Let’s play chicken. 9/23/2006
You want to know what seperates the men from the boys in the biking world? Chicken strips. What’s a chicken strip, you may ask. It’s easily identified on any motorcycle, especially sports bikes. Just walk over to the rear tyre, look down, and check the thread.
You will see 3 main parts on the tread. A grey area around the middle, where the bike spends most of its time. A slightly darker area just after that on both sides, where the bike has been leaning. And then you have the famous chicken strip, right at the edge.
This is the unused portion of the tyre, where the bike has never gone before. The thinner the strip, the further the bike has been leaned over. This basically means the bike has been going fast round corners, which is really where the fun factor is, on motorcycles. Some bikes are more conducive to leaning than others, of course. A sports bike is designed to go all the way to the edge of the tyre, without grounding things out, i.e. where parts of the footpegs and stands start scraping the road, before running out of tyre thread. On a cruiser, it may even be impossible to take the lean angle all the way to the edge, since cruisers are usually low to the ground.
On a machine like the Silver Lady, or her “R” cousin, or even her elder sister, “Old School”, it is entirely possible to bring the chicken strip down to nothing, without ever touching anything else on the tarmac. Of course, on the road, it would be fool hardy to do so, since if you are on the edge of the tyre, your knee is already on the ground, and your elbow not far behind. It also means that your bike has nothing left to give, in terms of lean angle and traction. Which sometimes means a visit to the hospital.
So, for my road bikes, I tend to keep something in reserve. Which kind of explains the picture of the rear tyre of Bikebike II above.
So the next time you meet a biker next to his bike, and he starts bragging about how hot he is, take a discrete look at his tyres. You may find a large flattened spot in the middle, and virgin rubber on the sides. One thing you will soon notice is that the hot riders tend to be very quiet about how fast they’ve been going through corners. They prefer to let their bikes do the talking.