Very nice tour this year – I got a new (30 year old) Yamaha GTS 1000, which doesn’t sound or look as neat as my old Moto Guzzi V7 but it’s a) much faster b) more comfortable, and c) doesn’t have random parts falling off of it. Well that’s not quite true, a plastic panel near the windscreen fell off while going over a slight bump at *some speed* but that’s nothing compared to the Guzzi which has previously lost exhaust pipes, battery covers, and on one occasion its ignition key switch.
The only downside is that with the Guzzi I could come out of a slow corner with wide open throttle and go through the gears and still come out under the speed limit. If I do this on the Yamaha I’d end up traveling at approximately the speed of sound.
The Yamaha GTS is a bit weird in that it has a fork-less front suspension more like a car, which is supposed to increase stability in fast corners. And it has other things that bikes didn’t usually have at the time, like ABS and electronic fuel injection. But it also cost as much as a VW Golf when it was new, so nobody bought it.
Well, the future was here, briefly, in 1994.
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