About once a season I appear as a guest on RevZilla’s Highside/Lowside podcast, and it seemed a good fit this month when the topic was sport-touring motorcycles. Is the sport-touring category dying? Or evolving? What makes a bike a good sport-tourer, anyway?
Those were some of the topics we covered, myself along with the regular hosts, Spurgeon Dunbar and Zack Courts.
I think a lot of people have the impression (and to be honest, I did, too, until I looked more closely) that the traditional sport-touring motorcycle is dying off. By “traditional sport-touring motorcycle” I mean models that are essentially either a sport bike made more comfortable and capable for travel or a big touring machine made lighter and more nimble. Either way, the goal is to have a supremely competent bike, the kind you’d choose if you had to ride across the Great Plains but still wanted to enjoy the curves in the beautiful roads of the Rocky Mountains when you arrived.
In the car world, we saw people buying SUVs because they needed to carry stuff (or a family’s complement of kids) and didn’t want to be seen in a minivan. Then they realized they didn’t need the off-road suspension of an SUV and crossovers became popular. There’s been a similar shift in motorcycles, as many riders drifted to adventure-touring motorcycles instead of the traditional sport-tourer. Then, because most of those riders don’t go off-road, in recent years we’ve seen the emergence of bikes that have the stance of the adventure-tourers but no off-road pretense. They’re clearly aimed at road use only, with 17-inch wheels and suspension tuned for the street. I’m talking the Ducati Multistrada models, the Kawasaki Versys 1000 SE LT+, the Yamaha Tracer 9 GT, etc.
Some consider my 2014 Honda VFR800 Interceptor to be the classic sport-touring motorcycle, striking a balance between performance and comfort.
It’s easy to think those bikes have replaced the traditional sport-touring formula because they get all the attention, as the newest entries. My Honda VFR800 Interceptor, which many consider a prime example of a classic sport-touring motorcycle, is no longer sold, for example. When you look past the headlines, however, you find that a surprising number of traditional sport-touring motorcycles are still on the market. I name half a dozen in the podcast.
Those are some of the topics we cover in the discussion. For many of us who don’t go off-road, the sport-tourer is the epitome of motorcycle competence, combining comfort and convenience with performance, and often still looking good in the process. If that sounds like your thing, check out the conversation.
