Default To No

After I made a particularly snarky Facebook comment regarding some newfangled electronic rider aid, a former editor sent me an email asking why I always slag off electronic controls. He asked if I had ever ridden a motorcycle equipped with traction control, wheelie control, engine power selector toggle or one built after 1971.

Usually my emails run to the “Are you still here?” variety so instead of my stock comeback (“Catterson’s hair is prettier than yours”) I played it straight. The truth is, I haven’t ridden a modern, electronic superbike. But it seems whenever new technology comes along my default mode is “No.” I have a hard time making the junky old motorcycles I habituate ignite fuel, why add complications?

There’s no sense having me ride a modern superbike because it takes skilled crashers…I mean riders to determine if the buffering of the improved, Datacom-7734 chip inside a Yamiguchi ECU has really increased corner exit speeds a hundredth of a second, or perhaps Ducatazzi’s PMS 7724 chip is more like butter?  We’ll never know because I accidently connected the battery backwards and fried the circuit board.

It’s not that I don’t like going fast, it’s just important to me how I get up to speed. I blame my Luddite ways on HO scale slot cars. Long ago, when a steady hail of meteors bombarded the earth, kids raced slot cars. The track was a two-slot, snap-together, plastic roadbed. Plated-metal rails paralleled each slot; these metal rails supplied low-voltage power to the cars via a driver-controlled rheostat.

Underneath the slot car chassis was a guide peg that fit into the track and spring-loaded contact brushes (on Aurora cars) or troublesome foil brushes pivoting on the slot assembly (on the much faster Tyco cars). These brushes conducted the rail power to a tiny electric motor. Untold hours were spent modifying the little motors and experimenting with different brands of tires. My friends and I spent many enjoyable hours racing against each other and the physical limitations of the system.

Since the rails in the track were plated steel, one of our tribe came up with the bright idea of gluing a magnet to the car’s frame to help hold it onto the track. Straight line speed suffered but cornering speed increased dramatically. Overnight, the worst driver of a magnet car could easily beat the best driver of an un-magnetized car. If one magnet was good then two had to be better. Magnets kept going lower until thin sheets of paper were used as a shim to space the magnets as close as possible to the rails.

The cars got faster. Aurora itself cut away the frame and lowered the motor magnets in their vertical-shaft HO cars to take advantage of the steel rails. The final iteration saw a dropped-motor Aurora with huge, front and rear mounted magnets nearly scraping the rails. This car could run upside down if you cared to build an upside down track. Driver skill, once the most important factor in our races, was extinct; all one had to do was hold the rheostat wide open. Soon the rheostat was unnecessary and we hard-wired the track for full power all the time.

The cars were incredibly fast. It was hard to keep them in sight as they blazed around, gripping the track so tightly the plastic corners would shift as they flew through them at top speed. The cars never jumped the slot.

It wasn’t long before we tired of racing and built ramps to jump the cars. From there things devolved into smashing the cars headlong into walls, then to pouring lighter fluid on the Auroras and setting them on fire to see how long they could circuit the track ablaze.

I loved slot car racing but making it foolproof turned it into that detestable thing: boring. In his email, my old editor told me a modern 1000cc sport bike would be nearly unrideable without the electronic aids. I believe him. So far active-electronic motorcycles still require rider skill to pilot at race speeds but the future looks grim. As for me, unless an electronic aid drastically improves my riding experience I’ll keep defaulting to “No.” I love motorcycling too much to risk losing interest.