BeemerMonkey's Ramblings

Bub Bonneville Speedtrials Pix... Finally

2007-10-08T11:58:00.001-07:00

OK, I've finally gotten around to getting the few pictures I took at the Bub Speedtrails event at the Bonneville Salt Flats. There's not nearly as many pictures as I intended to take. Either of the trip out, or of the event. On the trip out, I just didn't feel like stopping to take pictures, and at the event, to be honest, there was just not that much all that interesting to take pictures of. At least not as far as snap shots go. I mean, if I had wanted to get all artsy and set up "interesting" pictures, that would have been one thing. But it was too darn hot to want to do that. Anyway, below are a few of the more interesting things to look at.

Here's Tron (That's what I'm starting to call my 1983 R65LS) sitting in the middle of no-where on HWY50. While something like a brand new K1200S would have made this trip faster, maxing out at like 90MPH makes you look around a little more.

Another view of the above scene... I'm not sure why I always end up taking lonely looking pictures like this. Maybe because that's kind of why I like to ride... To get out and experience fairly wide open spaces with no one else around...

Obligatory shot of Tron next to the official Bonneville sign. Keep in mind that to actually get to the event, it's about 5 miles on the salt. The salt is not nearly as smooth as it looks in pictures. Riding out to the event after the pavement ended it was like riding on the moon. Craters, pot-holes, etc. everywhere. My Krauser bags were still on the bike, and as I had yet to stop at the hotel, were still full of my stuff. I thought for sure that they were going to bounce right off the mounts. Or perhaps my entire bike was going to just rattle itself to death and fall apart. Thankfully nothing happened more severe than my Pringles getting turned into dust...

Here's a panorama shot of the entrance. Yes, the seam joins are crap because I was too lazy to get my tripod out, so it was handheld. Still gives a little idea of the kind of expanse it is out there even before you get to the salt.

Here's an artsy-fartsy color version of the above image.

Here's Tron parked next to BMW corporate's expansive hospitality booth. If you squint really hard you can see it. It's the white one that you can hardly tell is actually even a BMW tent.

The above two shots are of the Confederate Motorcycles Wraith. Definitely one of the coolest looking bikes I saw out there.

A couple of speedy scooters...

This was, in my opinion, one of the coolest, baddest looking bikes out there. It's from Krugger Motorcycles.

No idea who's, or what, this bike is, but I thought it just looked pretty cool.

The above are a few shots of TheCrucible.org's bio-diesel powered BMW. Not quite a BMW motorcycle as it actually has a 2L diesel engine from a car and the rear-end of a BMW motorcycle.

Pretty sweet looking Vincent...

An even faster and wilder looking Vincent!

No idea...

San Jose BMW's insanly fast airhead R100.
Like, stupidly, "how in the hell did they do that" fast...

A few shots of the folks from MaxRPM and MaxMoto working on Andy Sills's K1200S. Sadly the engine was just not up to the task and died an early death on the salt. Hopefully next year BMW will throw some genuine support Andy's way and give him a bike he can set a record with (or at least have complete and tested before the actual event...).

Well, that's all for now. Come back in a week or so and I hope to have some pics of our Fall open house. Or at least a bunch of the umbrella girls... :)

World's fastest two-wheeled french fry!

2007-09-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

I'm obviously back from Bonneville, and just as obviously I have yet to get my pictures off my camera or to write about my experience. I've been on the road pretty much the whole month, most recently returning from Las Vegas where the Shop.Org Annual Summit was taking place (all the better to learn me something new to make our website more better).

While I was gone, this cool little bit popped up in my Google Alert for "BMW Motorcycles" about the folks at The Crucible and their astounding bio-fueled Die Moto.

I saw this thing in person, and the pictures on their site do not do this thing justice.

Check out the cool Die Moto page on The Crucible site to learn more!

Advertising And Other Design Stuff

2007-08-31T17:53:00.001-07:00

For you poor souls that live outside of our immediate area and are deprived of having your mailbox (atoms as opposed to bits [OR]) filled with our wonderful direct mail campaigns, I present here some of our more recent pieces, as well as some other semi random design stuff.

I really like this one. It went out at the height of the whole "how high is gas gonna go?" thing earlier this year. The 8-ball is totally Photoshop. Nice and shiny!

I thought this was kind of clever...

This is a "flyer" post card for our monthly in-shop party / gathering. We originally were just calling it a "Garage Party" but then we got a call from the Evil Motorcycling Empire and one of their minions informed us that they hade trademarked that term. First, it was astounding that someone at their corporate HQ knew we existed, let alone were "stealing" their IP.

