Modern-day motorcycles can be BIG. High, wide, and not always handsome, perusing a 2026 motorcycle showroom the relative similarities in size mean you don't always recognise that heft for what it is.
Only in certain instances and circumstances does it strike you how relatively diminutive even modern classic bikes can be - and I'm talking post 1970-ish.
I went to have a look around the Budworth Classic Bike show, held at the Cock O' Budworth pub on the edge of the village of the same name in Cheshire.
At most classic bike shows and auctions you rarely get to see classics alongside their modern equivalents - market-wise - but this was one where you do.
The car park and environs were rammed with classics, but bikers being bikers, plenty turned up on their modern or current everyday rides, and, with space at a premium, some ended up squeezing their machines into spaces alongside the oldies.
Even before I'd entered the show proper, such a comparative example presented itself. A current Triumph Tiger 900 alongside a 1979 Kawasaki 900. Yes, different uses - adventure versus pure road - but the Kawasaki looked like a current-day 650 by comparison.
And, of course, there wasn't really an adventure bike category back then.
"Adventure" bikes back then usually had "Enduro" written on the side. I had a Yamaha DT100 Enduro, and as I wandered the display I came across one which, given the number plate, must have been registered within a few weeks or even days of mine.
First thing: it was perfection. Second, it was tiny. Almost a mini bike. But it reminded me of back when I was wringing its neck trying to keep up with my mate Steve on his DT175 in the late '70s and early '80s.
I was easily able to wrestle the 100 back vertical if I keeled over off-road in an unofficial dirt bike Mecca in a power station slag heap alongside an abandoned railway embankment, but, bizarrely, one of the lads hanging out in that warren of trails, pits and climbs made a pretty good fist of off-roading his then already-ratty Kawasaki 900 Z1. Yes, you read that correctly.
I have a 1993 Honda CB1000 Super Four. It's big. Swinging my leg over an early Honda CB750, or a Z1 you immediately feel the difference in mass, and the location of that mass.
My CB1000 is 30-odd years old, but I still feel like I'm sitting sort-of in it rather than on it, as is the case with the CB750 or Z1; the seat is lower, and I feel part of my Super Four. Watching the 50-year-old bikes arrive and depart the Budworth show they look even smaller because riders and owners are perched on seats which were no really designed, but plonked on top of the horizontal frame rails.
But the abiding memory was as I was leaving the show. I was preparing to leave on my Aprilia 500 super-scooter (which I'd parked as far out of everybody's eyeline as I could…) when I heard and then saw a late '70s DT175 departing.
Skinny tyres, no width to it, and what must have been an average height bloke perched on top. The 2020s equivalents, for instance, are monsters by comparison - all manner of electronics, dashboard information tech, fancy suspension, leg-stretching ride height (while still feeling part of the bike) and seemingly continent-crossing fuel tank size.
But they'll do pretty-well the same thing whether for commuters or weekend off-roading.
And, boy, the comparative simplicity. My own perch-on-top '72 DT250 has a problem with the indicators. It'll take me an hour on Sunday morning to fix. Try that on its modern equivalent.
Ignoring the simplicity of older machines, I wondered what other influences there might be: well, doesn't take long to discover that 2026 humans are, on average, between two and three inches taller than they were back in the day the likes of the DT100, DT175 and even the CB750 were being conceived.
