Performance Bikes.

[Kawasaki Jimbo]

After a couple of years hanging on in the back pages of Practical Sportsbikes magazine, Performance Bikes mag is no more. What’s interesting is the editorial confirms what I, and I guess most readers thought. It’s not even that sports bikes are unpopular, it’s that PB’s raison-d’etre, the modern flagships (210 hp Panigales, RSV4s… reigned-in by electronic safety devices*), are absurd as road bikes.

Shame about the mag’s demise, but it’s still quite surprising how many bike mags there are on the newsagent’s shelves.

*Elsewhere I read that Moto2 teams are abandoning throttle-by-wire in favour of throttle cables to give riders more feel.

I was looking at vintage bikes at the Shuttleworth museum near Biggleswade just yesterday and thinking I probably couldn’t ride some of them, I don’t understand the manual advance/retard, oil feed or whatever else some of those knobs and levers do.

[MCN]

[Easy-X]

[wr6133]

[GSTEEL32]

I can't say I'm not hugely surprised.

I recently stocked up on some early 90's editions of Performance Bikes and I can see why its gone by the wayside since.

The subject matter back then was much more diverse than it is now.

Four strokes, 2 strokes, GP reps, the early supermotards, the 600cc category, triumph making a re-emergence, the GP's filled with bat$hit crazy 2-stroke models, grey imports 400cc's, the naked category...,. plus, biking back then was a relatively cheap mode of transport available to all....

These days, I struggle to convince myself to buy a magazine because it has an "adventure" bike on the front... which they test in the "extreme" conditions of Balham and Clapham.

I feel now, the 125 category is as boring as watching Love Island. Superbikes are super duper, assuming you have a spare £20k for the entry level model. The 400cc category now has bikes which top out at 35hp, not 20,000 rpm. Bikes are judged on whether they have a USB, not whether they are actually a competent machine.

Plus ... group tests. There are none. Its become nothing more than a 4 page advert for the manufacturers, rather than the journo's telling it like it is.... anyone that's watched anything with Henry Cole can also see this methodology of blatant advertisement transfer to the TV too...

Its really the death of enjoyable leaner legal bikes that's killed it for me. If you never get the excitement as a teenager of riding and tuning a small bike for the sheer pleasure, why are you ever going to put yourself though the pain and cost of owning a much bigger bike ?

No sir, not for me....

[Kris]

Practical Sportsbikes is the new Performance bikes

The readership have got older, fatter and more inclined to twiddle in the shed rather than do 160mph down the bypass.

DiRE is a funny one. Used to be about a broad spectrum of bikes but now seems to represent the 55 year old adventure tourer rider who has a flip up lid and writes angry letters to the editor about how noisy bikes ruin his Sunday afternoons in the garden.


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NSR125RR - ZXR750H1 - ZX9R E1 - GSF600S - GSF600SK3 - VFR400-NC30 - SV1000N - ST1100-R - CBR900RR-R - GSF1200SK5 - GSF600SK1 - VFR1200FA - GSXR1000K2 - ZZR1400 D8F
www.prisonplanet.com

[Easy-X]

[wr6133]

[Polarbear]

[Nobby the Bastard]

Starting a black shadow must be a right giggle.
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trevor saxe-coburg-gotha:"Remember this simple rule - scooters are for men who like to feel the breeze on their huge, flapping cunt lips."
Triumph Sprint ST 1050

[ThatDippyTwat]