Italian Excellence from Motorsport to road
Every people has its music. Every tribe its song. Ours just happens to be the sound of a motorcycle vapourising the remains of ancient lizards and firing the resultant gases out of a sex-cannon.
I have always been a strange and cursed thing. A creature driven by base emotions and primitive pleasures – pleasures which other people do not see as pleasures at all. Rather, they behold what makes me happy, and wonder how I managed to escape from whatever lunatic-minding facility was dumb enough to leave the door unlocked.
Let me give you an example. Some years ago, a magazine I wrote for was given an MV Agusta to review – a very special MV Agusta.
Only 300 of them existed, and one of them, Number 187 from memory, found its way into the hands of this magazine’s editor, the redoubtable Ken Wootton.
Ken called me an hour after he got it. It was Friday afternoon, and in the magazine business, Friday afternoon was not an afternoon when editors called other editors to discuss anything more complex than which pub they were going to.
“Come down to the garage,” Ken said. “I have something to show you.”
“Are you going to take your pants off again?” I sighed. “That’s getting kinda old, and the lighting does not flatter Mr Happy the way you imagine it does.”
Published in Bike Me!, MCNews.com.au, Caradvice.com.au, Red Dirt Diaries, Bikesales.com.au, Smiths Lawyers, XbHP (India), Auto Action, Australian Motorcyclist, Heavy Duty, Ozbike, Live to Ride, Australian Motorcycle News, Road Rider, Kiwi Rider, Two Wheels, Just Bikes, Motorcycling NSW, Top Gear, Wheels, Menace 2 Society, Australian Worker, Zoo, Penthouse, The Picture, People, Motorcycle News (England), Ralph, FHM, Street Machine Choppers and Motorcycle Legends.
Podcast: MotoPG – We See Dead People
Books published by Hachette: My Mother Warned Me About Blokes Like Me and At The Altar Of The Road Gods.
Book published by Shock & Awe Publishing: The Wisdom Of The Road Gods.
It was an F4 750 Senna. And it was the most beautiful bike I had ever seen. It was also, at the time, the fastest 750cc bike in the world, and possibly the angriest. Forged Mahle pistons, and a reworked combustion chamber carved from the deepest hatred produced a vicious 137bhp, which thanks to a modified eprom, allowed the maniac to redline at 13,900 rpm, rather than the less brutal 10,500 rpm of the milder S Evo 02.
The Senna was actually a selfless act of pure altruism.
Claudio Castiglioni had created this bike in the name of his good friend, Formula 1 legend, Ayrton Senna, as a charitable act to assist Mr Senna’s most worthy and eponymous charity, the Instituto Ayrton Senna, which had been set up to help the impoverished children of Brazil.
And it had a full race-exhaust system fitted to it.
“Give it to me,” I said.
“You can only have it for one night,” Ken replied.
“That will do,” I breathed. “That will do.”
That evening, a mate and I rode down to the Colo River Bridge on the legendary Putty Road. It was a deliciously warm and gentle late spring evening, and the road was empty, except for the two of us. Not many people go riding on the Putty Road at night because of the werewolves, but they have never scared me.
My mate and I parked up on the other side of the bridge, and then took turns belting the race-piped Senna up and down the wickedly winding section that leads down to the river…over and over and over.
And we did this just so we could listen to the Senna shrieking its savage concerto at the night. He would do it and I would giggle like an idiot, then I would do it and he would giggle like a similar idiot. I also giggled when I was riding it, revving it as hard as I dared so the scream from its four-into-one-into four exhaust system would be branded forever onto my primitive brain.
I didn’t even care that the headlight was so shit, a single mis-step would have seen me smeared on the river valley’s sandstone cliffs like a crappy rock-painting.
That noise…that sound, that brilliant primal and mechanical music, was all I wanted to hear.
Never forget who you’re dealing with
Thus has it always been for me. I have never owned a bike with a stock exhaust system. Even on the few occasions when I have had the means to buy a new bike, it did not leave the dealer with a stock exhaust.
“How about you run it in first and then we’ll put a pipe on it?” one Triumph salesmen said to me when I bought my first Speed Triple.
The fool must have imagined he was talking to a reasonable person.
“How about you stop making strange sounds and shapes with your mouth, get on the phone and make sure that pipe is here and fitted and ready when I pick the bike up on Monday?”
The sound a bike makes is a relentless and almost genetic imperative for me. It has to sound…well, right. Not just loud for the sake of loud. The noise it makes has to be right. When you open the throttle the sound has to hit that sweet-spot in your brain that tells you, and the girls watching you, that you are a man of power, quality, and taste – as defined by the symphonic threnody of your exhaust note.
In the case of the Senna, it was a vicious shriek that could have come from the very bowels of some demon-filled, medieval Hell. But depending on the engine configuration, you can also make an exhaust thunder like a mountain collapsing into a volcano.
When I bought my first Harley Shovelhead, I was determined to fit upswept fishtails to it. To my crazed mind, it was not a proper outlaw bike until it had 24-inch apehangers and upswept fishtails on it. Yes, the Eighties had some funky shit going on pretty much everywhere you looked.
So I bought the fishtails, fitted them up with swearing, four litres of Loctite, and a kilo of gasket goo, and fired the finished product up. It sounded like shit. Instead of the booming staccato artillery barrage I was expecting, I got this flat, slapping sound that reminded me of wet towels being rapidly whacked against a wall.
The pipes looked the business – all antisocial, one-percenter, chromed-up barrels of shark-finned bad-arse pointing nastily at the sky…but they sounded like crap.
And so looks were quickly sacrificed to the God Of Righteous Noise, and some fat straight-throughs of the proper tuned length were sourced, fitted, and I was a happy man – though much hated by my long-suffering neighbours.
I had learned that a great-sounding exhaust had to be more than just a fashion statement. There were a lot of factors at play – even in the days of carburettors. Things like exhaust length, exhaust diameter, back-pressure, and a myriad other crucial features all had a role to play in providing me with a suitable song for my people to hear.
In today’s high-tech motorcycle world of fuel-injection, engine maps, self-learning ECUs, and exotic materials, the quest to find the right song is even harder. Especially when you factor in the always prevalent jack-boot of government, and the survival of polar bears.
I have already written a piece about how the Australian government is more obsessed with noise than it is with emissions. Hence its cherry-picking through the very comprehensive European regulation ECE R41 (instead of adopting it in its entirety) and creating Australia’s very own ADR83/00. You can check out this article to learn more about the bureaucracy of noise compliance and the clown-car that governs us.
But the search for an exhaust system that sounds great and looks terrific – and let’s face it, if it looks like crap it doesn’t matter what it sounds like, does it? – is every motorcyclist’s prime directive.
It also pays dividends, in terms of not being Tasered by the side of the road, to be aware of the different types of symphonic sex-cannons you can fit to your bike.
SC-Project offers you two levels of aural pleasure. This is because SC-Project is one of those professional high-end exhaust manufacturers that understands both what the government requires, as well as what the customer demands.
So you can get a road-legal sex cannon, which passes all the tests. Or you can get a full-on, Ride of the Screaming Valkyries experience and fit one of the track-use-only pipes.
And for my money, no other system looks as trick as the SC-Project stuff. It terms of sexy sex-cannons, these are the bomb.
Road or track – the choice, as it should be, is yours. As will be the endless visual and aural pleasure you’ll get from fitting one of these bad boys to your bike.
Because the song of our people is a beautiful song, full of power, passion, and venom. And it demands to be played. So play it well. Make sure it looks PORN and sounds HORN!
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