Sweat is beading up. Bits of perspiration grow unchecked. First there’s one. Then two. Now, three. Until the moment comes when the collection of water hits its critical mass and the weight exceeds the liquid’s suction power.

A second later, I feel the momentum of the bead as it rolls down my back and the cool-yet-warm-yet-idyllically perfect SoCal wind buffets the side of my helmet and exposed parts of my neck and I have to smile.

It’s November and at last I’m riding again.

How perfect.

Cresting the canyon, I wring back the throttle as the bike launches forward. The gauges go up, the gears spin faster, the exhaust audibly rises and the road bends – oh, boy, does it bend…

Going back and forth left and right and up and down, in equal measure and in all directions, before it suddenly shouts out straight ahead. Slowing rising, as if the road is just biding its time… Just sneaking a peek at what comes next. Just letting you catch your breath. Never fully giving itself away, never quite letting you know its intentions. And then there’s a kink.

A little jut that shoots you straight out under the trees. The shadows overwhelming your senses… It’s just darkness and a prayer.

You gulp for air and wonder what might lie on the road surface – but just then the sunlight comes back. Casting its watchful eye on your adventure once again… Right before the road rolls over itself, and you gasp… The jarring 180º up-hill assault brings the tarmac back on to itself and as you gaze at it, you too return to earth.

A second later, the bike dives-in. Leans left. In your mind, you think about traction and forces, and science and force, and all kinds of madness… And in a heartbeat it’s over…. Before I know it I’m hanging above the coast and the canyon, peering out at an endless expanse of nothingness. Clouds that cover all and yet offer no definition between sky or ground or even horizon. It’s just one big bland colored canvas that’s wrapped around everything that I can see.

Yet even though it seems colorless there’s vibrancy.

And lots of it.

Hitting the stop sign, I pause for a second and tell myself — no, remind myself — I should breath.

My head feels like its spinning so fast, I’m shocked… Can’t remember the last time I felt this way…

My heart races… And I smile…

I’m alone – completely alone – And in my very own private canyon.

*****

Minutes later, the road barks. The 1098S vibrates with an urgency I haven’t felt in quite awhile – the windscreen shakes wildly, the seat wiggles up and down, there’s a beat to the moment. A sense of booming and bamming…

The engine hurls itself forward with such vigor that I almost feel powerless to stop it by myself. There’s a third-person video-game quality to it all. The ride surrounding my outlook on life so fully and in such a dedicated manor that there’s seemingly little left to do. I feel lost. Out of control. Out of touch.

However I’m there… I’m in the moment…

With each new kink in the asphalt, the road openly communicates. The handlebars scream instructions as the Tires dip and dive and avoid conflict-riddled patches. I feel engaged. I feel in touch. I feel in control.

The engine rumbles and howls and screams… Rapidly increasing and decreasing the bellowing exhaust notes, each flick of the wrist echoing through-out the canyons and right off of the rocky walls.

Coming up to the top of Saddlepeak Road, I my eyes fixate on the width and breath of the San Fernando Valley. It’s clearer than the Coastline, but not by much. I can see birds fluttering, other traffic, hikers, bicyclists… Yet all I can hear is the soundtrack of my own private canyon. The Rattle and Hum of the Individual Experience as it was meant to be had… Solitude in Speed… Gød how I have missed this…

The road is rising. Lifting up. And reaching out.

Searching perhaps.

For where to go next.

As am I…

I think…

Hugging the side of the mountain, the road anxiously bounces, frenetically jumping left and then right and then back left again. Over and over and over again. Each kink flowing into the next, with such little regard for the rules of reality that at times it seems almost overwhelming.

Yet it never quite gets away.

Never makes that full and final break that ends today and starts tomorrow…

Instead coming out of each successive corner, the road surface jumps ahead just enough to show you how little control you have over it before it slows back down and nimbly allows you to find your groove once again.

That addictive groove. The one that all riders crave.

When you can see no evil nor hear no evil. When you and the bike symbiotically connect with such frightening ease that what seemed fast yesterday is now downright mellow in comparison.

A slow mellow.

As the road snaps right, I catch my first peak at the ocean ahead and smile. The rush of the ride is coming to an end. I can see it beneath the faint haze that’s hanging over the crystal blue water. Half of me thinks that this is a good thing. That there’s no way I can sustain this pace safely. That I’ve ridden today to far out of my comfort zone.

Yet the other side of my head just defiantly smirks. Because like everything else comfort zones are organic. They live, they breathe, they grow. Expanding with confidence or contracting with fear.

And today it’s wider and deeper than its been in ages.

As a rider, over the years I’ve become keenly aware that there are roads you know well and ride all the time, roads you’ve never seen but find yourself making plans to visit, and then roads that from a mere photograph have a unique power to consume your dreams — because they are not easy to get to or to conquer.

The last several weeks have been a remarkable stretch of time where all of my personal roads, both the seen and unseen, the known and unknown, have blended together to form a wonderful combination of one single and seamless moment where everything feels like it’s exactly where it is supposed to be for right now…

And I can’t think of a better culmination of that sense of purpose than this Thursday evening, when our newest sportbike documentary, Motorcycle Crash Tech‘, premieres on The National Geographic Channel at 9 PM EST.

In May, I briefly wrote about the project but at the time couldn’t go into much detail about it — Tonight I finally can…

After we finished Twist The Throttle, the next inevitable question was what do we want to shoot next? For month we went back and forth, talking about what would be different then Twist and yet still part of the greater sportbike arena… A few truly intriguing ideas surfaced, but they never quite took off or captured enough of our collective attention span… But then lighting struck… While ‘taking a break’…

We were watching a sportbike race, when a rider crashed. It looked horrific. It looked deadly. It seemed disastrous. Yet the rider got up. Shook his head in frustration. And walked away…

It was a scene punctuated by the notion that twenty, maybe fifteen, hell probably ten years ago, would have required an ambulance or a helicopter. But instead suddenly seemed rather matter-of-fact. The rider later quoted as saying it was a run of the mill event. Barely noticeable and simply a function of ‘push the edge’…

Tonight it seems rather obvious that something interesting was there, but at the time it was simply a curiosity — was racing, and by extension regular-riding, really safer today? Have we actually come to a point where we can engineer out the danger?

