I love motorcycles. That should be obvious, given that I work for this magazine. Still, it’s worth stressing the point. When I’m not haring around the country looking for interesting driving destinations, you will find that my grin is at its highest wattage when I’m astride a bike, preferably a very large, loud one. I developed a passion for two wheels relatively late in life, and the ones that I salivated over most were the big cruisers. Sure, sportsbikes were incredibly cool. You didn’t ride them so much as merge into them until, as the cliché goes, ‘man and machine were one.’ They blitzed you to speeds that blurred your vision and made your eyes water. They howled like irate banshees and pointed out cloud formations at the slightest twist of the throttle. You could lay them almost flat on their sides and still go around corners at triple digit speeds. Hard men like Mick Doohan and Kevin Schwantz did things you wouldn’t believe were possible on them. Then, of course, there were trail bikes. Small, mischievous and, dare I say it, almost cute. Sounding like a bunch of mosquitoes, with funky knobbly tyres, these were the bikes on which you did fairly irresponsible things, like standing on the seat while 20 feet in the air.
And then (drum roll, please) there were the cruisers. Hee-uge, gleaming hunks of metal and enough chrome to cover a truck. Big, fat pipes that made you squint when the sun shone on them. Tyres so broad you almost didn’t need to put your feet down at the lights. A mother of a V-twin engine (a cruiser isn’t a cruiser without a V-twin, the Rocket III be damned). Seats that caressed your behind. A thundering ‘braaap’ of an exhaust note. Above all, an attitude that drawled ‘Whaddaya lookin’ at, ya runt?’ Yes ladies and gentlemen, these, above all, were the bikes that I gazed at in magazines and hoped one day to ride. These were m-o-t-o-r-c-y-c-l-e-s.
You can then imagine how I reacted when asked ‘Hey, you want to take the Drag Star for a spin while you’re in Delhi?’ I beamed. I positively high-jumped with glee. I distributed cigars and champagne. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, terribly excited. Not half as excited, mind you, as I felt when I rolled up to Yamaha’s plant in Faridabad and was confronted with the machine itself. It had been a while coming, because the bike had had to be readied for me, but boy, the wait had been worth it!
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