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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Last fall, Dunlop introduced it’s newest releases in hypersport rubber, the Q5 and Q5S, replacing the track focused Q4 and grippy but street oriented Q3+ in Dunlop’s lineup. Being curious, I purchased a set of Q5S out of my ridiculously abundant Road Dirt paycheck, spooned them on my Honda Superhawk and headed to The Ridge Motorsports Park in Shelton, Washington.
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The red fuel injection warning light came on. The engine died. Time slowed.
In motorcycling physics, miles per hour equals radius. More speed means a wider circle. Cut throttle (or have sudden power loss) and your circle tightens immediately. Engine power that had been keeping me passing the tanker truck around the outside abruptly left like a girlfriend scorned, and my radius tightened towards the tanker truck on my right.
For the second year in a row, Road Dirt will be pitting two tire giants against each other in a head-to-head battle for sport touring tire supremacy. Last year, Dunlop’s Roadsmart IV easily won the test over Pirelli’s Angel GT with better dry handling, equal wet weather grip, better long term handling and a shocking 70% more tire life. Conversations with riders and comments from both of my readers asked about Michelins touring giant, the Road 6. So once again, I twisted the arm of my touring companion Dave “White Girl” Wensveen and convinced him to join me for another summer of testing.
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Road Dirt’s summer tire shootout is back.
Last spring, after Dave “White Girl” Wensveen and I grossly over caffeinated ourselves, our acute grasp of the obvious made us realize we had the exact same bike. I suggested that it would be a perfect test bed for tires. Two identical bikes, two identical riders, each following the other around all spring, summer and fall while testing and taking notes sounded like the ideal way to put to bed all of the heresy regarding tire performance.
Legends grow as they roll along. Like snowballs they gather hyperbole packed deep in layers until the truth is buried somewhere way beneath. Telling and retelling of ancient stories swell the past until they take on a life of their own, only resembling the original in hazy memory. Good days far removed become epic, the older I get the faster I was and ancient asphalt snakes become the Nurburgring.
Highway 129, i.e. The Tail Of The Dragon, is such legend. Its 318 curves in 11 miles are fact, but there is also some legend around this stretch of twisty tarmac. The Tree of Shame, that tree at the beginning whose bark is a mangled plastic fairing testament to poor decisions adds to the lore, attracting swarming moths of sporty pretenders on everything from Honda Groms to McLaren hypercars. They make the pilgrimage to ride The Dragon, to get the sticker, buy the refrigerator magnet and say they were there.
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