South West Bikers | Motorcycle Forum

Can ya?

'Onda...Gert Large...1k

Bit vague

Oh phooey

Gert Large = GL (1000)

You are Lobby Lud and I claim my £5

There was a cafe racer Goldwing outside of Asda on Saturday, complete with beardy hipster owner.

Am I the only one thinking the cafe racer thing is getting a bit too Irrelevant now?

Each to their own, Graham, each to their own.

The original GL1000 was a pretty fair handling bike for its time - plenty of power, and carried its weight low down ...... Then the yanks got hold of it, threw a ton of glassfibre at it, and the behemoth was born .....

From a purely custom/ asthetic scene Cafe Racer's have their place, that is nestled amongst urban beardy Hipsters. Soon those hipsters will find something else to latch onto and cafe's can go back to being a retro thing that is enjoyed by some.

As was pointed out by a good friend of mine on going for a surf at his local beach ( he's lived/ surfed there for 40+ years) ' can you only be a surfer if you grow a large beard these days??'.........same beards, different advertising cache .

The reality is, if those guys back in the 50's had access to todays modern sportsbikes, that's what they'd be belting around the north circular on, not oil leaking Brit bikes with ace bars ;) ......

badgerKDD wrote:The reality is, if those guys back in the 50's had access to todays modern sportsbikes, that's what they'd be belting around the north circular on, not oil leaking Brit bikes with ace bars ;) ......

I'd disagree with you there Badger. The original cafe racers were the race-replicas of their day - they built bikes which aped the racers of the day, at a time when factories only built "workaday" bikes. If you wanted a bike like the ones you saw the likes of Duke, Surtees, Cooper, etc., riding, you had to build it yourself. The modern track-day rider bears closer comparison to the cafe racers of yore than the current retro-racer fashion.

I'm not against it - far from it - but it taking (relatively) modern machines and retro-treating them is actually closer to Steam-Punk in reality ....... almost fashion for its own sake ......