Rails, Part II

Yesterday was a day of days and today was not. Feeling pretty good about life I decided to head up to Ojai and Route 33… To be fair most of my morning was pretty amazing and I suppose at this point I could wax on poetically about my bike but in all honesty I’m not really in the mood. While there are a number of things that I’ve come to accept while owning an Italian beast – namely extreme ergonomics, an extremely hot seat and amazingly imaginative character – reliability and dependability are not among them it seems.

For the second time in less than three weeks on two different bikes I came to a stop light and found the clutch unable to engage. Thus had I not been on the front brakes nothing would have prevented the bike from going on it’s marry way regardless of our modern day traffic laws.

So either, A) In the last three weeks I’ve become completely inept and retarded when it comes to shifting a modern sportbike, B) there is a design flaw on both Milt’s ‘04 and my ‘05, or C) It’s August and as is the case with most of Italy, these bikes simply want to take the month off.

I say this in jest , but in all reality I have no good answer. Just a throbbing wrist and the knowledge that on both my bike and MotorMilt’s I’m unable to shift effectively.

I have to say I’m completely frustrated. While there are certain things on these bikes that clearly have no business being on a racebike – namely the speedo, the mirrors, the gauge cluster, etc. – a transmission and a clutch seem rather required. One would think that of all the parts on the bike that the factory would ensure could work correctly these would be among the top of the list.

Luckily for this blog I’ve had a few beers and enough time to calm down, but come on folks how fuck’n hard it is to build a decent transmission and clutch system? It ain’t like this is new technology here – clutches and tranny’s have been around for quite sometime – and there are no paddle shifters here… In many ways I’m at my wits end… I feel compelled to ride these bikes because when they’re on they’re amazing – more than amazing, they’re astounding – to the point where you simply do not know where fact stops and fiction begins. I truly doubt that a Japanese Inline 4 could do the trick. But when they’re off, like today, you stand in awe that you could so easily fall in love with such a temperamental beast.

All of this makes me wish that I skipped english lit in high school and took autoshop instead.