Antique & Classic Cars Blog

Had lunch with a friend today who finally parted with his Honda sport tourer.  He’d owned it since new and had reservations about lettin’ the ol’ gal go (–ol’ beautiful, fast, responsive, fun gal.)

The buyer ultimately made the decision easy and underscored the reason you sell valuable goods with a cashier’s check, not a personal one. He showed up a couple weeks ago when there wasn’t quite snow on the ground, but still frost and cinders and the usual hazards. My friend, let’s call him Lance, said, “you wreck it, you bought it.” Most sport-bike sellers adopt this policy because of how easy it is to turn Slim Pickens aboard an errant missile.

Lance’s driveway has a puddle at the bottom of it, about which he warned the speed-hungry buyer. The warning did not improve the buyer’s willpower. He got to the end of the driveway,  pointed the bars left, and cracked the throttle with the rear tire in the puddle. The tire did what friction-limited rubber always does when you throw too much juice at it–it broke loose, and since the front tire wasn’t in front of it, the rear end kicked out and bike and rider pinwheeled across the road.

Shaken, scraped and wobbly, he apologized to Lance. “No problem,” my astute friend replied. “It’s your bike.”

Seeing it all scraped up eased the whole post-partum issue, allowing Lance to watch the new owner ride off with bent bars and clutch lever, loved-one-who-saw following him in the family car.

This story brought to you by Doh!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 20th, 2008 at 8:49 pm and is filed under Motorcycle tales. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.