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In the queue, waiting to take advantage of the free test ride available at this years bike show at the NEC, I spent a lot of time trying to decide which bike I wanted to have a play with.
I thought to myself ‘what bike would I otherwise not take the chance to ride?’ How can I truly indulge myself and just make this about having fun, without considerations for practicality or worrying about wasting the time of some sales exec at my local dealer.
The answer: The Indian Scout Bobber.
I’d never ridden a cruiser before and so was a little unsure at the idea – I went for it anyway. The first time I sat on the Indian Scout a few years back it instantly made me smile. The seating position seemed kind of ‘zero fucks given’, a bit like ‘I’m going to sit here like a boss, and roll around making a shit load of noise and you’re going to watch me!’.
When the Bobber variant was announced, with it’s angry looking design casting aside all the cheese of a traditional cruiser, I felt very much like this could be a guilty pleasure waiting for me in the future. It seemed like this was everything Triumph failed to achieve with their own crack at the factory custom bobber style.
But it wasn’t to be.
Overall, I was underwhelmed – expecting it to pull like a train, and bring me miles of smiles atop a roaring bed of power. Maybe I expected too much.
The gears felt really short – used to being able to rev a bike up to the speed I want before shifting up, I frequently found myself topping out in second with a weird feeling of sogginess. Shifting up to third, the Bobber then had some of that pulling power I was hoping for and perhaps it was just a cruiser thing that I wasn’t used to.
If that was all that bothered me I could probably have dealt with it and put it down to being a different type of bike. But the weird riding position and boney seat topped it off. The foot position was just that bit beyond natural, with an awkward action needed to shift the gears. There were a few times I found myself in neutral when I’d really rather not have been.
The position did very little to make the bike feel dynamic, making roundabouts no fun whatsoever with a top heavy, unstable sensation. The mirrors were all but useless, with a concave (or convex? I forget) effect that comes with a warning that objects are closer than they seem. This seems to me to be something you very obviously don’t want from a set of mirrors. All in all, comfort was not on point – something that you really feel should be a selling point with these kind of machines.
I was expecting more from the overall feel of the bike. The wet, meaningless, euro 4 compliant, tube of cack that was the exhaust didn’t help at all. A proper set of pipes would be essential before you would get anywhere near feeling like this was 12 grand’s worth of motorcycle.
Maybe I was expecting too much. Maybe half an hour on a cruiser for the first time isn’t enough to get a real feel for the bike (probably a big part of it). But as it stands, I’m left with no drive to spend premium bike money on this particular machine and enjoyed the ride home on my own bike much more. Maybe looking cool isn’t high enough on my list of priorities to make this feel like a bike I have to have.