I kid you not... Some moron at the US Patent and Trademark Office actually allowed two totally common words put together in a totally obvious sequence to be trademarked! I personally wanted to leave it as Garage Party, hope they sued us and issued a bunch of press releases about it... I love free PR. Oh well. So we used a German version of the same idea and voila! I guess that this one is better anyway.

This was the infamous Girl Scout Cookie HotDeal promotional banner... Talk about polarizing! Some thought it was totally funny (the intent), some thought it was in bad taste, and more than a few folks didn't even notice out sexy troop leader behind the bike! Talk about not seeing the forest for the trees!!!

This was a mailer for our last Spring Open House. Our most successful event to date!

This was a mailer to a general motorcycle/Cycle World list. Just trying to get people to realize that there's a lot more to BMW Motorcycles than just RT's and GS's.

Another massive design job. The entire knife is done from scratch in Photoshop. The idea was that the BMW is a "tool" to have a good time, and there is a huge variety of options when you choose a BMW. We did a giveaway of a pretty nice multi-tool knife to anyone that brought the card in and took a test ride. We've still got a few knives left if you want to come in and take a test ride!

K16 Wallpapers

2007-08-31T17:21:00.001-07:00

Here are some (I think) pretty cool wallpaper images for your PC of the new BMW 450cc dirtbike currently known as the K16. Enjoy!

Song Of The Sausage Creature

2007-08-31T13:23:00.000-07:00

As I started thinking, "Hmmm... I run the site, I'm creating blog spaces on our site for our team, maybe I should have one. So now that I have the site up, what should I write about?

The first thing that popped into my head was to present one of the coolest motorcycle stories around. Hunter S. Thompson's Song Of The Sausage Creature.

I love HST [1] [2]. Or at least I love the stuff he wrote, the way he wrote it, most of his points of view, etc. etc. You know that question that always gets thrown around, "who's somone living or dead that you would like to have dinner with?" HST would be way up on the list.

I finished reading Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream again about a month ago, so his voice (shrill, shrieking, half-mad) is still echoing a bit somewhere in the back of my head.

Song Of The Sausage Creature was first published in March 1995 issue of "Cycle World" magazine. It's pretty much available all over the web but for convenience, I'm offering it up here for your personal edification. Along with a picture of Mr. Duke and a lovely interpretation by Mr. Ralph Steadman [1] [2] (Someday when I have a job that actually pays more money than I need, I want to own some of Steadman's art...). Without further adieu:

Song of the Sausage Creature
by Hunter S. Thompson

There are some things nobody needs in this world, and a bright-red, hunch-back, warp-speed 900cc cafe racer is one of them - but I want one anyway, and on some days I actually believe I need one. That is why they are dangerous.

Everybody has fast motorcycles these days. Some people go 150 miles an hour on two-lane blacktop roads, but not often. There are too many oncoming trucks and too many radar cops and too many stupid animals in the way. You have to be a little crazy to ride these super-torque high-speed crotch rockets anywhere except a racetrack - and even there, they will scare the whimpering shit out of you... There is, after all, not a pig's eye worth of difference between going head-on into a Peterbilt or sideways into the bleachers. On some days you get what you want, and on others, you get what you need.

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."

"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."

The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5000-foot straightaway is one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.

But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest decreasing-radius turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.

Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix of low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.

I am not without scars on my brain and my body, but I can live with them. I still feel a shudder in my spine every time I see a picture of a Vincent Black Shadow, or when I walk into a public restroom and hear crippled men whispering about the terrifying Kawasaki Triple... I have visions of compound femur-fractures and large black men in white hospital suits holding me down on a gurney while a nurse called "Bess" sews the flaps of my scalp together with a stitching drill.

Ho, ho. Thank God for these flashbacks. The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth into it). Some people hear Tiny Tim singing when they go under, and some others hear the song of the Sausage Creature.

When the Ducati turned up in my driveway, nobody knew what to do with it. I was in New York, covering a polo tournament, and people had threatened my life. My lawyer said I should give myself up and enroll in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Other people said it had something to do with the polo crowd.

The motorcycle business was the last straw. It had to be the work of my enemies, or people who wanted to hurt me. It was the vilest kind of bait, and they knew I would go for it.

Of course. You want to cripple the bastard? Send him a 130-mph cafe-racer. And include some license plates, he'll think it's a streetbike. He's queer for anything fast.

