Older things made of simpler elements have charisma.
Chrome, rubber, steel and glass, basics of so many classic motorcycles of decades past, carry stories with them in their porous surfaces, either building shine or dulling patina as the pages of the calendar flip. Those of us in love with old metal find solace in bikes built with steel and chrome instead of plastic and carbon fiber.
I wondered how the stellar Dunlops would perform long term as both a street tire and trackday weapon. The Q5S tires have a harder center compound for street mileage so I kept them on my Honda Superhawk for the duration of the 2023 riding season for commuting, touring and canyon sprint miles, using them as most riders would for a whole year. Then, last week, after a full year with the tires on the bike, I returned to MotoAmerica’s early summer race venue, The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, Washington for a second thrashing to see how they would fare after a full season of use.
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If you haven’t heard of Shinko Motorcycle Tires, I don’t blame you. Shinko does not have the brand name recognition or racing pedigree of major manufacturers like Dunlop, Michelin, Pirelli or Bridgestone. However, their rubber roots run deep having manufactured bicycle tires since the end of World War II, then purchasing motorcycle tire technology from Yokohama in 1998. They claim to manufacture about 200,000 tires a month.
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Even the journey of ten thousand miles must begin with the single turn of a wheel. This is how year 3 of Road Dirt’s Sport Touring Tire Shootout begins.
When tires are new, they are round and perfect, just as their designers intended, showcasing the technology and engineering their manufacturers have poured into their design profiles. We all love new tires because when they replace flat spotted rubber, our bike’s handling comes to life.
Our goal was to run both tires down to cord to get final mileage measurements. While that happened with the Dunlop, the Michelin came very close but never had the chance to make it down to metal. We simply ran out of weather. So, for both of my readers waiting patiently to see how long these two sport touring giants would last, here is what we found.
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After being available overseas for a year, Royal Enfield is bringing its Super Meteor 650 cruiser to the States. Orbiting alongside Royal Enfield’s flagship models, the standard styled Interceptor or INT 650 and cafe racer Continental GT, the Super Meteor channels Royal Enfield’s design heritage and wraps it around it’s venerable 650cc parallel twin engine. I had the opportunity to test the bike at the Super Meteor’s touchdown in Dallas, Texas and came away impressed with Royal Enfield’s mid-sized cruiser.
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Yet if you ride in the Pacific Northwest then you know that into every ride a little rain must fall. Just not this year. We rode through most of the West anticipating that somewhere, somehow, we would find nature’s rain for the highly anticipated wet weather tire test of Dunlop’s Roadsmart IV vs Michelin’s Road 6, our participants in year two of our tire shootout series. Instead we found heat, snow, even a biblical plague of grasshoppers but not a single drop of rain. So to answer the question that both of my readers have been asking, we traversed thousands of miles to some of the best riding in the country, the place where it rains every afternoon: Colorado.
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In the motorcycle world, Honda’s 1969 CB750 was a fork tailed devil of a different sort, striking its own deadly blow to its slow, unreliable competition and irreversibly changing the course of motorcycling. Its innovations were previously unthinkable: disc brakes came standard, power came easy, size and weight became manageable, electronics became reliable, beauty was standard. It killed the competition. There was no reversing course.
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Enter the Yamaha Tracer 9 GT+. Yamaha’s Tracer, revised for the 2024 model year, is listed as a sport touring motorbike, but after spending time on the Tracer, I find it is a flexible sport touring platform for whatever your flavor of motorcycling.
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