Riding the Dark Side

I have been riding motorcycles for most of my adult life. They have all been smaller machines except for my last one: a Triumph Rocket III. It used to be that a 1200 cc Harley Davidson was as big as you could get. Bigger is better, nodded the Harley crowd At 2300 ccs the R3 is nearly double displacement--bigger than many small cars, and comes with 140 horepower. If that won't do it for you, upgrades are available that will boost performance as far and fast as you and your wallet want to take it. The beast is powerful enough stock that its onboard computer will not permit maximum throttle in first or second gear to keep neophytes from winding upside down with 800 pounds of motorcycle on top of them. It also will not allow the bike to exceed 140 mph. I haven't felt the need to test this but I accept the word. The only comment I hear from Harley rider's now is that the R3 is too big. I guess anything bigger than a HD is too big. Oh well. It's OK to ride little motorcycles--it really is. I got burned out on replacing the rear tire on the R3 every 3 to 4000 miles. The huge rear Metzeler the Rocket was designed around is expensive and I can think of better things to do than groveling on the ce-ment floor of the shop removing/replacing the big wheel & tire. The bike is so huge, I sprung for an after market center stand to hold it up while I remove the muffler and axle and slip the worn out tire off the final drive (made by the same company that builds Maserati transmissions) and drive the wheel into town for new rubber. I had heard of people riding larger motorcycles on car tires on the back wheel. I got on the net and found a whole raft of posts of people riding Rockets with car tires. "Riding the Dark Side," it's called. One R3 rider had a video camera taped on the handlebars of a chase bike filming him as he rode through various curves and straight stretches. Another rider wired a camera underneath his R3 so you could watch close up how the car tire performed as he put it through its paces. There seemed to be a general consensus that once you ride on a high performance car tire, you'll never go back to making Mercedes payments for the managers at Metzeler. Anyhow, the last Metz rear tire sprang a slow leak and I had the option of paying forty dollars to have it repaired so I could take it off again in a thousand miles to be replaced--or just buy a new one. That does it. I went across the street to America's Tire Co and bought a cheap 225/50/16 inch directional car tire. Some of the people who posted on the Dark Side subject used bigger tires but I wanted to start out small. The gang at the Triumph shop cheerfully mounted and balanced the tire for less than they wanted to fix the leaky M 880 Marathon. I rode around on the new tire for a while and decided that while it wasn't as good as the high dollar Metzeler for road racing, it was superior for cruising on the highway. After I decided that there was nothing tricky about riding the Dark Side, I took my girlfriend for a ride as my wife was in Florida. I aimed for bumps in the pavement to see if the square shouldered car tire would grind on the inside of the fender. No problem. I might consider a 225/60 16 next. In over 1000 miles there is no perceptible wear on the directional car tire. I fully anticipate getting 20,000 miles before replacing it just to be safe. You can get longer, stronger rear shock/spring assemblies for an R3 if you need more clearance and I might do this if the larger tire rubs on bumps two up. At any rate, I have decided don't fear the Dark Side. N