Joan Jett belted out the chorus to “I love rock ’n’ roll” into the desert air as I gunned the Harley-Davidson into the long sweeping turns of the hills that separate the Red Sea from the plain of the Sahara.
The huge screen of the Ultra Classic Electra Glide kept the stinging sand out of my helmet, and kept the classic rock from the bike’s sound system in. On the surprisingly well-surfaced Egyptian roads, the touring motorcycle’s massive 400kg bulk seemed to melt away in the heat.
The trip had not started so well. A delayed flight connection meant a night spent in a Cairo hotel lobby. When I finally arrived at the Red Sea to join Harley’s ride-out, I had time only for a shower before choosing a mount for the 280km tour over the hills and through the desert to Luxor.
A night without sleep and a whole day riding Harleys, even the plushest and most comfy of the touring range, in challenging conditions should have added up to a waking nightmare. All too often Harleys are good on their own terms, but idiosyncratic to the point of obtuseness when compared to any other motorcycle. But the 2009 Harley range has undergone one of those stages in its evolution where the gradual improvement amounts to a recognisable step forward.
Take, for example, the mounting of the V-twins that characterise Harleys. The big air-cooled lumps – of 96 cu in, or 1585cc – in the touring range have a large mass of metal reciprocating wildly when you rev them. That translates into a lot of vibration, which in the past has meant that using the engines’ top revs left you all shook up.
Improved engine mounts isolate the rider much better. At times on that narrow strip of tarmac through the desert I had to check the rev-counter to know which gear I was in – our admittedly modest cruising speed of 100-130kph could be achieved in any of the top three gears. On last year’s bikes, buzzing the engine at its 5,500 rev limit was only for those with a total lack of mechanical sympathy.
I must confess that I often find models from this Milwaukee manufacturer hard to distinguish. Aficionados and wannabe desperados can tell Harleys apart at a glance, but I find the Road King Classic, the Road King, the Electra Glide Standard and the Street Glide alarmingly similar in appearance. The Ultra Classic Electra Glide is easier to identify, as it is fully dressed in panniers, gigantic seat and so on. The rest differ more in details such as screens, pannier bags and the colour that the engine is finished in.
Riding them, though, the differences are more apparent. The Road King’s main differences from the Road King Classic are the finish of the saddlebags, the shape of the seat, and a slightly bigger front wheel. Yet the larger wheel gives the Road King much more confident handling than its Classic sibling.
All the touring bikes share a new, stiffer frame, and all have anti-lock braking – which saved my bacon when I saw, very late, a speed hump on an otherwise open dual carriageway, when our convoy at long last reached the fertile Nile valley. The anti-lock system comes in very early – but better that than not at all.
Despite the improvements, all the bikes, not just the ones with “Classic” in their name, are styled to look like they could have ridden off the pages of a 1960s magazine. And they do a better job of blending tradition and technology than the guy I saw in Luxor talking on a mobile phone while riding an undersized donkey.
However, he did a pretty good job of keeping up with our convoy. Even the shepherding skills of Sharif, the larger-than-life president of the local Harley Owners Group (HOG), could not stop taxi drivers jostling into our formation and slowing us down.
Hidden behind the fairing of the Ultra and the Street Glide is a sophisticated sound system that had not just Joan Jett but also Mötley Crüe and various indistinguishable Steppenwolf tracks bouncing off the mountains. America’s “A Horse with No Name” might have been among them, and Neil Young’s “Unknown Legend” was hard to get out of my head (“Somewhere on a desert highway/She rides a Harley-Davidson/Her long blonde hair flyin’ in the wind”).
It’s all part of the myth that Harley-Davidson taps into and that has made this brand so attractive to weekend warriors, or bankers who grow their hair before their annual HOG meet. But it doesn’t come without drawbacks. Even after two days on the bikes, the second covering a greater distance than the first, I had to think about how to use the idiosyncratic indicator switches. They might self-cancel but they are also more complicated than the one-button-for-everything simplicity of most other bikes. And the standard pillion seats slope backwards, which seems perverse unless it is aimed at tempting buyers into the 824-page accessories catalogue.
Even within the self-referential world of Harleys, others in the current range are disappointing – for example, the XR1200, which is very self-consciously styled after the raw and successful XR750 that stormed to victory across many an American mile and half-mile oval track. But the touring bikes – especially, for me, the Road King – might even have made the crossover from good Harleys to good motorcycles.
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The details
How much
From £12,480 for a single-colour Electra Glide Standard to £17,420 for a two-tone Ultra Classic. But few buyers can resist the almost endless options
How fast
Not that speedy – but comfortable enough to stay on all day
How big
Length 240-264cm, seat height 69-71.5cm
How heavy
355kg-400kg
Brakes
ABS is standard
Gearbox
Six-speed, with belt final drive
