Twisting Asphalt - A SoCal Ducati Motorcycle Blog

As MotorMilt & I were heading up the Pacific Coast Highway this morning, I found myself being struck by how familure the stretch of asphalt from Santa Monica to Malibu has gotten. It wasn’t that long ago that just riding up the PCH to the outskirts of Malibu and getting a coffee was what I considered a full ‘ride’. Now days I’ve almost memorized the whole trek. I’m far more focused on the little parts of riding such as my perferred lane placement or knowing where the bumps in the road sit then I am on trying to learn how to ride a motorcycle. These days getting up to Malibu is just a juant before we get the journey started.

Long before the waitresses at The Rock Store recognized us when we walked in the door, I was just learning how to ride on a used Blue ‘94 BMW R1100RS. It was a big bike with something like a 500 pound dry weight. The fairing was bulbous to say the least and the saddlebags always seemed to hold just a tad of dampness in them no matter what I tried to do to clean them. The bike’s previous owner had quite literaly ridden the thing around the world. It had something in the neighborhood of 80,000+ miles on the odometer when I picked it up for the first time. Yet while kids my age were riding 600cc Ninja’s, I willingly threw down for this bike because I was petrified with the idea of locking up the brakes. The ‘RS had ABS and that seemed like a better way to learn to ride. I can remember thinking to myself that it was one less thing to worry about.

While the ‘RS wasn’t a particularly pretty bike to look at - I always thought it was one of the odder German design statements - it did work extremely well for what it was. A sport tourer through and through. Plus I had been fortunately enough stumble on to the bike right after the previous owner had installed Ohlins suspension componets across the board and when you added that to the big, obnoxiously comfortable seat, it felt like you could ride that bike for days on end without feeling a thing. Only back then I didn’t know that a few years later I’d relish the idea that there are bikes out there that allow you to feel everything that is happening to your bike all the time.

It was only a few months after I bought the ‘RS’ that MotorMilt went out and trade up from his very clean ‘92 BMW K100RS to a new ‘99 BMW R1100S. I remember at the time him telling me that the ‘S’ was the first bike in quite awhile that he ‘lusted’ after. So now we were both riding boxers, abiet very different ones. Together we slowly started extending our morning rides. First we started heading further and further up the PCH. Then we slowly started hitting the more obvious canyons like Topanga to the 101 or Kanan Road. At the time he was afraid of twisty roads with cliffs and I was still trying to make sure that I didn’t fall off.

After kicking over around eight or nine thousand miles on the ‘RS’, I started to get this strange feeling everytime we took the bikes out. I was really enjoying the process of learning how to ride, but I wasn’t really enjoying my bike. It seemed like a very strange place to be and on our second or third trip up the coast on the bikes I decided it was time for a change. MotorMilt & I were staying at The Inn at Morro Bay and had stopped at the local diner for breakfast when I brought up the idea of a switch. I remember that Milt tilted his head and thought it over for a second or two and then shrugged his shoulders with one of those, ‘it make sense to me’ looks. Two days later I called Marty’s Foreign Motors in Torrance, California - a wonderful mom and pop beemer shop (aren’t they all?) that’s no longer in business - and told Joe, the sales guy, that I wanted to trade up to an ‘S’.

Up to that point I’d never bought a brand new motorized vehicle of any kind. So the whole process was an unknown as far as I was concerned. I had no idea how to negotiate or even what I was asking for. Luckily Milt & I had gotten to know Joe while we were in having our beemers serviced and he cut me some slack since we were regulars. I’m also pretty sure that Marty’s was more concerned with servicing bikes than selling them.

