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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Hearing protection is critical for motorcycle riders. Wind noise and exhaust sounds combine to erode our hearing until we are straining to hear conversations in a noisy restaurant or asking our significant other to repeat dialogue at the movies. Loud pipes may save lives, but they destroy your ears.
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I miss the anticipation of the trip, the packing, the excitement of cramming my saddlebags full of warm clothes and strapping camping gear everywhere until it was heavily laden like a Yukon bound pack mule seeking a golden fortune. However, instead of heading for the frozen north, we were pointing our front wheels south to mine our memories from the golden shores of the Pacific Coast Highway. Levering my weighty bike off the kickstand and thumbing the starter felt like a leap into the unknown, the first steps of a thousand mile journey, my Honda VFR’s repaired electrics held together by electrical tape and happy thoughts, partly because I got lazy, party because it finally worked and I didn’t want to mess with it lest the whole mess unravel.
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New tires are a gift to motorcycle handling, fresh rubber turning your bike into a dance partner with nimble feet and newfound agility. Yet tires do not stay perfectly round for long as accumulated miles flatten rubber eliminating the roundness of honeymoon handling bliss. Much of a tire’s life is spent squared off and how a tire handles at mid-life is a concern of many rider.
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