On Mar 27, 2008, at 2:11 PM, William Robb wrote: > One of the problems of living kinda in the boonies is that I never > had the opportunity to try a > Guzzi or Duke. When I was riding, I would probably have appreciated > one, but IIRC, they were all > Ricky Road Racers at that time, which is a style of bike I detest, > so it would have been an > interesting diversion, not a brand changing experience.
Moto Guzzis were all standards and touring motorcycles except for the LeMans series until quite recently, and even now they are still heavily biased to the standard and touring bike class. Even the LeMans models were far from "Ricky Road Racer" bikes ... they were more of a 'gentlman's express', particularly the LeMans 1000 models. Ducati's GT models were all standards through the '70s and into the early '80s. Only the Sport and SuperSport models were race reps. The modern Ducatis (starting about 1988-89) went more sport-oriented at first (Quattrovalvole, SS and IE models) but then they added more standards (the Monster model), touring (ST series), and all-terrain (Elefant and later variants). I owned at various times the Ducati '75 750GT, '76 860GT, '94 E900 Elefant, '92 907IE and '92 900SS models. I had two of the 750GT models, one of which I rode well over 80.000 miles back and forth across the US (several times). In the Moto Guzzis, I owned a '76 850T-3, an '89 LeMans 1000 mk V, and a '75 850-T. The LeMans 1000 model was a great tourer ... I rode that bike back and forth across the US eight times. It was supremely comfortable and a great handler. Neither Moto Guzzi nor Ducati were ever big companies so dealers were nearly always few and far between unless you lived in certain areas. When I started riding these bikes, the dealers I did business with were over 100 miles away. I always did all my own maintenance work so it was never much of a bother to me. Godfrey -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
