MotoBrief

Motorcyclist has a good interview with Scott Summers, who has been tapped to manage the BMW team in the Grand National Cross Country series through 2010. He seems pretty impressed with the G 450 X.

You never know what you’re going to find when you move. You start boxing things up and pretty soon you’re stumbling across stuff you’d forgotten about years ago. That’s what happened to Lee Sutton. An amateur motocross racer in the 70s, Lee uncovered a stash of photographs he’d shot during his time at the tracks of Northern California.

Unfortunately, about half the negatives were ruined. After all, in 1975 there wasn’t much for someone to do with a bunch of pictures like this. You could share them with friends — provided they lived nearby and you got together to have a look. You could submit the best of the best for publication somewhere. Or you could put them in a box.

Today, things are different. Lee picked out the best of the surviving photos and did what anyone would do — he uploaded them to a Flickr photoset. Within days knowledgeable fans had annotated the pictures with details and reminiscences of racetracks, riders and their machines.

I love the Internet.

Gizmag has an article on Dainese’s motorcycle airbag. It’s a revolutionary system — the high tech gear does not require a connection to the motorcycle like the airbag on the Honda Goldwing. Instead, accelerometers and gyros identify movement that looks like a crash and deploys an airbag stashed in the hump on racing leathers.

The idea of an airbag on a motorcycle has always struck me as kind of crazy, but the airbag has already been used in an actual race. It was used for the first time in the Valencia MotoGP 125cc world championship. Let’s go to YouTube for the action:

Teaching motorcycle safety classes, I’ve come across many people who think they understand how a motorcycle turns and are completely wrong.

Some people think that it’s about throwing or shifting one’s body weight into the corner to lean the motorcycle over. In fact, pressing forward on the handgrip in the direction you are turning — in other words, pressing in a way that causes your tire to begin to turn away from direction you want to go — triggers a complex mess o’ physics that’s way over my head because I copied Joe Smith’s answers in my high school Physics class.

The act of turning the tire away from the turn is known as countersteering. I suspect those people who argue that they lean with their body end up putting pressure on the inside handgrip and countersteering without realizing that it happens.

That was certainly the case with me. I’ve ridden from a very young age and was a reasonably competent rider. I didn’t have any problem leaning into a turn and holding my line. But I had a number of close calls where, at very low speeds, I needed to avoid clipping a vehicle or some other object and found myself squirming and moving my butt to the side. I’d squeak past, but just barely. And I couldn’t understand why I didn’t have better directional control in those situations.

It was only after I’d become an instructor — my first exposure to formal riding education — that I understood that in those panicked moments I was trying to turn my front tire away from the obstacle and that countersteering was sending me closer to it. What came naturally in a long, sweeping curve went out the window when I was thinking desperately about it.

This YouTube video does a fantastic job of showing how countersteering works and explains it in a way that even Mr. Cantwell’s worst “C” student can understand.

So I won’t get any Dakar this year — but a number of places have pointed out that the theme music used in the rally is available on the iTunes Store. I guess that’s something.

The music is by a Senegalese band called Wock and the song featured in Dakar promos and coverage is Sama Amie [affiliate link]. It’s really beautiful music and I’m glad I’ve found it.

Unfortunately, Wock appears to be on the BMG France label. BMG is one of those record labels trying to convince everyone that Apple’s actually the enemy and that the record label would have been happy to let you have reasonably-priced music downloads long ago if Apple hadn’t stood in the way.

This is the same Sony BMG that attempted to secretly install rootkits on customers’ PCs so they could restrict them from ripping CDs to digital format, but they’d prefer you forgot about that. So as far as I can tell, there’s no DRM-free version of Wock’s music available for purchase; BMG has declined to offer DRM-free downloads in the iTunes Store.

I bought the album anyway despite the DRM. It’s great music that evokes images of past Dakars while I wait for 2009.

With the Dakar cancelled, this YouTube video has been getting some new attention and a bunch of new comments. I’m still crushed from the cancellation and wondering what they’re going to do in the future.

Apparently, Chile & Argentina are angling to have the Dakar held in South America. Isn’t the Dakar all about Africa? Wouldn’t it be just another rally if were held anywhere else? I suspect relocating the Dakar would take away a lot of its allure and I’m betting that when A.S.O announces their plan for 2009 it’ll be focused on increasing security in Africa and planning for alternate routes in case of trouble.

The Jockey Journal points to some awesome footage of board track racing from the early 20th century. As the story goes, the footage was shot by the Czech importer of Indian motorcycles during a visit to the United States. This may or may not be accurate, since the story also claims it was shot at a board track in Daytona that never existed.

It’s remarkably good footage and includes some sidecar racing. These guys were real men — I can’t imagine taking a spill on that track. If anyone has any idea what track is really shown, leave a comment.

OK, I’ve been gone, spending all my time on a new job and on MotoBrief.tv. But the Dakar schedule is up and they’ve posted a YouTube video showing the entire route. The race begins January 5 in Lisbon.

Some members of the BMW-GS mailing list recently spoke highly of the Oregon Scientific ATC 2K Action Cam Flash Memory Camcorder. I may try one of these myself, since it seems an inexpensive alternative to the well-armored cameras from HelmetCamera.com. The ATC 2K quality doesn’t seem to be as good but it’s hard to draw any conclusions from highly compressed web video. Oregon Scientific has a site for the camera where you can check out some video yourself. I think it’s worth looking into for a self-contained unit costing less than $100.

Last Saturday the man responsible for the most famous motorcycle stunt in movie history died. Bud Ekins was an off-road racer turned Hollywood stuntman who doubled for Steve McQueen in the climactic motorcycle jump in “The Great Escape.”

Ekins was a legend and will be missed. But he’ll never be forgotten — I’m sure I’m not the only person who feels that the first 2 1/2 hours of “The Great Escape” is just an elaborate prologue to a movie about a guy trying to jump a motorcycle into Switzerland.

Bud Ekins was 77.