When it looked like I wasn’t going to be able to qualify for fiancing, Joe got on the phone with BMW Financial and got me qualified under the extrememly under publicized student rider finance deal. Only to prove that I was still in school, which I wasn’t, I had to provide BMW with a copy of my diploma. Now I don’t know how anyone else does it, but I day I got my diploma from USC I tossed it into a box and forgot about it. So for three days I remember tearing my entire life apart looking for that damn thing. Finally found it, promptly send a copy of it over to Joe and then went back and tossed it in yet another box. If you asked me today where it is, I still wouldn’t know…

Now somewhere around this time I realized that I no longer was all that excited by mellow trips up to Malibu and the few occassional canyons jaunts. I wanted to spend my entire day in the canyons, not surrounding them. I’ve written quite a bit about the ‘S’ in this blog but at the time it was the perfect bike for me. I finally felt like I was riding something that performed well and looked good while doing it. In many respects the ‘S’ was a step sideways, maybe even backwards, in terms of riding compared to the ‘RS’. The engine was quite similar, but the ergonomics were completely different. Instead of having the foot pegs right beneath you they were placed a bit further back. I spent awhile getting used to being more leaned over the handle bars and slowly my riding style began to change.

During the time I spent on the ‘RS’ I had grown very comfortable with a combination of counter steering and body steering. By the time I trade the ‘RS’ in, I was feeling very confident getting through corners by pushing down on the peg aimed at the inside of any given corner and then adding the necesssary counter steering pressure. On the ‘S’ body steering - at least as I had known it - didn’t do a whole heck of a lot. Instead I found myself counter steerings and growning more and more comfortable with leaning my entire body from one side to the other. As the miles passed I eventually found myself counter steering less and less and instead sliding my butt over in the seat and sticking my knee out in order to get around a corner faster and with more stability. Over time my speed began increasing both in and out of corners. Slowly I began pulling away from MotorMilt on treks through the canyons…

A few years later, on another journey up the coast from LA to Northern California, the idea was hatched that perhaps it was time for both MotorMilt & I to get something a bit more sporty. At first the idea was to pick up a used liter bike in decent shape. ProItalia had a low milage used Triumph Daytona for sale at the time and the thinking was that for limited out of pocket expsense we could both share the sportier bike over the course of the weekend. Of course that idea didn’t last long. By this time I had become a much more aggresive rider and I remember Milt telling me that I’d lose him in the canyons if I was on a bike like the Daytona and he was on a Beemer. I don’t know how true that is, but it pushed us in a more agreesive direction. Thus began the quest for the original set of Ducati’s.

Several years later I find it somewhat remarkable that as I’ve gone through bikes and grown up, I’ve learned so much along the way.

This morning when Milt and I hit The Rock Store for breakfast and it occured to me as we were strolling through the parking lot that we used to spend the time between riding going back and forth about what worked better for either one of us. He’d say counter steering was the way to go and I’d respond with body steering. We’d debate about how fast or hard either one of us should be going into a corner. I’d give him a hard time for not getting his feet up on the pegs and he’d complain about my lack braking (on the ‘RS’ and the ‘S’ I was a big engine braker). At some point he’d complain about the seat on the ‘S’ or the more leaned over ergos. I’d bitch about touching down the center stand.

Yet this morning as we sat there, I found it quite charming that our conversations were no longer about ‘how to ride’, but rather ‘how to get faster’. Over coffee we were talking about trail braking, sliding back in the seat when entering a down hill corner, where in the rpm range the 999’s like to be for certain things. It just struck me as such a different world and such a different conversation then it used to be. Instead of being the student and he being the teacher, we were both sitting at the table at the same place. And it’s now the little things that go along with that concept which I really admire.

Milt no longer complains about his seat - probably because on the Duc it’s a given that it’s going to be hot as hell and there’s not much you can do about it - and I no longer give him a hard time for not getting his feet back on the pegs. He doesn’t moan about what I’m doing wrong, but rather has grown comfortable with letting me go in the canyons and catching up a little bit later. We both have become faster, more confident in our riding, and I believe safer along the journey.

Here’s a couple of picts from the moring:

Early Morning Light on Saddlepeak Road

Lonely Helmet & Santa Monia Mountains

MotorMilt Catches Up

The Shot Of Day

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