Originally Posted by S-Dot
I certainly do! Every day.
Stress != sporting, and stress != fun. Why needlessly add stress in the vehicle you do you use to commute or get groceries? For better subjective "feel" on the track? If we're lucky, it might spend 1% of it's life being really tested. Should the attributes of the 99% be sacrificed for slight improvement in "feel" in the 1%? In a daily-driver sedan?
If we were concerned only with the 1%, we would all be commuting in Ariel Atoms. Surely anything less is a compromise.
So maybe I don't know sporting. I am just a girl.
In the late 80's I raced what was then called "Open Class" motorcycles - for me that was a heavily modified GSXR-1100 (the first generation of the machine), lapping primarily at Shannonville, but occasionally at MoSport, and one trip a year to Race City in Calgary. I preferred Calgary, which is a counter-clockwise track, and I could always get lower and more sideways turning left for some reason. The bike was a beast to control, brutally peaky power, harsh suspension that wanted to buck you off, twitchy steering that was prone to speed-wobble every time the front wheel touched down, and other assorted "eccentricities". I spent half the time in the pits trying to get four Mikuni smooth-bores to sing the same tune. They never did.
Fast-forward to today. I could grab pretty much any 600 super sport off the shelf, scrub in the tires, and run as fast or faster on the track. WAY less stress, and WAY more fun. In fact, I'd say filtering out the stress purifies the fun.
To suggest that the new bike is "less sporty" because it has better suspension, steering, chassis, geometry, power delivery, etc is nonsense. It does everything the old bike could do, but it does it with ease, and with much less protest.
That you "hate the way the new car drives" is a subjective argument, not quantitative. Everyone has their own preferences. But to suggest it's because it's less "sporty", well that argument doesn't hold water. It feels different from what you would prefer, or you may say that it feels less sporty to you, but because it out-performs the old model, one cannot accurately state that it is less sporty.
As an aside, I have to question how serious any magazine is taking thier editorials when they track one vehicle in "max performance" summer tires, and the other in spongy all seasons.
|