The answer as many riders know is, yes.

It is something I learned first hand this January when I crashed (an odd occurrence while working on a sportbike show about crashing no doubt!).

Now, of course I’m not suggesting that racing is 100% safe, nor regular everyday riding, neither one is, but the odds of survival should the worst happen have dramatically increased and that’s something I personally find fascinating… So we set out to see the remarkable advancements in racing and riding gear; from the bikes themselves, to the brakes, to helmets, and the actual riding suits.

I hope everyone in the audience enjoys! (Press Release Below)

Umberto rides the F4

“Motorcycle Crash Tech” is an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at the new technologies being used to avoid motorcycle crashes, and prevent injuries or even death when a racer or rider does go down.

Exclusive interviews with racer Neil Hodgson and the legendary Giacomo Agostini describe first-hand what goes through a racer’s mind the moment they know they’re going to crash and vividly recount just how deadly racing was in the 1960’s and ‘70’s. Combining rare archival footage from years past as well as contemporary AMA racing coverage, the film explains the differences between high-sides and low-sides and the extreme forces involved in both types of crashes.

The film captures stunning action photography of world-class test riders Vito Guareschi (Alpinestars, Nolan, and Ducati) and Umberto Rumiano (MV Agusta) in action during what are normally closed test sessions of new riding gear and bikes. Brembo factory riders are also filmed testing the company’s newest brakes on twisting Italian mountain roads and performing incredible braking tests on Brembo’s private test track.

Produced by Cry Havoc Productions, an award winning documentary film company specializing in Moto related films, “Motorcycle Crash Tech” will premiere on September 17, 2009 at 9PM ET on the National Geographic Channel.

Filmed in 1080i high-definition and 5.1 digital surround sound, “Motorcycle Crash Tech” takes viewers on an extraordinary journey across Northern Italy. With rare access to the R & D facilities and research departments at Alpinestars, Brembo, Nolan, and MV Agusta, the film chronicles the very latest technologies being used in motorcycle riding gear, boots, helmets, brakes, and the bikes themselves to make racing and riding safer.

Back at it Again...

The bike is slipping into second gear as the sunshine flickers. Bright and dark rays shutter through the weeds. Spill onto the road. Laying out a pattern of texture that’s deep with shades of gray but very little black and white…

And then the torque starts to talk…

Big hits of power slam into the road. Punch the asphalt straight in the face as the bike gnarls, and snares, and grabs hold. Wringing the last bit of grip as the power envelops not only the moment, but my mind. And it’s evil and it’s vicious and it’s just down-right mean… After three or four hits I find myself thinking the poor road didn’t even do anything to deserve this sort of punishment… And yet it’s still getting knocked silly… Rip after rip…

The top of Stunt Road

Jumping forward, the bike blasts. Begins beating up the wind as well. Nothing it seems can stand in its way… And then you realize it’s time to buckle down. Fully focus. As in 100-percent pay-attention time… No room for wandering thoughts, idle memories or business decisions that lurk ahead… No, now there is no time for anything else but moto-satisfaction…

Breaking left, the road tries to sneak one past the machine… But it doesn’t are. Just flicks in. Dives for the centerline. Acts unfazed…. Subconsciously I lean inside… Slide off the mount and towards the ground… Think to myself it wasn’t that long ago I was fighting this situation… But that was months ago and even though it’s been awhile since I was on the bike, this somehow feels more secure than it has in quite awhile… Because the bike just holds its line… Hangs on in one extended moment of solidarity with the asphalt. As if suddenly they’re best friends again… And I think what a change a six-pack of months make…

They say that ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder,’ but historically, for me anyway, that’s not always been case when it comes to bikes. The longer I’m off them, the more reasons I seem to find for putting off the first ride back. Chores, bills, parties, work, sleep, all those other things from regular life that tend to get in the way…

And it’s not because I love the machines any less, but rather, really, because the first ride back after a long lay off always seems to suck… It almost never fails that I find myself fighting something… The machine, the transmission, the road, the grip, the rusty feelings…

In truth, it’s not my favorite emotional ride…

And yet today none of that is true… The machine is matching the revs of my mind and doing exactly what I want, when I want it and it just seems easy… Remarkably easy…

Pulling off at a vista spot, the old man, pulls off his helmet and looks at me and then the machine…

“You look like you again,” he says with a smile… And I think, ‘I feel like me again’…

“It’s seems like it’s been a long time since I felt this good on a bike,” I respond and he nods…

It’s been months since I was last on the bike, thanks as usual to work - the traveling, the catching up on sleep, the deadlines, it’s the perfect cauldron for poor riding really… But somehow, for some reason, not today… How that’s remotely possible I don’t know, but I dig it… And I can’t wait to ride out the rest of Summer… Ah… It’s nice to be back…

'Motorcycle Crash Tech' Audio Mix

It’s been an incredible few days as we wrap up the last remaining bits on our new sportbike doc for the National Geographic Channel (which I briefly wrote about previously) but none was nearly as exciting as sitting down at Salami Studios in Burbank, California, and hearing the 5.1 audio mix for the first time. While I totally dig the move the High-Def in terms of the visuals, there’s nothing quite as exciting hearing the sounds of sportbikes roaring in real, honest to goodness surround sound. It brings the hair on the back of neck up and makes two-dimensional images seem so much deeper… And honestly, I really dig the images in this show, so that’s saying something…

Hopefully you all will enjoy the show & the audio mix as much as I do

Air-Schedule coming shortly…

Just a quick post to share some international launch dates for Twist The Throttle;

Poland/Hungary - Sundays at 9:00 starting on 8/2

Denmark/Sweden/Nordic/Finland - Every other Sunday at 11:00 starting on 8/23

Italy - Thursdays at 23:00 starting on 10/8/09

Japan - 1Q 2010

The series will continue to roll out worldwide in other territories and I’ll add new dates as they become available… Enjoy!