Which is true. I have been a connoisseur of fast motorcycles all my life. I bought a brand-new 650 BSA Lightning when it was billed as "the fastest motorcycle ever tested by Hot Rod magazine." I have ridden a 500-pound Vincent through traffic on the Ventura Freeway with burning oil on my legs and run the Kawa 750 Triple through Beverly Hills at night with a head full of acid... I have ridden with Sonny Barger and smoked weed in biker bars with Jack Nicholson, Grace Slick, Ron Zigler and my infamous old friend, Ken Kesey, a legendary Cafe Racer.

Some people will tell you that slow is good - and it may be, on some days - but I am here to tell you that fast is better. I've always believed this, in spite of the trouble it's caused me. Being shot out of a cannon will always be better than being squeezed out of a tube. That is why God made fast motorcycles, Bubba....

So when I got back from New York and found a fiery red rocket-style bike in my garage, I realized I was back in the road-testing business.

The brand-new Ducati 900 Campione del Mundo Desmodue Supersport double-barreled magnum Cafe Racer filled me with feelings of lust every time I looked at it. Others felt the same way. My garage quickly became a magnet for drooling superbike groupies. They quarreled and bitched at each other about who would be the first to help me evaluate my new toy... And I did, of course, need a certain spectrum of opinions, besides my own, to properly judge this motorcycle. The Woody Creek Perverse Environmental Testing Facility is a long way from Daytona or even top-fuel challenge-sprints on the Pacific Coast Highway, where teams of big-bore Kawasakis and Yamahas are said to race head-on against each other in death-defying games of "chicken" at 100 miles an hour....

No. Not everybody who buys a high-dollar torque-brute yearns to go out in a ball of fire on a public street in L.A. Some of us are decent people who want to stay out of the emergency room, but still blast through neo-gridlock traffic in residential districts whenever we feel like it... For that we need Fine Machinery.

Which we had - no doubt about that. The Ducati people in New Jersey had opted, for some reasons of their own, to send me the 900ss-sp for testing - rather than their 916 crazy-fast, state-of-the-art superbike track-racer. It was far too fast, they said - and prohibitively expensive - to farm out for testing to a gang of half-mad Colorado cowboys who think they're world-class Cafe Racers.

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. My neighbors called it beautiful and admired its racing lines. The nasty little bugger looked like it was going 90 miles an hour when it was standing still in my garage.

Taking it on the road, though, was a genuinely terrifying experience. I had no sense of speed until I was going 90 and coming up fast on a bunch of pickup trucks going into a wet curve along the river. I went for both brakes, but only the front one worked, and I almost went end over end. I was out of control staring at the tailpipe of a U.S. Mail truck, still stabbing frantically at my rear brake pedal, which I just couldn't find... I am too tall for these new-age roadracers; they are not built for any rider taller than five-nine, and the rearset brake pedal was not where I thought it would be. Mid-size Italian pimps who like to race from one cafe to another on the boulevards of Rome in a flat-line prone position might like this, but I do not.

I was hunched over the tank like a person diving into a pool that got emptied yesterday. Whacko! Bashed on the concrete bottom, flesh ripped off, a Sausage Creature with no teeth, fucked-up for the rest of its life.

We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always Pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on our tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear.

No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.

On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4000 rpm....

And that's when it got its second wind. From 4000 to 6000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.

I never got to sixth gear, and I didn't get deep into fifth. This is a shameful admission for a full-bore Cafe Racer, but let me tell you something, old sport: This motorcycle is simply too goddamn fast to ride at speed in any kind of normal road traffic unless you're ready to go straight down the centerline with your nuts on fire and a silent scream in your throat.

When aimed in the right direction at high speed, though, it has unnatural capabilities. This I unwittingly discovered as I made my approach to a sharp turn across some railroad tracks, saw that I was going way too fast and that my only chance was to veer right and screw it on totally, in a desperate attempt to leapfrog the curve by going airborne.

It was a bold and reckless move, but it was necessary. And it worked: I felt like Evel Knievel as I soared across the tracks with the rain in my eyes and my jaws clamped together in fear. I tried to spit down on the tracks as I passed them, but my mouth was too dry... I landed hard on the edge of the road and lost my grip for a moment as the Ducati began fishtailing crazily into oncoming traffic. For two or three seconds I came face to face with the Sausage Creature....

But somehow the brute straightened out. I passed a schoolbus on the right and got the bike under control long enough to gear down and pull off into an abandoned gravel driveway where I stopped and turned off the engine. My hands had seized up like claws and the rest of my body was numb. I felt nauseous and I cried for my mama, but nobody heard, then I went into a trance for 30 or 40 seconds until I was finally able to light a cigarette and calm down enough to ride home. I was too hysterical to shift gears, so I went the whole way in first at 40 miles an hour.

