Heat Wagons

Heat Wagons

The Fricassee Factor

Humans routinely travel into space. Men have walked on another celestial body, and robots are sending us remarkable pictures from distant planets. We’ve cloned sheep, cats and dogs, can communicate wirelessly all around the world and have inexpensive, hand-held devices that offer more computing power than the supercomputers of a couple decades ago.

Why, then, can’t the companies that manufacture motorcycles find a way to keep their products from roasting riders like Thanksgiving turkeys?

They can make them go 190 mph, do 9-second quarter-miles and cut world-class lap times, all while passing EPA and DOT requirements and offering car-like reliability. All things considered, then, diverting engine heat away from the rider should be a piece of cake. Instead, the rider gets baked like a cake.

So many of today’s bikes are portable blast furnaces, and three of these Speed Wagons-the Honda ST1300, the Triumph Sprint ST and the Yamaha FJR1300-are serious offenders. All three bathe the rider in waves of heat that rise up from inside the fairing and through vents in it. If you’re not wearing riding pants with knee protectors when on the ST1300, your knees feel like they’re being fricasseed if you simply allow them to make contact with the fairing—and for riders who are 6 feet tall or more, it’s virtually impossible to avoid knee contact with the fairing.

On the Triumph, not only does the tailpiece above the trio of exhaust outlets get blazing hot, so does the passenger grab handle. Didn’t the designers and engineers ever put a passenger on the back of a Sprint before going into production?!

Yamaha’s liability-conscious designers won’t let you open the little storage bin on the FJR’s fairing unless the ignition is on and the transmission is in neutral, and by God, you can’t start the engine if the bike is in gear and the sidestand is down, but they don’t mind if your legs end up looking like something on The Colonel’s menu.

It makes you wonder just how much actual on-the-road testing is conducted with some bikes and who does the test riding. Maybe the manufacturers haven’t adequately addressed this problem because no one of any consequence ever complained about it. I don’t know whether or not I’m of consequence, but I’m complaining anyway...Sfop the presses, stop the presses! On deadline day, Yamaha dropped this little bomb on us, a revised 2006 FJR1300 (shown below), rejiggered to alleviate radiated engine heat. This was accomplished by different internal ducting, repositioned fairing vents, fitting a curved radiator and the addition of strategically placed heat shielding, all aimed at keeping hot air away from the rider.

While they were at it, the FJR’s handlers added an electrical accessory port, revised the windshield for even better coverage and upgraded the (already stellar) brakes.

Well, that’s more like it.

Paul Dean