The Bugatti Veyron

Every now and then this gig truly has its moments — And the last month has certainly been one of them…

As most longtime readers have undoubtedly noticed, Twisting Asphalt has been dark for quite awhile — again — It’s been just over a month since I penned the last post. This self imposed media blackout is not a harbinger of a slow death for the site but rather the unfortunate side effect of the realities of life superseding the joy that comes from riding or sitting at the screen and hacking away at a post about riding.

For the past month I’ve been existing in a remarkable world of Moto-Lust, where each breath is not filled with only air but also the nuances of ultra-performance at its unequivocal best…

For the last thirty days I’ve had the distinct privileged to live one of the greatest automotive fantasy’s around — An unreal, absolutely marvelous adventure spent documenting the world’s fastest production car — The Bugatti Veyron.

It is a machine unlike any other automobile I’ve ever been around — That’s not to say I’ve lost my taste for Ferrari’s, Lambo’s or Porsche’s — But rather an acknowledgment of just how incredible this machine truly is when you see it in its native environment. From the design and engineering that went into it, to the craftsmanship at every step of the assembly process and, really, the utter lack of concern over time or money spent creating perfection, it is simply a hard to walk away from one and not admire it… Or dare I say fall in love with (though clearly I will never be one of the 300 owners — Starting at 1.7 million Euros I’m fairly certain that’s a hit my wallet will never support)…

While everyone talks about the Veyron’s remarkable top speed of 407 kph or 253 mph — After a month hanging around the car and the folks who build it, I’ve come to the distinct conclusion that talking about the top speed is the easy one-liner, the simple description you tell your buddy at a bar, but there’s so much more to this car… And frankly, I’m not even sure it’s fair to call it car… So much aircraft technology has gone into it that it’s probably more apt to consider it a airplane — just one that happens to have four-wheels.

On the Track with the Veyron

On the Track with the Veyron

Ducs on the Road at Alice's in NorCal

It’s flat and foggy. A collection of roadways, rattled by the everyday, intersect one on top of another. There are holes and grooves and unannounced visitors tucked behind the wheel of their ordinary machines coming up fast in the right lane. Folks cross the street without a care in the world. They never even look. Semi’s stroll along mass arteries of societal movement and never check their blind spots. It’s chaotic and mundane and unaware – And no matter what you do, you feel like you’ve already been here before… That you do it everyday…

And then the light changes. Goes Green. And the stop becomes the start of something special…

The road darts up the valley wall. Corners approach. Bend after bend they begin to build. One twist becomes one lean, which becomes one seamless arch – Then it all becomes two. Then three. Then four. The one-dimensional route becoming the two-dimensional, which begets the multi-dimensional. And you feel the bike bite down. The suspension settles. The tires grab the asphalt. The throttle advances. The gears engage. The L-Twin hums as the comfortable ceases and the challenge beckons. Your fingers beginning to bend just a bit before you hear the pop of the clutch, and the mechanical advances into the emotional. One gear up at a time.

A second, a minute, a moment, it all comes together — without even thinking about it – and then it’s just you and the road and the ride. Alone.

The ability to see ahead diminishes as the light goes dark, and the darkness then quickly becomes light again. To the side, tree after tree flies past and waves goodbye just as it says hello. The canopy above revealing little of what lies ahead and even less of where you’ve just been. You squint. You try to look ahead. But you can’t make it out. There are just pooled spots of light sitting on fragments of curved kinks that only a few hours ago you were idly tracing with your finger on a worn-out map while sipping your first coffee of the day.

Somehow, somewhere, it just doesn’t seem possible to be here. Right now. And yet you are. You are this very moment. This one, little bit of time, tucked away on the side of mountain.

As the road keeps climbing upwards, under your helmet, you struggle for your bearings. Initially grasping for the last remnants of a remotely general direction for where you’re headed. But slowly, as each corner wears you down, the need to know where you are dissipates. It evaporates. It disappears. Completely. You are lost and yet you are not – You’re just running from the preplanned part of your everyday life. Instead running towards the unarranged adventure. The thing that lies ahead and beyond what you can see. And for the first time in ages it feels good to not be worrying about where you’re going, just that you’re getting there.

After all, that’s why they make the maps in the first place.

Hitting the first uncovered straight in multiple miles, you catch a glimpse of the sun that’s sitting overhead as it settles into a groove. And through the break in the tree line you hear the exhaust resonate throughout the canyon walls. Booming and echoing from right below your helmet to the very valley floor sitting beneath you.

And you see. You see and see and see.

Acres of the uninhabited. Natures very own solitude. The last vestige of life before mankind ever arrived here. It is beautiful and it’s awe-inspiring and so counter to the half-dozen or so concrete or stuccoed boxes that you move between in your regular daily regiment that you find yourself wondering where did all this come from? And more importantly, how did I get here?

Then it’s gone. A flash frame in a scene of forward progress.

Hundreds of trunks of bark race right next to you, as bits of light flash in-between, and you just carve. Carve corner after curve after corner. The rhythm of the roadway repeating itself in the revs of the engine. Up and down and up and down. You shift. The bike. Your weight. Your mindset. It’s engaged. It’s complicated. It’s sequential events unfolding in microseconds of thoughtless processes; You see the road come at you, You catalogue it, You think back on the collection of roads you’ve ridden in the past, You process the event at hand, You come up with a game plan, You enact it. It just happens — almost instantly.

And a hundred corners later, you climb off the bike and breath. Big breaths. Deep down to the bottoms of your lugs. Because you’ve just experienced something that doesn’t happen everyday – something that doesn’t even happen every month.

