Philip Fibiger

Last Sunday I went for a ride with a guy I met through So-Cal SV Riders. He has a SV650 he was considering selling (he is too tall for it), and I was thinking about buying one. Rather than just head over to his place for a quick test ride, We agreed to take a ride together, and we’d swap bikes for a bit. We met up in Santa Monica, and then took off up the PCH to Malibu, where we stopped for a cup of coffee. A 15 minute stop turned into 45 minutes or an hour, as we ended up chatting with a salty-dog old rider who is trading in his Ducati 748/996 homemade bike for a CR450 based Supermotard. Anyway, when we finished we switched keys, and took off from the Coffee Bean.

I was having a blast. This bike was everything my GS500 wasn’t. It was smooth and powerful, making gobs of torque pretty much everywhere in the powerband. I was grinning like an idiot. After a ride down Malibu Canyon, I hung a left onto Piuma, a very tight and slow road, with tons of low speed hairpin turns. I flipped up my visor and told my riding companion to be careful, since it was a tough road, and then we took off. A couple minutes up the road, we came to a really tight right hand turn. I went into the turn slow and then got on the gas coming out of it. Coming out I heard a weird metallic noise. I thought to myself “that can’t be the guy i’m riding with, he’s too far back. I hope his motorcycle didn’t just make that noise.” I looked back in his mirrors and there it was, my motorcycle, lying helpless in the road.

The rider was fine, his leathers left him with merely a scrape on his thumb. My bike wasn’t quite so lucky. In addition to all the scraped up parts you’d expect, the front brake lever was snapped off and the right side engine cover was smashed up. We righted the bike and started it up. It ran like crap, but I did manage to limp it home, relying on engine braking, my nearly nonexistant rear brake, and a healthy dose of caution.

The problem with riding an inexpensive old bike is that it’s often more expensive to repair than the bike is worth. The guy I was riding with couldn’t have been cooler about what happened, and we worked out a deal where I’d sell the bike on ebay, and he’d write me a check for the difference between what it sells for and the value of the bike, pre-crash. So after a week of commuting to work in a car (man, that is a nightmare), and with the trusty old GS up for auction on ebay, it was time to find a new ride. I ended up finding a 2000 SV650 in great shape in Koreatown, and I absollutely love it. I can’t imagine ever getting rid of this bike.