I've owned and sold lots of motorcycles, so the experience of letting one go is not strange to me. I am use to that empty feeling of slowness as you load it up onto the trailer for the last time. The distant look the bike seems have when you know you've found a buyer. My first street bike, a CB700SC, was bought from a dealer. Four years and 28,000 miles later I sold it to buy my ex-wife's engagement ring "see honey, I'm normal, I'm actually selling one this time..." More recently I purchased a street bike, and sold it six days latter, for twice what I paid for it. This sort of cold business like transaction is more like planning your mutual fund than owning a motorcycle. I have been blessed in that I have never sold a motorcycle except when I wanted to get rid of it. More importantly I've never regretted getting rid of one that I sold. (author's note, two years later I regret selling the bike that prompted this article)
I had a chance to sell my very first race bike a few weeks ago. In fact I have been trying to sell it for a while with little or no success. It was a stupid first race bike for anyone, built faster than I was, or ever will be, as a rider. When it ran it simply won races, assuming I had the brass to let it do its thing. More often I would push it up to the grid and pull the pin on what can only be described as a quarter liter claymoore. It taught me more about engines than four years of spinning wrenches at a Honda dealer did.
I wasn't looking forward to selling it, not because of some sentimental reason, but because I was not looking forward to having to explain all of the engines idiosyncrasies, or decipher my hand writing in the notes to the buyer. Fortunately the buyer is going to put a completely different engine in the chassis. He will not be using the claymoore. This is proof that there must be a benevolent God. I sold it for a little less than it was worth, but still more than I paid for it.
I don't think there is a bike anyone knows as well as their first race bike. You spend your first couple of years learning about all its strange problems. You know the problems, remember the first time the power valve holder vibrated out of the engine? Man what a racket the uncovered port made! Or perhaps those big cams you installed put a greater stress on the treads for the bolts that hold the cam holders in. Remember the first time you stripped one out? Remember "fixing" it with Loctite to make your next race. How about the counter shaft threads that got cross threaded? Now you can only tighten the nut so much, but to make it safe you now have drilled all your sprockets so you can safety wire the nut in place. Remember the first time you got bounced out of Tech because the neutral light indicator was weeping a small amount of oil? You tried a new gasket, and even permatex form-a-gasket but it still leaks a tiny amount. Now you just remember to wipe it with rag before you go to tech. Remember the first time you found out the float levels were out, and your motor was filled with Unical's finest? You tried to get the floats right, but when you did the Mikuni's run out of gas on long straights. The dealer couldn't get you the correct oversized float valve bodies, so now you just use a clamp on the fuel line to keep it from flooding when not running.
It a good thing we buy and sell race bikes on a regular basis. It would be a terrible shame to only be dealing with the same problems for any length of time. In fact, no matter what race bike we may own or have, it will have problems. At least we can get some new problems every now and then to keep racing interesting. As for me, I no longer have one set of problems and now am looking for a new set of problems.