You’ve just experience the beauty of a multi-day ride.

It’s been three days since I returned home from a 1,100-plus-mile voyage with the old man, and while my body is physically beat, my moto-spirit has never been better.

I feel more at peace with riding than I’ve felt in countless months. More confident. More connected. More passionate. More alive with what it means to actually ride.

It is as if I have returned myself to me. In a way that perhaps only I can understand.

And oddly, in a way I have.

Because for the last week MotorMilt and I have retraced our very own footsteps, rushing up and down the California coastline, one curvy road at a time, in an eerily reminiscent journey to an adventure we took almost five years to the very day from when we left town. Five long arduous years that have been full of change and circumstance and the evolution of life. 1,825 days where the only constant has been that there are few constants if any in life. With the obvious exception being a mechanical, dare I say near maniacal, advancement of time.

Honestly I don’t know what took so long to do this.

While we’ve done road trips or multi-day rides over these past five years, none of those journeys were like this journey. Because none of those trips featured this many miles in just five days of back to back riding, this far up and out of what I know.

It’s a kind of riding that is so righteous and profound that I’m not sure that I can fully comprehend it’s meaning in totality. It is as if the mile-markers are Brillo pads for everything that ails us in life and as you pass each one by a little bit more of the regular pressures or concerns of daily life get scrubbed away.

Each corner or sequence or hidden short-cut that turns out to be the long-way around holds the power to re-initialize your own hard drive and each gas station fill-up doesn’t just put fuel in the tank, but also installs a little bit more fresh code for your own personal operating system. Somewhere on day two or three or four, you wake up and suddenly it’s as if you’re a brand new machine all over again, fresh from the factory floor.

I’ve sorely missed that feeling.

Instead of bemoaning its absence, what I should have done in retrospect was tossed my leg over a bike and just go for it. Just ride. Till the flame in the sunset went out. But I didn’t. I let the real world and the deadlines and pitfalls of so many other things get in the way. Which begs the question, why do we wait to do the things that give us the most pleasure? Why do with rationalize the destruction of the very things that let us be us?

Sitting here tonight, I can’t escape the thought that there is something marvelous and magical and damn right special about just hitting the road with minimal pre-planning, a couple of saddlebags filled with two-days worth of clothes – max — and nothing more than a general direction of where you’re headed. It’s illogical, it’s unorthodox, it’s counter-intuitive on just about every level to how I run the rest of my life and yet it’s trips like this that lay the very foundation of my soul. For they are so much more than the sum of their parts. They are journeys built on a collection of routes and roads and off-the-beaten path highways that transcend the love affair with a machine or a weekend jaunt, and instead enter a realm of serenity where you exist in a nine or ten hour window of obsessive-compulsive movement.

They offer the kind of release that’s impossible to achieve on a regular ride. Impossible to feel when you’re wondering where you put the garage door clicker or if you locked the front door. When you’re on the road for multiple days none of that matters. Your head lets go of the grocery lists and the car payments. It’s as if you exist in a vacuum, where it’s just you and the road and the freedom to come and go as you please. It’s an almost primal reason to advance.

However the thing that truly stands out about the past week – and what I’ll always remember about this particular trip – were the things that finally had the time to be said. The words and the phrases and the sentences that somehow seem to get lost in the madness of the everyday. While the ride was great, it’s the bits in-between and afterwards that encompass the outstanding. Whether it was standing on the edge of North America and peering into the great blue beyond or shuffling up to the bar late at night and ordering a well deserved single malt, those are the true memories I’ll hold. The true moments. The things that matter the most.

It is perhaps that the best part of a long adventure – the time you have person to person to communicate when you’re unwired, untethered and unable to receive Outlook notifications.

A couple of other quick thoughts on the journey;

Bada...Boom... The BoomTubes get Installed

Amazing how the desire to wrench myself versus the desire to get things done quickly took an unexpected turn yesterday… After waking up WAY to early — like 3 AM early — So early the dog looked at me in fact, shook his head as if to say ‘really?’ and then went back to sleep — I ended up rolling into LA with plenty of time to spare. As in all day - and the old man, MotorMilt, came up with a brilliant idea.

With less than twenty-four hours before the next great personal moto-adventure begins, he suggested that I swing by Alex White’s Motorcycle Performance Services on La Brea and see if I could get a quick oil change and once over the Monster. Since I was planning on doing that after the great ‘09 moto-adventure wrapped up, I figured why not.

And since a box of parts was already in the back of the truck, because in my perfect world fantasy, I’d install the new bits with the old man post-trip, I couldn’t help myself. Alex had a hole in his shop schedule and the bike was there and ready… So the latest, next step, in the Monster mod project got a bit of a jump start…

Pulling the box of assorted bits out of the truck, I watched as Alex’s face lit up — Apparently I’m not the only one inflicted with the moto-lust disease… He smirked and smiled and then dived right in… “What’dda we got here?” he asked… Well, let’s see…

Moments later, Alex and his crew went to town… Bits and pieces started flying around… And at 5:10 in the afternoon the results of their labor rolled into the driveway…

Because it was a one-day affair a few things got a touch rushed and in some respects this is just a first generation version of these elements — after speaking with Alex afterward, I think it’s clear we’ve got a bit more work collectively ahead of us. For starters the Tail Chop isn’t quite perfect yet - it’s installed, safe and legal, but it’s not quite as eye-catching as either of us would like. Purely a function of time. Post trip that’ll be at the top of the list to sort out. No doubt a black powered coat is in store for the mount. Also the remnants of the homologation fender are probably on their way out — at the moment I’m thinking some sort of custom mount for the taillight is in order. I’m just not real keen on the dreaded ‘black tray’… though I suppose it’d make a fine place to place a beer

Also the Power Commander settings for the BoomTubes aren’t quite perfect yet - I’ll be playing with them on the upcoming adventure and surely there will be a bit more tweaking post-trip as well…

