After the Accident

So there I was, two months after the accident; talking to a stranger in his empty driveway, standing on crutches; talking about his motorcycle, while a friend of mine rode it around the block with the insurance settlement burning a hole in my pocket. It was a 1988 Honda Hawk 650GT, which I remembered reading about in bike magazines when they debuted in that year. The reviews stated that it was an extremely good handling motorcycle. It suffered from the fact that it was severely underpowered, with a small v-twin motor, but that it cost as much as the Suzuki GSXR 750, which was then the ruler of the Sportbike roost.

In fairness, it cost so much because it had much that was exotic at the time. The frame was a large twin-spar aluminium perimeter one, and the swingarm a large box-section aluminium one which was single sided. This was very trick at that time, and from the right side of the bike, the tire appeared to just be floating there. The front brake had a single disk, which was fine because the bike was so compact and light. The stiff frame meant that the suspension could be well tuned, since it flexed, and not the bike. In any case, the bike remained an undiscovered gem. In consequence, Honda didn't sell very many of them, and North American production halted after two years. In fact, a lot of them were left on dealer shelves, still in crates.

Then a funny thing happened: The gem got discovered. Racers across North America happened upon the bike, and realized that the only thing wrong with it was the gutless engine, which was easily remedied. The bike was stiff and light, had excellent suspension geometry, and could be made to handle really, really well. You can make a slow bike faster, but you can't make a pig dance like a ballerina. This baby could dance.

A Kingston fireman who raced a Hawk in the Professional classes, and who I bought a bunch of parts from, asserted to me that his (highly tuned) Hawk was good for a win or top three finish in BOTT (Battle Of The Twins) racing, a top ten finish in Open Superbike, or a top five finish in the rain. This was against the most powerful and fastest bikes racing in Canada, and solely because of its superior handling. He advised me to stick with the stock front end and single disk; as he had fitted a GSXR front end with dual disks to his racebike, and couldn't prevent the rear end from rising as much as a foot off the ground on every corner entry, when he was hard on the brakes. He dryly noted that this caused considerably more excitement than he was looking for. Mind you, that was on an extremely fast and heavily modified (incl. larger engine capacity) Hawk GT, wearing racing slicks, and it was highly unlikely that I would be experiencing that particular combination.

The gentleman that I bought that bike from happened across a Hawk that sat for three years at a dealership in Thunder Bay, and bought it for a good price. He rode it for two years before deciding to upsize to a Concours (interestingly enough), which was a bike model that I already had my eye on as well. I benefited from his good fortune, and drove away with a bike that I would be unable to ride for at least another month, secured in the back of my pickup truck.

When I began to ride the Hawk, I quickly realized that it was the best-handling bike that I had ever owned. As I rode it more, I began to realize that it was the best handling bike that I had ever ridden. When I analyzed the accident, I kept coming back to one inescapable conclusion: Reaction time. If I had only used ¼ second to analyze the situation and reacted, rather than ½, I might have been able to (just) squeak ahead of the car's front bumper and avoid the impact entirely. Yes, I'm estimating the elapsed time, but that's not really the point: I had done all of the right things, but the next time I had to be able to do them quicker. This meant that I had to become better. This meant that I had to get advanced training.

More to come...