WATCH: Honda Gold Wing crashes in hillclimb head-to-head
Remember the guy who off-roaded a Honda Gold Wing with an enduro bike strapped to the back seat? Well, now he’s hillclimbed one, too
Matt Spears loves off-roading on a motorcycle, but seemingly even more so when riding a bike not designed for off-roading - specifically a Honda Gold Wing.
Matt’s previous endeavours have taken him to the dirt with an enduro bike… strapped to the back of the Honda Gold Wing he was riding. 100kg on the back seat can only aid rear traction, right?
Following on from that innovative engineering success, he has now gone a stage further, taking a Gold Wing to a couple of near-vertical hillclimbs.
A rocky hillside might not have been too out of the ordinary for the riders at the Motocross of Nations in Ernee last weekend, but for a motorcycle you sit in rather than on it makes quite the challenge, as demonstrated by Spears’ stance on the bike - it is hard to stand with much control when your feet are a metre apart on the pegs!
Scaling the hills took some off-road tyres, a whole lot of GL1800 limiter - surely up there with silence and the coo of a dodo as one of the rarest sounds in nature - as well as a load of momentum, determination, and consideration of line choice.
Not only was the hill itself a challenge for the bike (and going down, as well as up, thanks to the Gold Wing’s ABS), but so was its competition, as Spears put the GL1800 up against a hillclimb-tuned dirt bike (specifically, is a Suzuki RM-Z450 with an extended wheelbase) piloted by Austin Tyler, five-times Great American Hillclimb champion.
Image credit: Matt Spears/YouTube
Alex has been working in the motorcycle industry for as long as he has been at Visordown, which has been since March 2022 so we'll let you work it out from there. He's the new guy. He'd be fetching us all coffee 'round the clock if he wasn't based in the arse end of nowhere.
