In my hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, football season is under way. For locals, this means a period of near-religious fervor, characterized by empty roads on Sunday afternoons and grown men painting their faces black and gold. Area-wide worship of the Super Bowl Champion Steelers has also affected the local motorcycle market in ways no one could have anticipated a year ago. But since then, Steelers' quarterback Ben Roethlisberger made national headlines for crashing his 2006 Suzuki Hayabusa into the front end of a car that made an illegal left turn into his path. The city staged candlelight vigils in his honor as the team's future hung in the balance. The injured QB was lucky enough to survive the accident with a concussion and a few broken teeth, despite riding without a helmet. In the end it was the Hayabusa that took most of the blame, emerging as the unofficial Devil Machine That Almost Ruined The Steelers.
But instead of learning from Roethlisberger's mishap, a number of riders in these parts are now determined to emulate Mr. Touchdown's safety-averse riding habits. Steve Stiller, a veteran motorcycle salesman with over a decade in the business, seldom finishes a week on the showroom floor without some novice asking for "a bike just like the one Big Ben was riding." Oftentimes, the requests come from riders with little or no streetbike experience, Stiller says. By his estimate, nearly 50 percent of the big-bore sportbikes that leave his shop come back on trailers a few weeks or months later. As a result, he says there are few long-term sportbike enthusiasts in his shop's database. "They only want a really fast bike, and when they crash they move on to personal watercraft or a fast car or a set of golf clubs. These guys scare themselves so quickly, very few of them stick with riding for long, and that's a shame. They'd become lifelong enthusiasts if they'd only start off on smaller motorcycles, working their way up to a big bike in a few years," he said.
And in this bigger-is-always-better mind-set, the Hayabusa reigns supreme. With local newscasters offering endless, breathless accounts of the 'Busa's reputation as the world's fastest production motorcycle, owning one has become a veritable badge of manhood for a lot of inexperienced riders. There's crazy props to be had from riding the same bike the city's star quarterback rides.
The problem is, the Hayabusa is one badass machine-kinda like Ray Lewis with more attitude. Its soft, voluptuous lines and quiet, sewing-machine exhaust purr may seduce the inexperienced and the foolhardy into thinking this beast can be easily tamed, but initial impressions can be deceiving. As Roethlisberger and plenty of Stiller's customers have learned the hard way, a 160-horsepower, 550-pound streetbike has ways of making fools out of its rider not even a 260-pound linebacker can imagine. It takes discipline, training-read: track days-and putting in the miles on smaller, less-exhilarating motorcycles to master something as potentially life-altering as a liter-plus sportbike. Unfortunately, in today's world of instant gratification, few new riders are willing to heed such advice.
"If I sold Hayabusas, I could retire right now after how many people have come in and asked for them," said John Bergman, owner of West Hills Honda, located just outside Pittsburgh. Bergman routinely attempts to dissuade all but his most-seasoned customers from buying the fastest sportbikes on his showroom floor, but it's a quixotic task at best. One customer who hadn't ridden on asphalt for the better part of 20 years was recently talked down from a 150-horsepower CBR1000RR to a 100-horse VFR800F Interceptor. He promptly high-sided the Interceptor leaving the shop's parking lot.
Short of throwing a major penalty flag in the path of American riders by adopting horsepower limits for beginners as is the norm in the U.K., Japan and many European countries, the motorcycle industry had better come up with some solutions to the big-bike crisis. Sure, there's the bottom line to consider, but off the record, some dealers and salesmen say the OEMs need to make entry-level bikes more attractive. Others say it's time to prohibit 100-plus-horsepower bikes from being sold to those under a certain age or experience level. We motorcyclists can consider ourselves lucky that Big Ben survived his blitz by a left-turning car, leaving the mainstream media to fish for more frightening villains than the Hayabusa. But one more serious accident involving a high-profile public figure and a high-performance motorcycle, and it may be the non-riding public that decides what we get to ride.