Tag: RX3S

A Note From Zuo

Timely, perhaps…with the reactions we received on our recent Nine Reasons You Should Ride A Chinese Motorcycle blog, I received a nice email from Sergeant Zuo, the man who led our ride across China a few short years ago.

大舅：

最近可好？我买了宗申RX3S，是老版的，排气量380cc，RX3已经8年9.6万公里了。我们国家的机动车有强制报废的规定，所以我还是再换一台摩托车吧，谁让我喜欢呢。RX3我就再怎么喜欢还得卖掉，因为我们小区车棚里我只能申请一个车位，所以还是给RX3找个喜欢她的人吧。

我们这里的疫情是好是坏，你们那里的疫情好点了吗？一定保护好自己。

有一个知道我和你是好朋友的朋友说过：“真正的中美友谊在民间。”我非常喜欢这句话，送给你。

随信寄去几张我的RX3S的照片。（我发给你的信和照片你怎么使用都行）。非常想念你，我的朋友！代我向你的爱人，家人问好，特别是你的几个孙子。

——— 左振义 2021.10.16 中国•兰州

What, you don’t read Chinese?  Okay, here you go:

Uncle:

How are you doing recently? I bought the Zongshen RX3S, which is an old version with a displacement of 380cc. The RX3 has been 96,000 kilometers in 8 years. Our country’s motor vehicles have mandatory scrapping regulations, so I’d better replace them with a motorcycle. Who makes me like it. No matter how much I like RX3, I have to sell it, because I can only apply for one parking space in our carport, so let’s find someone who likes RX3.

Is the epidemic situation here for good or bad? Is the epidemic situation there any better? Be sure to protect yourself.

A friend who knows that you and I are good friends once said: “The real Sino-US friendship is among the people.” I like this sentence very much and I give it to you.

Enclosed are some photos of my RX3S. (You can use the letter and photos I sent you anyway). Miss you very much, my friend! Say hello to your wife and family, especially your grandchildren.

——— Zuo Zhenyi 2021.10.16 China•Lanzhou

Here are a couple of additional photos that Zuo sent to us:

So there you have it.  That “uncle” business…I used to be a secret agent, you know, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and…nah, just kidding.  The Chinese named me Big Uncle and they called Gresh Little Uncle when we rode across China with them.  The Chinese words are Da Jiu and Ar Jiu (Big Uncle and Little Uncle) and the “jiu” parts sounds a lot like Joe, so it was kind of a natural fit.

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Want to ride with us as we crossed China?  Hey, it’s all right here!

The RX4

I first rode the first prototype RX4 in June 2015, which is really quite a ways back if you think about it.  I was in Chongqing to discuss things we were doing on the RX3 and the new RC3 model, a sports bike based on the RX3 engine.  The RC3 bike was stunning, but it suffered from a bad case of “me, too” (Honda, Kawasaki, and Yamaha all had credible 300cc sports bikes here in the US) and the RC3 just didn’t sell well when it reached our shores.  The RX3 was going great guns, though, and there was a cry for a similar bike with more beans.

Enter the RX4.

That first one was wild.  I remember standing out in the heat and humidity with the Zongshen folks snapping photos of the RC3 when a Zongshen engineer rode into our midst on what appeared to be a hacked-up RX3, smartly executing a stoppee that lofted the rear wheel 3 feet in the air, and coming to rest right in front of us.  This guy can ride, I thought.  In my younger days I had done stoppees like that, but not by design and they didn’t end the same way.

The bike was rough. It was an RX3, but somehow the Zongsters had shoehorned a prototype 450cc motor into the frame.  The engine was made of castings and machinings, and it looked (and sounded) very rough.  Telling me that they hadn’t worked out the mapping, my hosts asked if I wanted to ride the prototype.   Is a bear Catholic?  Does the Pope poop in the woods?  Hell, yeah, I wanted to ride it.   I couldn’t talk about the bike in the CSC blog at the time, and that was probably a good thing.  It didn’t run well, and the handling was, well, let me put it this way:  Imagine you’re drunk as a skunk and you’re wearing stiletto heels, and you’ve got to walk across a rocky stream bed through swiftly-flowing water.  In my checkered past, I’ve done two of those three things, and I don’t need to try the stiletto heels thing to imagine what the combination would be like because I rode that first prototype RX4.  It was that bad, and I told the Zong folks what I thought.  They smiled politely.  They knew.

Passport in pocket, standing in the rain with an RX4 in Chongqing about a year or so ago. The GS decals had to go, I told Zongshen…others can advertise their “Go Slow” ADV bikes with big GS decals. Thankfully, they’re gone.

A year or two later I was in Chongqing again, and I rode an RX4 that was closer to what the production bike would be.  It was a much more refined machine.  Heavier than an RX3, most definitely.   Faster?   I really couldn’t tell.  It was raining and I was on the Zongshen test track, which is a tightly wound affair with topes and no straights tucked away on the Chongqing manufacturing campus.   It felt a lot better than that first prototype, but I really couldn’t let ‘er rip because there wasn’t enough room.  I also saw a clay mockup of the RX3S (the 380cc twin) in the Zongshen R&D center, a bike I just couldn’t understand. Again, no photos allowed, but it made no matter to me because the RX3S was a solution to a marketing problem that didn’t exist.

Singing in the rain on Zongshen’s tight test track.

That brings us to today and the production configuration RX4 I am picking up later this afternoon.  Or maybe tomorrow.  It depends on when Joey has it ready.  It’s going to be interesting.  I’m flattered that CSC wants my take on the bike, and that they want me to write about it with no preconditions on what I can and cannot say.

Like I always say, folks:  Stay tuned.