At noon on Saturdays, a motley assortment of motorcycle aficionados meets up in a garage in San Francisco. They get to work completing their latest modifications, installing new brake rotors, upgrading shocks, replacing gas tanks, mirrors, fairings. Then they take their Triumphs, Ducatis, Suzukis, etc. out for test drives and shootouts on the deserted access roads to the south of the city. This is the work of Inline Performance Magazine, and work is good. Sometimes, we’re even organized enough to take photos.
This is only my third weekend with IPM. The first had been a mock-shootout between my ’06 Shadow and a crazy Soviet-era MZ Skorpion. The second weekend, we fitted an ingenious device beneath the nose of a 675cc track bike in the hopes of eliminating all front-end wobble. This weekend, I have no idea what is in store – so you might understand my extreme glee when IPM’s editor announces an impromptu shootout between the mag’s 2008 Triumph Street Triple and a brand new Aprilia Shiver, courtesy of the goodly motorheads over at Scuderia.
First, we had to go pick up the Shiver, which meant photographers Dan, Jon and Paul, hopped into a Subaru and figured out directions while I began getting acquainted with the Street Triple. Ignition, display, engine cutoff switch, clutch, brakes, signals. Short wheelbase, very light. Hyperactive throttle. Pipes that make you feel like you’re red-lining at all of 4000 rpm. It was a completely uneventful ride down to Scuderia – and that was just fine by me. They say that in an emergency, you can only handle three or four tasks at once. Well, just between my two hands and a completely unfamiliar shifting pattern, I had more than enough to worry about.
Down at the dealership, we fill out paperwork while one of the younger reps, Abby, brunette, gives us the run-down on the Aprilia Shiver. “Now, she is not broken in,” she says for the first of fifty times. “The bike only has two miles on her. Her tires are new. I can’t stress this enough.” Before walking off to process our insurance, she explains the root of her concern: somebody had gone for a test drive on and promptly dropped the very same model bike just the day before. I mean, the Shiver is a pricey machine, in all of its 750cc, ride-by-wire dual overhead camshaft V2 glory. But dropped? Knock a thousand bucks right off the MSRP. No wonder the hesitation. You’ve gotta have a big heart to leave $9,000 in the hands of a pack of yahoos like us. Luckily, Scuderia and IPM are on a first name basis!
Out behind Scuderia, we find a couple alleys covered in amazing graffiti, so we decide to take the Triumph and the Aprilia out back for some photos before the shootout. There’s one wall adorned with a massive, stylized skull, which more or less meshes with the spirit of the naked sportbike, so we stand them up on the curb in front of it and let Dan, our photographer, go to work.
Standing beside each other, the Street Triple and the Shiver are night and day – despite their similar price tags. The Triple’s 675cc inline three cylinder engine versus the Shiver’s brawny 750cc V2 illustrates plenty, but why stop there? The Shiver is plainly a bigger bike. She’s tall and jaunty, even with the slimming effect of her “Competition Black” paint job. She measures in with a 4.29in (109mm) trail and 25.7-degree rake, compared to the compact Triple’s respective 3.75in (95.25mm) and 24.3 degrees. The Shiver’s wheelbase is 1.79 inches longer than the little Triple’s, and though I’d later swear it wasn’t so, the Shiver also weighs 50 lbs more. She’s big enough that a rider who measures in the 6′-6’2″ range doesn’t feel cramped – and that’s a rarity indeed.
It may also be worth noting that, brand new, she’s pretty argumentative when it comes to shifting to neutral; and neutral is the only gear in which you can thumb the bike’s ride-by-wire throttle over from “touring” to its sport and rain settings.
Although, come to think, Abby specifically prohibited us from doing anything of the sort.
Over the next hour, we drove the bikes around a couple hundred meters of deserted warehouse parking lot with Dan snapping photos and Jon rolling with a handheld digital camera. It is a lot of fun, and I’ll err against blathering on and on about what you need in order to have this kind of fun (an M-class license, insurance, a good set of protective gear, free weekends, miles of trust, more insurance) and simply say that I look forward to these weekends with an unhealthy degree of anticipation! The Shiver handles very, very well – new tires and all – and it doesn’t take long to get comfortable carving around the parking lot debris and drainage grates. Having signed over my firstborn to Abby that I’d keep the tachometer under 6,000 (like I said, more insurance), we don’t get as full a look at the Shiver as we’d have liked… but we definitely got a look. I’m sure she’s worth the price tag, but this is a machine that belongs in a different class than the hooligan Street Triple. I don’t get the same urge to devour the pavement, to haul ass across the city,to zip, zoom, weave and eventually succumb to the pull of the ego-inflating engine of self-destruction.
The Aprilia Shiver is a shiny beacon to the more responsible among us, and unlike the Street Triple is surely deserved by the more reckless. On it, I want to tackle the Pacific Coast Highway at inadvisable speeds, to attack the bucking roads leading south out of Monterey. Maybe this one gets chalked up to taste.
Look out for the full article in our second annual print issue in the near future! Stay tuned!
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