Motorcycle Reviews | Stats, prices and verdicts on all the latest bikes

Michael Mann Web Editor Bennetts BikeSocial v3

By Michael Mann

BikeSocial Web Editor. Content man, reviewer, commissioner, road tester, video presenter, interviewer and race fan. First ride was a 1979 Honda ST70. Not too shabby on track, loves a sports bike, worries about helmet hair, occasionally plays golf and squash but enjoys being a father to a 6-year-old the most.

Posted 01/01/0001 09:44 UK

BikeSocial does motorcycle reviews differently. Scroll down the page and you’ll find our enormous database of new and used road tests. We understand that most people looking to buy a motorbike have a good idea of what they want.

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They know whether they want a sports or adventure bike, cruiser or naked etc. They know how long their legs are and what sort of price they can pay. Our job is to explain the technology, put the performance into some kind of context, make some valid comparisons with other bikes in that class or price range and help you buy the right bike.

It’s not about employing the fastest riders or the greatest stunt riders, BikeSocial’s road test team has around 150 years of combined riding and testing experience. Between us we have written for, edited or published pretty much all of the UK’s major motorcycle publications and more importantly we’ve ridden every significant (and a whole load of not-so-significant) motorcycle of the last 50 years.

That’s important because it means we understand an engine’s power delivery, the way a bike steers, how the suspension behaves, brakes, comfort and all the other stuff that makes up a bike’s performance. And we can put it in context in the current marketplace for a bike costing whatever amount of money or of any age.

We also take the time to get to know the technology – how it works and what difference does it make, and we do our best to make sure the specifications we publish are both comprehensive and accurate. When we’ve finished doing all that we try and talk to as many other owners and experts as we can to broaden the opinion.

We don’t too many group tests because we’d rather do each bike in detail and, we shouldn’t assume that just because you are interested in a BMW R1200GS that your other options are similar big adventure bikes – that’s not how we buy bikes and we’re pretty sure it’s not how you buy them either.

And, of course we all run our own bikes – buying, selling, fixing and tweaking them. Rather too many of them probably, which also means that some of us (well, two actually) are also pricing and market geeks – spending far too much time browsing the classifieds – almost always on the verge of another ‘investment’.