In addition, as you’ll notice from the picts that Alex sourced up some nifty expandable soft FirstGear saddlebags — this will be my first trip of any kind with something other than a factory installed hard mounted set of saddlebags. I have some doubts about them, but of course plenty of folks tour this way, so I suppose it’s bound to work. Just not quite what I’m used to using… As with so many other parts of life, ultimately I guess we’ll see… There’s nothing quite like giving something a go on a long voyage…

All in all, I couldn’t be more pleased at the moment. Great adventure coming down the pike, awesome bike that’s getting progressively more awesome each day and a slowly evolving road map for where it’s headed…

This should be quite an adventure — the riding and the rebuilding

Bitubo Steering Dampner

It’s early in the morning and the dog is barking… Loudly… Peering through the door’s eye piece I catch a glimpse of a box and smile. Cracking the door open, I desperately try to hold the mutt back, but it’s tough. He’s excited and so am I… Standing in the doorway is a cacophony of brown. “Got another delivery for ya,” the local UPS guy says with all to knowing smirk. I get the feeling he too is in love with the Monster… Because as each box shows up, he gets to take five and talk bikes… And really is there anything better?

And so it begins…

The second mod to the Monster — well, actually it’s the first uninstalled mod to be fair — was a simple one.

If you’ve read my review of the Ducati S2R 1000 Monster for Pro Italia, you’ll know that while I totally dug the bike and what it represented, and thus obviously ended up picking one up for myself, I was not so keen on the less than solid windscreen.

Removing it was both an aesthetical choice as well as a practical one. While riding the bike, the cafe-styled half-fairing just didn’t feel very structurally sound. Above 70 mph it felt like it was a disaster waiting to happen - at least in my book. But more importantly, in my mind there’s something extraordinarily classic about the unfaired Monster lines that Miguel Galluzzi penned in ‘93. The virtue of the bike in many ways is its simplicity and the half-fairing somehow broke that for me. So with that in mind, the windscreen is now gone. Out of here. Adios. Two bolts and see ya later… I believe its destiny is to become a beautiful exercise in eBay commerce…

Yet even though that was the ‘first’ change that took place on the bike, it wasn’t really the first ‘mod’…

That honor falls to a brand new Bitubo Steering Damper. Since picking up the ‘08 S2R, I’ve had a chance to take it on two relatively short rides (>100 miles) — neither one posted to the blog since I had yet to have the time to write anything meaningfully intelligent about actually taking delivery of the bike in the first place — and on both occasions the front end felt quite different then I remembered it feeling during the week I had a similar machine for the Pro Italia review. I’d go into corners and where I expected security and that famed Ducati superbike ethos, I’d find undulation and fear. Where I’d wick it up a bit, the bike would hesitate with marked indifference before shaking it’s head slightly and barking. Much like the dog. The front never quite feeling as confident as some of the other rides in the garage. Each time I’d ask myself, the eternal riding question, “Is it me or is it the bike?”… I’m still not 100% sure, but thanks to the last trackday my confidence is much higher than it was and my gut kept telling me it wasn’t my riding but rather something missing on the machine.

Since every other ride in the garage, with the exception of the ST3, has a steering damper (and frankly I’ve always thought that was the one glaring omission on that bike from the factory), I thought adding one to the Monster would be an obvious place to start. If afterward the bike still echos uncertainty, then I’ll go to step two and look into a proper suspension set up at a place such as Race Tech (A company who has set-up both Milt’s F4 and my 999 at the track and it was without a doubt some of the best money we’ve spent — I honestly can’t say enough good things about those folks).

So once I decided it was time to investigate adding a steering damper to the bike, the next logical question was which one?

As with all things Monster, the choices are seemingly endless. My initial thought was to look into adding an Ohlins unit, since that’s an obvious suspension choice for a Ducati and something I’m at least a bit versed in thanks to the 1098S, but everywhere I turned the Ohlins solution resulted in a steering damper that ended up needing to be mounted to one side of the side of the frame and a rather unappealing fork clamp (at least to me), so relatively quickly that idea ran its course and I started searching for alternative options.

That search eventually lead to two distinct possibilities — An Arrow kit and a Bitubo Kit — Originally I was leaning towards the Arrow system since the last time I was at the MV Agusta Factory in Varese, Italy, they had piles of Arrow boxes sitting around and if Arrow is good enough for MV, it’s certainly good enough for me … but then of course fate intervened.

While surfing the new Ducati Monster Forum, I stumbled on to a thread called Black Gold Struck in SoCal, without really thinking about it I clicked the link and suddenly my head began spinning… Another local SoCal rider had done a number on his Monster and the result was absolutely spectacular… A look that I never would have thought would be my thing, suddenly seemed like the only route to go…

Suddenly everything began to crystallize - the BoomTube exhausts, the purpose of the bike, the colors, the vision and suddenly an either/or steering damper choice got remarkably simple. Even though both systems looked equally great, the The Bitubo system was the only one that came in Gold.

Of course, like many things in my life, I spent way to much time pondering the addition before moving to action. Call it financial hesitancy — even when the outcome is never really in doubt… With the next great road-trip adventure just around the corner (quite literally, posts to come), I realized that I was now battling both the clock and the inventory window of the usual suspect shops. So with that in mind, I decided to reach outside the norm.

Having read great things about a Ducati parts supplier called Desmoworks in Indiana (the former LoudBike parts shop), I gave them a shout since they listed the Bitubo unit in question on their website. (If you’ve got some time to burn, check out their blog… it’s beautiful eye-candy… just put your wallet away before hand )… Practically minutes later the chap who runs it, Anthony Creek, gave me a ring back and I laid out exactly what was going on, what I was interested in and what the time constraints were. Anthony didn’t blink. Actually he was pretty awesome about it all, and even though he didn’t have the unit in gold in stock, he got right on the horn and a few minutes later was able to unequivocally tell me that he would be able to drop ship the unit directly from his distributor and guaranteed that it’d be in LA by the next afternoon, which would give me plenty of time to install it before the coming adventure. So really, how can you say no to customer service like that? And sure enough less than 24 hours later my favorite UPS guy was standing at my door with another box in hand.