Whoops! What am I saying? Tall stories, ho, ho... We are motorcycle people; we walk tall and we laugh at whatever's funny. We shit on the chests of the Weird....

But when we ride very fast motorcycles, we ride with immaculate sanity. We might abuse a substance here and there, but only when it's right. The final measure of any rider's skill is the inverse ratio of his preferred Traveling Speed to the number of bad scars on his body. It is that simple: If you ride fast and crash, you are a bad rider. And if you are a bad rider, you should not ride motorcycles.

The emergence of the superbike has heightened this equation drastically. Motorcycle technology has made such a great leap forward. Take the Ducati. You want optimum cruising speed on this bugger? Try 90mph in fifth at 5500 rpm - and just then, you see a bull moose in the middle of the road. WHACKO. Meet the Sausage Creature.

Or maybe not: The Ducati 900 is so finely engineered and balanced and torqued that you *can* do 90 mph in fifth through a 35-mph zone and get away with it. The bike is not just fast - it is *extremely* quick and responsive, and it *will* do amazing things... It is like riding a Vincent Black Shadow, which would outrun an F-86 jet fighter on the take-off runway, but at the end, the F-86 would go airborne and the Vincent would not, and there was no point in trying to turn it. WHAMO! The Sausage Creature strikes again.

There is a fundamental difference, however, between the old Vincents and the new breed of superbikes. If you rode the Black Shadow at top speed for any length of time, you would almost certainly die. That is why there are not many life members of the Vincent Black Shadow Society. The Vincent was like a bullet that went straight; the Ducati is like the magic bullet in Dallas that went sideways and hit JFK and the Governor of Texas at the same time.

It was impossible. But so was my terrifying sideways leap across the railroad tracks on the 900sp. The bike did it easily with the grace of a fleeing tomcat. The landing was so easy I remember thinking, goddamnit, if I had screwed it on a little more I could have gone a lot farther.

Maybe this is the new Cafe Racer macho. My bike is so much faster than yours that I dare you to ride it, you lame little turd. Do you have the balls to ride this BOTTOMLESS PIT OF TORQUE?

That is the attitude of the new-age superbike freak, and I am one of them. On some days they are about the most fun you can have with your clothes on. The Vincent just killed you a lot faster than a superbike will. A fool couldn't ride the Vincent Black Shadow more than once, but a fool can ride a Ducati 900 many times, and it will always be a bloodcurdling kind of fun. That is the Curse of Speed which has plagued me all my life. I am a slave to it. On my tombstone they will carve, "IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME."

About Me

2007-08-30T17:34:00.000-07:00

This post is a little about yours truly...

I've been working here at A&S since Feb. of 2004. I currently run the websites (A&S BMW Motorcycles and A&S Powersports) run Marketing/Advertising, handle a lot of other little technical tasks, as well some other general business process analysis and design issues (especially as they relate to the internet operations and the parts and accessories department).

How I ended up here at A&S is kind of a wild story. Sort of a testament to you can't always get what you want, but if you try, sometimes, you get what you need...

I had worked as a sales engineer for a number of interesting (yet doomed) internet related companies during the dotcom bubble years. (If you are insanely bored, or are looking to stalk me and want a head start on the leg work, check out my LinkedIn Profile). I was a moron in that I always seemed to be working at companies that had really cool technology, but were essentially run by monkeys; thus my options, bonuses, etc. always ended up being worthless and I never got to see what it was like to retire as a 30 something millionaire (I did however get to find out that the myth of lying around and sucking at the teat of unemployment insurance was complete and utter B.S. When you get it, it's an insanely small amount, and then even then it runs out in like no time!). As opposed to some of my friends that worked at companies that essentially had totally lame or boring technology, but were run by (smart : lucky : shifty) folks that managed an IPO or other equity event and cashed out.

So fast forward to the middle of the dotbomb crash. I'm unemployed and living in the Bay Area surrounded by all these other dotcom refugees that were also out of work. My wife was a recruiter at Visa (which has its HQ on the peninsula (San Mateo, CA)) so I knew first hand that there were folks with stuff like an undergraduate degree from Harvard and an MBA from Wharton that were willing to take $50K a year jobs because they were out of work for over a year and were desperate. It was ugly. So I did what anyone else with any internet related technical skill did and start doing freelance work.

Once again, totally ugly. Like, standing on the exit ramp holding a sign that said, "Will create websites for food." OK, not really, but it seemed like it.

My wife and I had been married for about a year at this point. We eventually both came to the conclusion that it was just not worth fighting the Bay Area fight any more. Houses were stupid expensive. The job market was dead. She was tired of working at her job. So we decided to just bail.

