luggage bags with David while you’re out riding. Just pack your gear into the panniers and away you go! Then when it was time to return the bike, David dropped me back off…

RATED 4 OUT OF 5 HELMETS Royal Hotel Kidman Way Mount Hope NSW 2877 Ph: 02 6897 7988 SO WHEN I rock up to the Royal at Mt Hope, Super Ten’s ambient temp gauge is showing 43C. It’s somehow fitting that at the end of a scorcher in the middle of our dog days of summer I’m met by a blue heeler resting in the doorway of the pub. Down the side, two women are having a durry in the cool shade beside the outside dunnies. The dog gets up, grabs a battered soccer ball and sits back down. And looks at me, then at the ball. At me and then the ball. It’s not some guard dog weighing up my threat to its home. It’s trying to sort out…

WITH THE CONCEPT of alternative universes becoming more acceptable in the scientific community, it beckons you to ponder the separate paths you could have taken on any one day of your life. For example, in one universe, you narrowly miss being run over by a car while walking across the street to your office. In another universe you get hit by a kid on a skateboard while crossing the same street and end up in hospital with a broken arm. Or better still, in one universe, you ride a DR650, in another you commute on a CT90. So imagine waking up on a Saturday morning with clear skies and a cool breeze. I make breakfast for myself and my wife, but in universe A I’m set to go for a…

LOOK AT ME RIZOMA TOMOK MIRRORS Price - $149 EU each MIRRORS ARE one of those things that have to be on a motorcycle but most of the time make the motorcycle look ugly. Thankfully Rizoma is here to save the day. It has an extensive range of billet mirrors to choose from. I agonised over which ones to put on the Z650L and finally ticked the Tomok units, which feature blue anti-glare glass that is also convex for more rearward vision despite their small size. The Tomok mirror has a unique look which is unmistakably stylish no matter which way you look at them – kind of like an elf’s ear in a way [You having a Lord of the Rings moment, Stu? – Boris]. The Tomok mirror is…

MY PARTNER PUMPS his left fist in the air as we ride on the Chandigarh/ Delhi highway. He is acknowledging another riding couple, also loaded with saddlebags, typical of a touring pair. We had only met a few on our month long spin on the Spiti Valley, Himachal Pradesh, India. There is something fundamentally sexy about adventure riding as a pillion with your partner, a throwback to the era of cavemen who had to drag or carry their loot (including their chosen women) on foot. The taming of horses gave humans the ability to move at speed and with minimum effort. The invention of the wheel added a new and exhilarating twist. Many a small boy, mesmerised by the passing vision of a rider with a glamorous girlfriend on the…

BEFORE I JUMP with you into the heady world of classic motorcycles, and the racing thereof, it’s probably important you should know a little about me. This is so you can work out if I have any credibility when it comes to the classics. When the doctor slapped me on the backside, my dear mum called me Christopher Pickett. Now I’m simply known as Picko. Some of you may have heard of me before, some not, and some of you wonderful readers may be trying to forget you heard my name at all. What is important for me is passion – especially seeing as how I’m going to write about classic bikes, where it’s all about passion. The great bikes of bygone eras have been a passion of mine for…

APRILIA HAS REALLY stepped it up with the new Shiver 900. The previous Shiver models left us a little ‘cold’; they were simply not overly exciting to ride. But throw off the jumpers, because the Shiver 900 is an excellent and truly fun bike to ride. So good, in fact, that we’ll be getting one as a long term loaner for six months. When I headed off to Melbourne for the recent Aussie launch I went with an open mind, but hoping the Shiver would be something to rave about. And so it turned out to be. In a nutshell, the bigger engine and new frame have the wow factor you’ll be looking for in a mid-sized naked bike. It needs that factor, too, because the mid-sized naked market has…

YOU’VE PROBABLY read my rabbitings about organised bike tours; I am a late convert, but like most late converts I’m a fervent one. Now let me rabbit on about a few different aspects of this kind of travel. Many of the people I talk (and listen) to are keen to do some overseas travelling by bike. Maybe they had one or more touring holidays when they were young and are keen to re-live the pleasure of getting up in the morning and looking forward to a day of riding new roads in new places; maybe they’d never had the opportunity to do that, and would like to sample it. As with so many other things we’d like to do, however, there’s always something in the way. This can be crippling:…

YOU ARE ALREADY thinking “What the hell are you doing comparing a Ducati to a Harley? Surely the Ducati will win hands down if you’re riding them together?” Well, we like to look at things a little differently here at Australian Motorcyclist. Sure, the Ducati has a bucket-load of power, but that will only land you in gaol, so we looked at not just how fast they are, but all the aspects of these two heavyweights of the power cruiser scene. The styling of both bikes is all the current rage of matte paint and blacked-out engines. The single-sided swingarm of the Ducati lets you see the detail of the spoked fat wheel while the Harley’s ‘look-at-me’ feature would have to be the dual cannon mufflers. Both bikes feature short…

TAKE A MILLION-dollar car and slam it into a short, low stone wall separating the road from a 250 metre drop. Back up, take off again. Repeat. What are you doing? You are competing in the Monte Carlo Rally on the road up to the Col de Turini in south-eastern France. And you are in only one of dozens of similar cars. No, I haven’t seen this happening, but I’ve ridden the same road and seen the roadside rock piles that the cars leave behind when they bash into the short protective walls. Every now and then you can see a smear of paint, and even that looks expensive. At the top of the pass, the walls of the hotel Les Trois Vallées are covered in pictures of the cars…

AT LUNCH ON A RIDE with Jimmy Barnes once, one of the other riders asked him, “Do you ever listen to Cold Chisel when you’re on the road?” Barnesy said yes, and the other bloke went on, “Do you think, ‘hey, I’m listening to Jimmy Barnes’?” Barnesy raised his eyebrows and looked at him exactly the way he deserved to be looked at, and replied, “No.” I put the Chisel on the H-D Road Glide Special’s excellent sound system when I hit the start of Highway One just past Waterfall and Barnesy’s howling vocals precede me on my way through the thin scrub. “And I've traveled round the world from year to year And each one found me aimless, one more year the more for wear…” Funny to be listening…

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