What was inside is just magical…

The Bitubo unit is brilliantly machined, it looks awesome, but of course the directions for installation are, well, typically Italian. There’s lot of words and numbers, but um.. well some interesting translation. Of course having never installed a steering damper myself before, part of me was certainly more than a bit nervous. Not so much about the bolting on as the idea that I was about to unscrew and re-screw two of the bolts that directly attach the handlebars to the triple clamps and somewhere in the back of my mind the image of riding down the road as the bars came off in my hands flashed before my eyes. But, one of the great things about installing something yourself is that as you do it images like that are lessened by the fact that you begin to gain an understanding of what you’re fixing/adding/altering and in the case of the damper it didn’t take long to realize that this was really no big deal. If you can screw in a lightbulb, you can put one of these suckers on your bike. It’s really that simple.

The biggest issue I encountered during the entire install was that the unit shipped with the riser attached to the wrong side of the bracket that comes off the handlebars, so the first time I put it on the bike the steering damper and the bracket didn’t line up correctly. But after a quick smoke break, I took a step back, double checked that everything in the package had S2R written somewhere on it and gave it a quick think. There didn’t seem to be anything to lose by trying to flip-flop the riser and once I did everything worked perfectly. All in all it was like a hour of total wrenching time, including the upside down riser fiasco. For the first mod, I’d say that’s not to shabby

And I could be happier, it’s a sweet looking unit and thus far seems to work rather well. Of course the proof will be in the pudding, as they say, and that’s about to come…

Some Custom BoomTubes by Mark Savory @ MotoCreations

Over the past couple of weeks a barrage of parts have made their way into the garage and while on one level it’s somewhat insane to already be planning the destruction of a perfectly good motorcycle only so you can recreate it in your own vision, I’m also fairly certain that somewhere in the basic genetic structure of a Monster lies a series of base pairs that if analyzed would blueprint the need for modification. It seems like something that is intrinsically part of the bike’s soul. Something it doesn’t need, but rather asks for… Rather loudly…

Hunting these parts down has been both an absolute joy and an odyssey in and of itself to say the least. It is amazing how one small picture in a tiny quadrant of the internet can launch your mind in fifteen different directions all at once and lead to several hours of web surfing all in the name of a part that nobody seems to stock stateside. Page after page you struggle to find what you’re looking for. Hours of links later, you’re saying to yourself perhaps it’s not meant to be… But then, just for the shits and giggles of it, you click on that one last link… That one last remaining hope before you truly pack it in and give up… Of course at this point, you’re fully expecting to be let down once again… Only this time, you’re not… Instead you finally see it and this odd sense of web-surfing accomplishment takes hold, as you slightly smirk to yourself and think, ‘Ah ha, I finally found it!’.

Needless to say there’s a certain satisfaction in the picking and choosing of what you want to go on your bike. I know this might sound crazy, but it feels soooooo radically different than the knee-dragging need-for-speed aesthetic of a full-blown sportbike, where the parts you lust after are purely performance based. There’s something quite addictive about starring at a web-page and asking yourself whether or not this bit or that fits with your vision of your own bike and there’s something quite refreshing about equally caring about the looks and the functionality.

One might suggest that you could do the same with a full-blown sportbike but I think that’s a bit of a false assumption in many ways — At some point we all lose focus on the visuals and instead turn our attention to the ends that justify the means. After all, on the most basic level, all sportbike riders subscribe to one simple truth, we run our bikes at cathedrals of speed and we always want to go faster. We want to raise our skills and perfect the craft of performance riding. Amazingly it doesn’t really matter what level you ride at either, the desire for adding bits to increase personal speed exists in exactly the same manor in everyone from the first time track rider to the WERA or CSS vet, I simply think they show it in different ways and on different levels. Ultimately irregardless of whether you time your laps or just count them, in the end everyone wants the illusion that the bits they’re putting on their bikes are making them go faster.

With the Monster it feels different. There’s no pressure to go fast. No need to press the ‘metal’ so to speak. No desire to be the quickest up the mountain. I’ve got other rides built for that purpose. Instead, with the Monster, I feel this strange yet wicked sense of visual adventure. A desire to craft and create a unique personality for the bike and one that echoes both the machine’s soul and mine. Don’t get me wrong, I want the bike to be peppy and go well, but I also want it to be something that’s been created, if not by me, certainly because of me. Something that speaks to my ideals. My desires. My dreams.

Of course every custom project needs a beginning and even though the idea of picking up a Monster has been festering inside for quite awhile, the inspirational launching pad for exactly what kind of Monster it’s going to turn out to be was missing…

But not anymore…

Over the years while shooting different motor-oil based documentaries I’ve had the good fortune to meet quite a few auto industry designers and regardless of whether they’re penning supercars, daily drivers or motorcycles, I’ve come to the conclusion that they’re all remarkably similar in one respect — If you ask them where their inspiration for one of their designs originally came from it’s rarely a big object but rather something very small and particular. A pen, a watch, a toaster, a woman, the eyes of an animal. As a group, almost to a T, they all seem to gravitate towards a specific bit or two of an object that most of us would find quite ordinary and yet they see something magical in it and take that hint of a tread of a thought and build an their vision from it. At first this sort of mindset struck me as a bit odd, but I guess as happens in life sometimes, the more you hang around something you don’t quite understand, the more you begin to get it. And so with the Monster I’ve found myself searching for that one bit that can become the genesis of a well thought out idea. That one particular element that leads to unified vision.

And I found it… In a set of MotoCreations’ BoomTubes…

The second I laid eyes on a set of the Boomtubes I knew I had found my Monster’s inspiration.

