Free Let's Ride by Sonny Barger Page B

having the fastest and fanciest motorcycle around, and, most important, if your legs are long enough to safely ride a dual sport, then this type of bike might be right for you.
    Supermotards
    Supermotard bikes were developed for supermoto racing. This is a type of racing that is usually done in parking lots and can encompass sections of track that are both paved and dirt. The bikes themselves are usually created by taking dirt bikes and fitting them with street suspension and street tires. They look like dirt bikes with road-racing tires mounted on them.
    Supermotards can be a lot of fun for an experienced rider, but only for short bursts of hooligan-type behavior. If you like to do wheelies and stoppies or big, smoky tire slides, few bikes do these things better than a supermotard.
    But if you’re looking for a practical all-around motorcycle, you’d do well to look at something other than supermotard bikes, because they are basically dirt bikes for the street, which means they’re extremely uncomfortable to ride for any distance at all, mostly because they have dirt-bike-style seats. Add to this the fact that supermotards are generally expensive, costing as much or more than many full-sized motorcycles, and you can see why this type of bike is less than ideal for a beginner.
    Cruisers
    You’ll most likely end up with a “cruiser,” as the magazines call them. This is an odd name for a poorly defined style of motorcycle. The cruiser came into existence as a response to the custom bobbers and choppers we built in the 1950s and 1960s.
    Up until roughly 1970 Harley only built two main types of big bikes: the XL Sportster and the FL Electra Glide. The Sportster was a hot rod back then, a lightweight high-performance bike. Remember, this was before Kawasaki started the Japanese horsepower wars with its 900-cc Z1 and right around the time Honda released its 750 four cylinder. Harley’s other main line consisted of the big FL Electra Glide models. These were enormous 74-cubic-inch (1200-cc) motorcycles loaded down with touring accessories. Most people considered these old men’s motorcycles; we called them “garbage wagons” because of all the touring equipment on them.
    Today I ride a full-dress motorcycle—you think differently when you are seventy than you did when you were eighteen—but we were young then. Because we young guys generally didn’t want to ride around on the same types of bikes that our fathers and grandfathers rode, a lot of us customized our motorcycles. Some of us built full-on choppers and bobbers, but others just rearranged the basic material we already had available. Some guys rode stock Sportsters, but most of us preferred the smoother-running and more-reliable FL platform. Still, a lot of people wanted the cut-down look of the Sportster, so they got rid of the big, heavy Electra Glide fork with its chrome-plated steel covers and mounted the sleek, light fork from the Sportster.
    The people running Harley-Davidson noticed what riders were doing to the machines they built and decided to cash in on it by offering a bike from the factory that resembled the machines people were building at home. In 1971 the Motor Company grafted a Sportster fork on an Electra Glide frame and created the Super Glide, an entirely new kind of motorcycle. I got my first Super Glide in 1972, and got my first Low Rider in 1977, after I got out of prison. It was great to have a bike that looked good right from the factory, but that didn’t stop us from modifying them even more. Most of my modifications during these years were to improve a bike’s performance. For example, I’d take the hydraulic disc brakes from Japanese bikes and mount them on a Harley.
    The Super Glide caused a stir, and it wasn’t long before other companies like Norton, Triumph, and then the Japanese companies—Yamaha, Honda, Kawasaki, and Suzuki—started offering bikes with similar style. People didn’t know what to call this new type of bike,