Name: Steve Walker
Age: 68
Home: Mountain Center, CA
Occupation: Triumph restorer

On a late October morning, Mods and Rockers again gathered at a seaside resort town for an epic event. But this wasn’t Brighton Beach in the 1960s; it was Fort Lauderdale 50 years later. Mods and Rockers in South Florida? Why not—it’s the second-largest motorcycle market in the country after Southern California; it’s just known more for blinged-out choppers and sportbikes than cool café racers. The annual Mods vs. Rockers Rally has proven to be a fantastic gathering of motorcycles and scooters that highlights South Florida’s nascent vintage scene.

Rider: John Dolman
Then: High-school junior
Now: Retiree

I am a dedicated denizen of Craigslist and other online motorcycle classified sites. It’s not that I’m in the market for any more motorcycles—my garage is already at critical mass. Instead, I enjoy perusing ads for the sublime pleasure of becoming one with the secondary motorcycle market. Maybe it’s for the adrenaline jolt that comes from spotting a bargain-priced Ducati or a rare Bimota. Maybe it’s my fascination with the motorcycle market’s ebb and flow. Classifieds are the nexus where motorcycle buyers and sellers connect. Ads offer a broad spectrum of opportunities: occasional bargains as well as blatant rip-offs. Bike adverts also have their own culture, mores and lexicon, most of which gracefully dance around the theme of “Please come and buy my pile.” Here are some simple translations of common phrases you’ll encounter as you glide through the classified ads:

Whenever my wife Colleen ventures into my motorcycle world, there’s always a period of adjustment. I operate with a highly refined sense of style and cost, most of it rooted in the Depression Era I so sadly missed. Each trip she has to re-learn that the piece of twisted metal and scrap we are riding is not trash, but is, in fact, a valuable motorcycle.

What is riding technique? And what makes a technique successful? Is riding just a composition of good or bad technique, or is there something more basic?

These things, they say, take time. So often it seems that planning goes on forever. Analysis paralysis becomes the SOP.

Name: Leon Stanley
Age: 50
Home: Trenton, NJ
Occupation: Owner, Cycle Icons

It was hot that morning at Indian Dunes. The August sun ignited the scent of the brush that lined the riverbed near the track. The reigning big guns were out of town, giving us rookie Experts a chance to prove we were worthy of our recent promotions to the elite level of open-class warfare. This was our day, and nothing was going to spoil it for us … until I read the lineup for our race. Penciled in under my #23 was #24, Steve McQueen.

There's really just one update left about my Dakar Racing experience, but it's a biggy- I finished the 2012 Dakar!

The Long Island Sound is an estuary of the Atlantic Ocean that separates the New York suburbs from Connecticut. But in another sense, the Long Island Sound might be the music of Billy Joel. While many famous musicians have come from Long Island (Harry Chapin, Mariah Carey, Blue Oyster Cult and The Ramones, to cover the full range of genres), none so strongly personifies the stereotypical Long Islander. Billy Joel has a Brooklyn accent, expertly employs the New York Alphabet and sings songs about blue-collar, working-class folk. When Shea Stadium (1969 Mets forever!) was slated for demolition in 2008, it was Billy who hosted the farewell concert. He is to Long Island what Bruce Springsteen is to New Jersey.

Last year at the Milan show Honda introduced a new range of middleweight crossover motorcycles that prioritized practical fun over outright performance. American Honda announced today that one of these three new bikes-the adventurous-looking NC700X-is coming to America for 2012. Powered by an all-new, 670cc parallel twin engine with either a 6-speed manual or optional auto-shifting Dual-Clutch Transmission (DCT), the NC700X represents a new breed of versatile, user-friendly two-wheeled transportation. And with a base price of just $6999, the cost of entry might be the most accessible part.

On Any Sunday

Got an update from Ned finally!

It’s as true today as it was four decades ago: On any Sunday, there’s some kind of motorcycle competition going on somewhere in the world. But the movie inspired by this idea did more than document the phenomenon; it changed the way the public at large thought about the sport.

Rider: Billy Joel
Then: The Piano Man
Now: Piano-playing owner of 20th Century Cycles

I love broken motorcycle parts: holed pistons, shattered gears, twisted connecting rods. You can’t buy these in stores; you have to earn them one at a time, often as they come flying out of that fresh hole in your engine case. Some of these treasures are the result of motor development gone horribly wrong. Some arrive in the brief moments after an oncoming Prius turns kamikaze and drifts into your lane. Some parts take many miles to clap themselves to oblivion. My own personal accumulation of butchered bike bits includes the following:

Ned update from Stage 9

KTM’s new Moto3 engine was unveiled just as the FIM released full details of the class rules. The Austrian company’s engine is a purposeful new design, but it’s also a fairly conventional effort in the face of the radical cost-cutting nature of this 250c four-stroke class that is replacing the 125cc two-strokes.

I completely understand that you’re going to give me that ticket. You took my license, registration and insurance, and now you’re handing those back to me along with a little extra piece of paper, informing me that an agent of the state officially accuses me of inappropriate behavior on public roads. I’m not going to give you any blowback about that, but spare me your canned lecture.

January 8th, 2012: Rest Day

January 5th, 2012: Dakar Stage 5
Today was a reasonably early start but nothing crazy early. We had a bit of a tighter time allotment to get across the liaison section to the start of the timed special section. The way it works is you’re given a start time to leave the bivouac or pits where you slept. When you leave, they give you a set amount of time to get from the pits to the start of the special stage.

Before the ink dried on the first issue of Pacific Motocycling in 1912, the Isle of Man TT was already the world’s most prestigious motorcycle race. The inaugural Tourist Trophy was held in 1907. The event originally welcomed cars and motorcycles, but for the first four years bikes competed on an abbreviated circuit because they weren’t able to climb Snaefell Mountain. Motorcycles didn’t race the full, 37.5-mile Mountain Course until 1911, when event organizers, in an attempt to force motorcycle manufacturers to develop new technology, mandated that all race entrants must tackle the mountain.

A decade before some British hooligan stripped the bodywork off his balled-up sportbike to create the first streetfighter, a pair of Australian filmmakers went the other way, transforming naked standards into post-apocalyptic superbikes. And the results were no less badass.

January 3rd, 2012: Dakar Stage 3