The S2R just had to have them. It was that simple. While Termi’s excite me like everyone else, here, with the BoomTubes, was something unusual, super trick and yet also nicely understated. If James Dean rode a Monster, this would be the exhaust system he’d put on. In addition ordering up a set of BoomTubes offered an awesome solution to the most glaring eye-sore on the entire bike, the garish 1 into 2 catalytic converter abomination. (Every time I look at it I shutter. It’s the least Italian looking part of an entirely Italian bike).

Avid Monster fans of course will already know the name MotoCreations - For the past six years Mark Savory and his crew have been knocking out one of a kind custom Ducati bikes, their work has been featured in a number of moto-mags and if you’ve been a Ducati Monster Challenge event, there’ a good chance you’ve even seen their work in person. They’ve especially garnered quite a bit of recognition for their DesmoDevil custom Ducati-Chopper. It’s a love it or hate it kind of bike, but one that is extremely unique no matter how you cut it. (You can read the full backstory on the DesmoDevil here).

The success of the DesmoDevil, along with the rest of their custom business, has lead to Mark and his crew at MotoCreations going into the custom parts business. I say custom and not production because while they are selling their wares to Monster owners around the world, these are unique bits that you’re not going to find on your local Ducati dealership’s website any time soon (At least I don’t think so) and they’re built to order, so if for instance you want a particular tweak done here or there based on your personal taste, for a few extra bucks they’re willing to craft it anyway you want.

In the case of my set of BoomTubes, I was a bit worried about how loud they’d be — I’m all for nice sounding bikes, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve also got a neighborhood full of folks who don’t take kindly to Sunday morning moto-madness wake up calls. A few emails later, Mark worked up a nice set of custom baffles and we were on our way. Problem solved.

Now I’ve just got to find some time to get’em on the bike

Small update to share about Twist The Throttle — Starting June 1st, HD Theater is going to start encore presentations of all eight episodes of the series, which will continuing running through November!

More info is available on a week by week basis at HD Theater: Twist The Throttle Schedule.

A Ducati S2R1000 Monster at Pro Italia

“Oh boy… Here we go again,” is in fact the first thought that comes to mind the minute I walk into Pro Italia and realize that, yes, I am in fact once again kicking tires…

Not idly mulling about mind you, but striding purposefully through the dealership with intent-to-kill and purchase kind of eyes… The kind of tire kicking that gets you trouble on the 1st, 15th or 30th of each month…

Should I be? Would I be? Can I be? Could I be? These days it’s just damn hard for me to answer those sorts of questions…

It seems that somewhere along the line my personal passion, career and lifestyle all organically merged into me and the result is this odd combination of confusion, excitement and down right blatant moto-lust…

Rolling through the showroom, I’m struck by the fact that it’s probably time to simply accept and acknowledge the fact that when it comes to things with combustion powered engines and two-wheels my normally logically sound life comes crashing down and grinds to a halt. In effect blows up, only to be rebuilt again with either two-valves or four.

What I think I know and what I know I should do, quickly become superseded by an irrational desire to do the foolish. And while I could probably create an elaborate fictional reality as a cover story and attempt to explain why the irrational is actually rational and therefore life always makes sense, well that’d just be a blatant lie that perpetuates some other version of me. What is probably best described as a holdover of my former self. Not that those stories didn’t roll through my head mind you, but rather because when all is said and done, it’s just easier to tell the truth, and more important be honest with yourself…

Simply put, I’ve come to the not so shocking conclusion that I am in fact a full fledged addict… Some folks pick pills or drugs or drinking as their poisons of choice… For me it’s motorcycles… Plain and simple… They are not just vehicles or modes of transportation, but rather magical creatures with destinies that are anything but predetermined… In my mind they are the ultimate unknowns. They take you places you simply can’t imagine until you’re actually there. They live, they breath, they act up, I believe that they are in fact alive. And they do it with passion. With pride. With purpose.

Rationally — oh, great there’s that word again — I suppose one could make the argument that motorcycles are a healthier lifestyle choice than any of the above mentioned addictions. But frankly I’m so sure about that anymore… I spend an exorbitant of time each day thinking about nothing but riding… Even when I can’t actually get out and do the ‘riding’… From the bits to the bolts to bikes to ride itself, it’s absolutely frightening the amount of time one can spend when they’re in love with an inanimate object. From the sport, to the skill-set, to the lifestyle and growing dream to see and ride everything that’s out there, I’m tired of fighting reality… My reality…

I used to fear it, to run from it, to nonchalantly put it down amongst friends to diffuse the accepted mainstream doctrine that bikes are bad, or evil, or deadly, or who knows what else, particularly with those who didn’t share the passion — with those who didn’t see it or understand it — But no more I say… It times to face up to what it is that makes me alive…

Maybe it’s a function of getting close to turning thirty-two this summer, I don’t know, but I feel a certain sense of urgency at work here… As if time is running through me like an hour-glass. I feel as if I’ve waited my entire life to get to this point, to enjoy the life I always wanted. I’ve spent countless hours counting down the days until I could make the ‘choices’ and bear the burdens of life and enjoy the benefits. And now it’s here. I can feel it. I can see it. I believe it. It’s almost as if I can touch it.

Yet I also feel this sense that there’s only so much of me left and it feels like I’ve got to stop fooling around here. It’s time to get serious, not about my career or my loved ones, or my Cable TV package, but rather it’s time to get serious about me. It’s time to stop wasting mental and emotional energy on the things in life that I don’t really care about.

Is that selfish? Is that conceded?

Probably.

But as they say, ‘you only live once’ and of all the things in life I fear the most, the idea of letting one of the best periods of life pass by as a passenger and not an active participant scares the living hell out of me. I’d rather end up broke and destitute but with a saddlebag full of experiences then rich, wealthy and devoid of meaning. Is that youthful ignorance coming to light? Could be. Maybe at forty with a kid in toe I’ll feel differently about it… But right now it not only seems age-appropriate but time-appropriate… It feels like what I should be doing not what I’m supposed to be doing.

