Alright, here is what gets me about every bike in this bo...
“Alright, here is what gets me about every bike in this book: not one of them had to be that good. A motorcycle is just a way to get from here to there. That is the whole job. You could do it with something ugly and cheap and slow, and it would still count as a motorcycle, technically. But that is not what happened here. Not even close. Take the Honda NR750. In the late 1970s, Grand Prix racing rules said you could only run four cylinders. Honda wanted eight. The rules said four cylinders, but they did not say what shape the pistons had to be. So Honda built oval pistons. Each one shaped like a bar of soap, essentially two pistons fused together, running eight valves per cylinder and two connecting rods per piston inside a four-cylinder block. It was the most expensive, most complicated way to technically follow a rule while completely ignoring what the rule meant, and only Honda would have tried it. The racing program was a financial disaster. The oval piston bike was unreliable, slow to develop, and never won a single Grand Prix. Any normal company would have buried the whole thing and moved on. Honda spent a decade refining it instead and released the NR750 as a street bike in 1992, with titanium connecting rods, carbon fiber bodywork, a full LCD dashboard that was years ahead of the industry, and a price tag of $50,000. That was more than a brand new Corvette the same year. They never even officially sold it in the United States. Honda found a loophole, spent millions exploiting it, lost every race, and then turned the technology into one of the most exotic street bikes ever produced. Nobody asked them to do that. They just could not stop themselves. Now look at the Britten V1000. John Britten built the most innovative motorcycle of the 1990s in a shed in Christchurch, New Zealand, with a small group of friends and a budget that would not cover the catering at a factory racing team's annual meeting. The V1000 has no frame. Let that sink in. The engine is the chassis, with the front and rear suspension bolted directly to the engine cases. The bodywork is carbon fiber. The wheels are carbon fiber. The connecting rods are titanium. He designed his own fuel injection system and built an onboard computer to log engine data when most racing teams were still running carburetors. The whole bike is roughly 6,000 components, built by hand, and it weighs 304 pounds. He took it to Daytona and beat every factory-backed team in the world. No sponsor. No factory. No budget. Britten died of cancer at 45. He asked his team to build ten bikes total, and they finished them after he was gone. Ten machines. That is it. None of it makes sense. And all of it matters. Then there is the Ducati Superleggera V4. The entire chassis is carbon fiber. Not just the bodywork. The chassis. Frame, subframe, swingarm, wheels, all of it. When it came out it was the only street-legal motorcycle on earth with its entire structure made from carbon fiber. If a bolt could be titanium, it is titanium. If a cover could be magnesium, they made it magnesium. Ducati's engineers were not saving pounds. They were saving grams, shaving fractions of an ounce off parts that were already lighter than anything in production. The result is 224 horsepower in a bike that weighs 350 pounds dry, sitting in the same weight class as a middleweight 600 while making more than double the power. Ducati built 500 of them at $100,000 each, and every single one sold. Yeah. All of them. Now think about this. You would never look at any of these machines, with their titanium connecting rods and hand-built components and carbon fiber everything, and say that just happened on its own. Come on. You see that level of detail and you know somebody designed it. Somebody obsessed over it. So why would we look at ourselves any differently? We are way more complex than anything in this book. Way more dialed in than any engine Honda ever dreamed up, any component Britten ever built by hand, any frame Ducati ever shaved a gram off of. God did not build people on a budget. He did not stamp us out to a spec and move on. He made each person on purpose with that same ridiculous, way-more-than-it-needed-to-be kind of care. And He proved it. When we had run our own lives into the ground, God did not walk away. He came down here and paid the whole bill Himself. Jesus died in our place, taking the punishment for every sin, every mistake, every stupid decision we ever made, just so He could pay our debt for us. So He could make us new again. Make us into something He could be proud of. That is not just a good deal. That is the God who made everything looking at something the world wrote off and saying, no. This one is worth everything to me. So when one of these bikes stops you dead and you cannot figure out why, pay attention. Nobody had to build it that well. And God did not have to come after you, either. But He did.”
Summary
The provided sources all discuss the bicycle book *It’s All About the Bike* by Robert Penn and contain no information about the Honda NR750, Britten V1000, or Ducati Superleggera V4. Consequently, none of the passage’s claims about those motorcycles are confirmed by these sources.
Sources 58 searched
- It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn | Book review
Robert Penn's account of seeking out components for his perfect "steed" will convince you never to buy another off-the-peg bicycle, writes Tim Lewis
- It's All About the Bike by Robert Penn (Ebook) - Read free for 30 days
Each chapter covers one cycle part (wheels, tires, frame, etc), and in this way the reader learns the history of the bicycle part by part. Plus you get to see the culmination of all that history as you meet people working in the industry today.
- It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®
Robert Penn has saddled up nearly every day of his adult life. He rides to get to work, to bathe in air and sunshine, to travel, to go shopping, and to stay sane. He's no Sunday pedal pusher.
- It's All About the Bike: The Pursuit of Happiness on Two Wheels by Robert Penn | Goodreads
Given the quality of the writing, though, I don't think it matters how many other works in this style exist. Here's the story of a man who has been riding bicycles most of his life.
- Cyclopedia: It's All About the Bike by William Fotheringham | Goodreads
Is road-race-focused, so lots in here on Mercx, Armstrong (this is a 2009 book), and Coppi. Contains articles on other cycling-related sporting events, too, and the technology, but mostly racing. ... Perfect accompaniment for tour de France. Easy to read with fantastic facts and figures.
- It's All About the Bike Summary of Key Ideas and Review | Robert Penn - Blinkist
It's All About the Bike (2010) by Robert Penn is a captivating journey exploring the world of bicycles and what makes each one unique. Here's why this book is a delightful read: Packed with fascinating anecdotes and historical facts about bikes, it offers a deep dive into the cultural significance and craftsmanship behind these two-wheeled machines.
- Welcome to N-1 - by James Huang - n-1
But what I have gotten very good at over the last twenty years is evaluating a wide range of bikes and gear: road and mountain, gravel and ‘cross, analog and e-assist, cargo and sport. I’ve dissected their ins and outs, teased out their highlights and their flaws, and examined them through the lens of both a long-time shop mechanic (I’m going to be taking apart a lot of things here) and someone who’s spent way too many hours breaking things in a lab, all without preconceptions or either explicit or implicit pressure from someone looking over my shoulder.
lovelybike.blogspot.com- Is This About a Bicycle?
Everything is about the bike until you get a car.
- Most interesting or fun bike books you have read - Page 2 - Bike Forums
General Cycling Discussion Have a cycling related question or comment that doesn't fit in one of the other specialty forums? Drop on in and post in here! When possible, please select the forum above that most fits your post! ... Go to Page... ... It's All About The Bike. Robert Penn I just finished this last week.
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