We thought about moving back to MI where I grew up, but one winter trip killed that idea. Nancy would never survive the winters there. So we started looking at the Sacramento area (considering it's 104+ outside right now, I'm not sure I'm going to survive many more summers here). It was still close to her family and the houses had not yet gone through the roof (as was later the case because of the exodus of the aforementioned well-heeled Bay Area refugees). Sold her condo, took that money, as well as the money from the sale of my condo that I sold when we got enganged, and bought a place in the Sacramento area. We moved with no jobs, and no real plan beyond just making a change. Total blind leap. We always relied on the back up position that in the worse case scenario we would just work at Home Depot or In & Out Burger. Thankfully she landed a pretty decent recruiting job at a local phone and communication company (Surewest) soon after landing.

I started doing the freelance marketing, design, advertising, and web thing. I started a little firm called FoxDot Marketing and Design and managed to get some decent work. But as anyone that does freelance stuff knows, it's very feast or famine. You have a great gig, then that gig goes away and you need to find the next gig. I decided I didn't like that anymore.

So I started kind of poking around for something else to do. For one reason or another my wife and I ended up at a sportsman's/boat/RV show in Sac. One of the vendors there was A&S BMW Motorcycles with their big trailer and a bunch of bikes. Now it had been a number of years since my last riding days (more on that some other day) but I was still really into motorcycles. I figured, "what the hell, maybe there's something there I could do?" As fate would have it a few days later I happened to see a post on craigslist that A&S was looking for a parts counter person.

Now as I had since passed the days of caring about becoming millionare by the time I was 30, and had decide that quality of life (lack of stress, etc.) was more important than money as long as I made enough to get by and worked doing something I liked, I figured I go in and see what happened (which is an important consideration as there is apparently very little money to be made at the retail level of the motorcycle industry). It was quite a leap... I had not worked at, let alone considered, a retail job since Junior High School. This was going to be an interesting experiment.

So I get hired on the parts counter. Jeff Hanrahan, then the Parts Manager, notices that my resume sort of indicated that I could probably be more valuable doing something a little different that sitting on the parts counter.

A&S was batting around the idea of redoing their website. The platform they had built on was totally not designed for the volume of products, volume of business, nor the way that that our business needs to be organized. They had already plunked down the cash on their next platform so I was essentially tasked with rebuilding their new site. This involved a pretty comprehensive review of the way that the system should work, and the equal and opposite fact that this new platform pretty much was horrible and not only didn't do what I needed it to, but the stuff that it was supposed to do typically didn't work very well, if at all.

So fast forward through a lot of blood, sweat, tears, as well as copious deleted expletives, and now A&S is the proud owner of the single largest BMW Motorcycle focused e-commerce website on the planet. We've managed to more than double business every year since the new site came online. We've been at the top of Google for pretty much every BMW Motorcycle related search for years. We're the phenomenally large fish in a very small pond. But hey, success depends in large part on how you measure it!

An interesting by-product of my work here, as well as my past experience, is that I have the opportunity to write a monthly column on e-commerce for DealerNews which is the leading trade publication for the motorcycle and powersports industries. Pretty interesting because this is one industry that the internet, as well as most modern information technologies seems to have forgotten! More on that some other day I suppose.

So that's a little blather about me, what I do, how I came to be here, etc.

Stay tuned for more riveting information and insight!

Getting Ready For The Desert

2007-08-28T12:29:00.000-07:00

My first post on my brand spanking new blog is about my pending ride across NV to attend the BUB Speed Trials in Wendover NV. BMW is throwing down some cash on some pretty cool events there, mainly because Andy Sills (Mr. High Speed BMW) is going to be running a pretty intense turbo-charged, chain-driven K1200S to attempt to set yet another record.

If you ride a BMW, get signed up on BMW's XPLORE site for more cool stuff!

This will be the first long ride on my R65LS. I've done a few weekend rides of around 200-250 miles, but this is going to be the long one. Just got my valves done to make sure they can handle the NV heat. Turns out the exhaust valves had almost no clearance, so it was a damn good thing I had them done (as opposed to melting down on the side of the road in NV and getting to meet some buzzards up close and personal!).

I'm taking my sweet time to get there so I can hopefully get some good/interesting pictures out there in the desert. Check back in a week and see if 1) I made it there and back again, and 2) I actually stopped to take any pictures.

I'm sure I'm going to come away wanting to move to the desert. Every time I go to the desert I want to move there. Even though I hate the heat... Go figure. I'm complicated like that.

I also just bought a new pair of BMW's Airflow II Boots. My feet will thank me I'm sure. Airflow II's are like armored flip-flops! :)