A road tester's diary

What’s it really like to be an MCN road tester? Is it really living the highilfe, jetting off around the world to ride all the top bikes in sunny locations? Used Bikes Editor Angus Farquhar joined in to find out:

MCN Road Tester Michael Neeves had organised a team of riders, including myself, News Reporter Tony Hoare, and Acting Art Editor John Millbank, to take four bikes down to Wales to see how they handled both the motorway work and the fantastic winding Welsh roads when we got there.

The journey would give four riders with differing styles and levels of experience the chance to ride all four bikes on a range of roads and in varying conditions.

Staff photographer Mark Manning drew the short straw – a photographers kit rarely fits in panniers so he travelled by car.

The test got off to a late start when breakign news meant that John had to stay later than planned to make sure MCN met its Monday evening print deadline. When he was finally free to go we made sure we had a thorough introduction to the bikes before starting off for the first part of our test.

After lunch we completed our photographic needs and then got on with the serious business of more riding – this time in the direction of home.

All that’s left now is for Michael to analyse what we had learned and to synthesise all of it into a definitive verdict on these bikes.

A week later, and it will be four pages of MCN.(see the July 21 issue).

And tomorrow? Michael’s back out on the road again testing the next set of bikes.

Would you want the life of a road tester? Click here, to Have Your Say.

And it wasn’t just a straight blast all the way down to Llangollen where we were staying. We took time to swap bikes en route so we would all be ready with our first impressions by the time we swapped notes at a roadside service station that evening.

After a break for a meal we arrived at our hotel just in time grab a few drinks before closing time and some sleep before the next day of hard riding.

We headed up through The Horsehoe Pass and used the Ponderosa Cafe as a base of operations.

The pass is a sensational road, and at that time of the morning there were hardly any cars to get in the way. We go to know what the bikes would do on these kind of bends and worked out which corners might offer photographic opportunities later in the day.

After a head-clearing run we stopped for a cuppa and made sure we had the detail and static pictures we would need to tell the story of these four bikes: A Ducati 1000SS, BMW R1100S, MZ1000S and Moto Guzzi Le Mans Rosso Corsa.

With the photographer and designer collaborating on getting the perfect shot of all the bikes and making sure that they got all they detail photos that would be needed, there can be times when all a road tester can do is sit and wait.

“I bet you thought it was all glamour didn’t you?” said Michael. “I spend a lot of my time like this, waiting for the photographer to get the shot he wants or just waiting for the sunlight to be just right.”

Once all the static stuff had been sorted we set up the camera on a bike mounted frame to get some shots looking back past the front of one of the bikes to see the others riding beside it.

Once it was fitted though two of us had to ride beside each other in exactly the same position that was set up in the car park. Easier said than done. But we got the shot.

With those niceties sorted we could get on and do some serious riding.

You might think getting action shots is simply a case of riding a really nice road with photographers dotted about waiting to take shots as you pass, but the reality is that you have to ride one corner at a time, go 100 meters up the road, do a u-turn and come back and do it again. It can be tiresome when you all you really want to do is get on and ride – but you lot want to see some great pictures – that’s why we go to the effort.

It gets even harder when all four bikes have to go round the same corner at once to be in the same shot. For all the bikes to fit in the same frame they have to be far closer together than you would ever consider riding on the road, and you all have to be leant over at exactly the same distance apart otherwise the pictures look odd.

We got a couple of passes like this under our belt but then, as predicted, the sun decided to take a break and left us with cloud to contend with. We took the opportunity to put some more testing miles on the bikes – and grab a bite to eat.