Quote:
Originally Posted by Gank
[b]
At the heart of the ugliness matter is the hard bags. It took me a while to figure out why they bother me. I was sure I’d seen them on another bike or somewhere before. I spent half a day trying to recall where I’d seen that pattern, and then it came to me. I’d seen it in my kitchen.
If you combined the shape of the Concours hard bags with the inferno heat of the FJR, you would have yourself a pretty good package for cross country barbeque. This is the bike George Forman would ride.
The caboose on this Ugly Train is the exhaust system. The best word I could find to describe the exhaust placement is aggressive. Like the hard bags, the inspiration for the design was found somewhere you might not have expected: the military. In this photo, the machine in the foreground is a Howitzer. The machine in the background is a Concours 14.
I wish I could get around this, but relative to the other bikes in its class, the exhaust setup on the Concours is one gigantic question mark. It’s hard to understand how offensive the exhaust is until you take off the hard bags and see just how terrible it looks. Where the FJR suddenly becomes a sport bike with the bags off, the Concours becomes some kind of horrible thing that makes young children run and cry. |
Jeez Louise, you are mean!!! 
That is not an insult! I love your writing style.
This thread is so informative that I could cry. That is one serious achilles heel about the mileage of the C14. Still, though, it is nice to hear that the seat height is so low as compared to the others you have ridden (I'm 5' 8" at 185 lbs), so that prove to be the equalizer.
While I have some differing opinions about the C-14 (I actually LIKE the styling of the bike), I still appreciate your effort in putting this in type. Takes a lot of effort out of the comparison-shindig ( I'm still going to have to put them thru their paces, though
)