So why a Monster? And an outdated one at that?

Well, several reasons really… For starters I’ve had this weird growing fascination with late 60’s and early 70’s vintage bikes lately. BSA’s, Triumph’s, Norton’s, CB750’s, Mach III’s… Probably a direct result of hanging around them during the Twist shoot… There’s something about how when they’re built-out they showcase a certain kind of purpose, and dare I say urgency…

So why not pick one of those up instead? Good question. Simple answer, while I think they look cool, I’ve got no desire to engage in drum brakes, early disc brakes, headshake or a myriad of other ‘early’ technological advances that seem utterly dated by today’s standards.

The Monster — and by Monster, I mean the original Monster penned by Miguel Galluzzi, not the current Streetfighter/Thing that’s badged Monster/Homologated “Am I Brutale clone or Street Triple knockoff or contemporary slice of moto-evolutionary pie” machine — is in its own way as classic of a machine as say a CB750, but relatively speaking modern, safe, sporty and well, sound… It evokes all the bits of the past that I find cool but in something I actually want and will ride.

Secondly, I love the fact that it’s a completely open canvas. The 999 streetbike turned trackbike experience has certainly opened my eyes to customization, in a way that it wasn’t before. The Monster is the perfect platform for that sort of transformation. People have been doing it for years and I’m greatly looking forward to trying a slice of that moto-pie. The possibilities are practically endless and parts are widely available from a variety of resources. Just hunting all the sources down is almost half the fun…

Third, the idea of picking up a true 2-valved air-cooled Ducati fascinates me because it’s a relatively simple engine that’s been around practically forever. In a perfect world it’s an ideal platform to wrench on myself - a skill I have yet to conquer completely but one I certainly want to experience. Ultimately will I? Have no idea. Time right now is a fluid, combustible medium that seems to move faster then I’d like it to, but just the idea that on an engine like this it’d be possible to give it a go intrigues me greatly. There’s something marvelous about its simplicity in my mind.

Finally, it’s a sporty ride just the way it comes from the factory - It’s not Superbike competent, but it’s street-bike competent, and post-crash I have a new found respect and, dare I say, point of view on what I’m looking for when I’m not out on the track. Something that moves well but doesn’t bring out the speed freak demons inside. Right now the idea of a mellower, more comfortable, sport machine sounds damn good… And so it begins… My own kind of Monster Madness…

Photo by Trevor Navarra

“What’s next?” is a seemingly innocuous question…

And yet it’s a documentary filmmakers most constant fear… It’s a refrain you hear often in this business. People ask it off-handily, almost meaninglessly, during hello-how-are-you kinds of conversations, and yet it collectively haunts us all… Because often times there is no known answer when the question is posed.

As someone said to me recently, ‘creating documentaries is like throwing darts at a board and waiting six months to see if they hit.’

And therein lies the fear…

You never quite know what is coming next, even when you think you do… Because nothing in this business, like life itself, is ever certain.

The job is in a constant state of evolution. It’s a system of constant challenges and never-ending risk vs. reward scenarios. And honestly that’s part of the draw too. There’s something amazingly evocative about constantly ‘battling’ for your spot in line. And yet it’s the biggest concern as well. The amount of time you have to breath from one project to the next is minimal at best and yet everyone always expects not only your ‘A Game’, but for your ‘A Game’ to actually improve. The status quo is never good enough. Nor should it be, really. The goal should be — no it has to be — to get better. But you know that when you take the gig… It’s part of the inherent contract you sign with yourself.

So as some of you might have noticed, lately I’ve been more or less missing in action on the blog front — it certainly wasn’t a pre-planned hiatus but rather the result of being consumed with ‘What has come Next’…

And it’s worth mentioning at this point that right now given where the world is at from an economic standpoint a good portion of me is just thankful there is a ‘next’ anything at all. When all is said and done documentaries, and even movies to some extent, though less so, are completely consumable products. Nobody needs them to live their lives. The world would continue just fine without them. If every network on the face of the planet went into a state of constant re-runs… Sorry, ‘encore presentations’… You have to logically think that some percentage of the TV watching population wouldn’t even notice… We live in a world with more visual diversity and stimulation than at any other point in history and it’s impossible to keep current on it all…

That being said tonight I’m thankful for more than just the gig itself — I’m thankful for my guys. They are truly an amazing group and they were able to make ideas that existed only in my head and turn them into reality.

I simply cannot thank them enough; Directors of Photography Andrew Waruszewski and Trevor Navarra, along with Jason Goodell, who Gripped and Gaffed, and Peter Karr , who handled Location Sound, were absolute magicians.

I bring all of this up because tomorrow the rough cut for the next sportbike doc heads back east for the network to review and it is without a doubt the best piece of work we’ve ever collectively done. Sportbikes have never looked this good. It is light years beyond Speed On Two Wheels and so far past Twist The Throttle it’s not even funny.

It used to be when I was sitting in the edit suite editing a show I knew if something, say a sequence or an act, was good because the hairs on the back of neck would stand up and I’d get that goose-bump feeling that made me think this was something I’d watch… This time I know it’s good because I can’t stop watching it… And I’ve already seen it a couple hundred times…

Now ultimately it’s up to you the audience to really decide if it’s better, but right now I’ve got the strongest hunch of my entire life. I’d bet the farm, the house, the in-laws, maybe even the dog… (Probably not the bikes though It feels like something entirely different and yet still consistent with the tenets of filmmaking that we collectively subscribe to… I simply can not wait for all of you to see it.

Photo by Trevor Navarra

Twist The Throttle - Yamaha

Just a quick reminder that the eight episode of Twist The Throttle, which showcases Yamaha, debuts this coming Monday at 10 pm EST/PST on Discovery’s “HD Theater”!

*Channel 76 and 281 on DirecTV, but if you’ve got a different cable system please check your local listings…

*Detailed episode listings are available on the Discovery HD Theater website here.