Three To Go

Truth to tell, sidecars have it rough; In motorcycling they're generally regarded as the horse-faced girl with two club feet. And sidehacks are about as well loved which is to say they're loved by family members only -- sidecar enthusiasts.

For a long time, sidecars have been closet cases of the upstairs sort. It was not always so. In motorcycling's first two decades, and into the third, sidecars were quite legit. Then, motorcycles were transportation vehicles and sidecars were natural appendages, handy for all-weather riding, increasing utility space and containing a growing family. Before Word War I, automobile users were a hardy lot too. Totally enclosed and weather tight sedan bodies would come later, to say nothing of real interior heaters. Motorized transport, with two , three, or four wheels, put the users in the elements, just a sneeze away from pneumonia. It's hard to comprehend in an age of all-weather air-conditioning that the first generation of internal combustion users accepted as normal exposure to choking dust, blazing heat, drenching rain and bone-numbing cold. Most car4riages, horse or horseless, were damn Spartan. And when was the last time you saw a saddle horse with a full-weather convertible top and side curtains?

Sidecars started up the golden staircase to the far closet when horseless carriages stopped being carriages and became cars. Those four-wheeled automobiles began running off regular lines in mass production. Inexpensive automobiles were bargains and that made the car America's transportation vehicle. Oh yes, hardware stores and candy shops and police departments would continue to use sidecars as light utility vehicles throughout the twenties and thirties and onward, but but for the most part sidecars were gone. They were too expensive, peculiar, specialized. So too were motorcycles of the two-wheeled sort. Who needed a motorcycle when Henry Ford had put the car within the grasp of Everyman?

Motorcycles rebounded after World War II. This time, however, they made it as sporting vehicles, not transportation.

Today, there's only one simple reason to own a motorcycle: they're fun to ride. Entertainment, excitation, exhilaration, wide-open fun. Lithe, responsive, quick, willing, agile, fast, strong, immediate. These word clusters describe motorcycles, but when motorcyclists first try traditional sidecars, that vocabulary falls flat -- dead and motionless -- on the hard first-floor of reality. Sidecars, they decide, are like old cars: wonderful things to look at and wonderful things for somebody else to own. No second thoughts.

Second thoughts there should be. Why be trapped by tradition? The moment the rules in International sidecar racing opened, suddenly new-tech sidecars burst on the scene, sweeping the traditional rigs into he history books. A whole new generation of three-wheeled vehicles?  The question should not be why, but why not. There's no single area as wide open as three-wheelers. Because designers are unfettered by the rules and regulations  governing automobiles, good engineers haven't had this much unrestrained freedom since the early 1960s. Think about it: the engineering knowledge developed in the last 25 years on two wheels and four could be brought to bear on three-wheelers by the most creative companies dealing with engines and wheels. You know what could come out of that? Things you never have imagined.

You drive south from Los Angeles along the coast road to get to Dana Point, California, where the main office of Trihawk Vehicles, Incorporated, is located. Steadily the route abandons the places where goods are made -- the broiling sweatshops and belching factories -- and opens up to the strip of tourist traps and country clubs where they are consumed. Her e you'll find the Trihawk building, firmly planted on the main drag between the surfing shops and the yacht boutiques, with a group of Trihawks fanned out behind a lawn-sized picture widow.

You have to see them in context. In Muncie, Indiana, a bunch of Trihawks gathered at a stoplight (company spokesmen refer to the three-wheeler as a car even though the government views it as a motorcycle) would have the city council out of session for a gander. But in the reaches of California south of L.A. , the Trihawk is just another glimmering facet of the glimmering landscape, a polyp on life's daily pleasuredome. In the sun-drenched, sybaritic world of Dana Point, the Trihawk makes perfect sense, because it looks like -- an elegant tribute to the visibility of hard-core fun.

"Fun" seems unlikely as the compelling reason for Harley-Davidson to reach out from blue-nosed Milwaukee to the land of hot tubs and total-body tans to acquire Trihawk, a small-scale concern producing less than 100 vehicles a year. Harley recently purchased Trihawk under an agreement which funnels royalties from the sale of each new unit to the previous owners. Harley gets control of the company, and parachutes into an established niche at the leading edge of three-wheeled design, an area many experts see as the "next phase" of street-going technology. Could the Trihawk be a testbed for Harley powerplants, particularly the long-awaited water-cooled V-4 Nova? Harley spokesman don't deny it, but for right now they want to bump Trihawk production into four digits by offering some less extravagant models (the vehicle currently sells for between $12,000 and $13,000) and leave its excellent basic design unchanged.

That design, which uses a tubular steel frame under a fiberglass body tub, and front-wheel drive powered through a five-speed gearbox by an air-cooled 1299cc Citroen flat-four engine, simply works too well as is to start mucking about with the Trihawk's dynamics without a lot of deep-well R&D. First set to graph paper four years ago by racecar designer Bob McKee and sporting millionaire Lou Richards, the Trihawk began as a four-wheeler, but government safety and emissions regulations drove this small manufacturer to the sanctuary of three-wheelers.

The triple-track configuration was an auspicious compromise: it simplified design and lowered curb weight to under 1400 pounds. Furthermore, the low-slung fiberglass body and ducktail rear section make for slippery aerodynamics with a claimed 0.43 coefficient of drag. Hardware for the independent front suspension system, drive shafts and powerful dual disc brakes, is lifted directly from Renault's Le Car, while fitting fat Goodyear Eagle NCT (now known as the GT) tires and adjustable Carrera shocks gives the Trihawk performance that overwhelms all but the most tenacious four-wheel road quellers; the Trihawk accelerates through the quarter mile quicker than a BMW 318i (though still sluggardly by bike standards at 17.2 sec. and 77 mph), brakes harder than a Mazda RX7, and sticks better on the skid pad (Car and Driver recorded an astonishing 0.87 G) than a Porsche Carrera.

So much for the numbers. The real Trihawk experience begins when you stop staring at its "bottom leader" physiognomy, slip down into the open yet curiously cloistered envelope of its cockpit, and head for a twisty road. For protection there's a sturdy roll bar, three-point harness and the buttress of the steel frame tubes under the Trihawk's kidney-height gunwales, yet any practiced motorcyclist's first reaction will be to head back to town for a good helmet. A feeling of exposure is part of the adaptation process. So is the altered perspective of tooling along with your nethers skimming barely half a foot off the road surface, a flea in a dog's world; a compact car looks like a full-sized sedan, a sedan a van, a van a semi and a semi a preposterous, rolling Mount Rushmore. You can watch the scenery underneath some vehicles and suddenly the space below a semi's trailer looks like a perfectly rational place to change lanes.

With its taut suspension, dart-now steering, power-dive brakes, open seating, and oneness with its environment, the Trihawk has the same spidery grace and sweet release from the laws of physics common to all high-performance roadsters, number of wheels notwithstanding. Seventy percent of the trike's loaded weight rests on its front wheels, and the rear simply tracks around whatever line is chosen, with no tendency to step out. The Trihawk sticks like paint lines to the fastest sweeping turns, with no change in attitude, gas on or off. A narrow leg-and-footwell confines those knees which motorcyclists may nudge out reflexively. The Trihawk is untouchable on tight, twisty roads, but long, uphill sweepers bring out the shortcomings of its engine. The Citroen powerplant is a marvel of low-end torque and tractability, but its claimed 65 horsepower has your throttle foot boring holes in the floorboards probing for more urge. Everything you see from the driver's seat says four wheels; only a chunk of debris suddenly materializing in the center of your lane reminds you that you're really traveling in quite a peculiar contraption.

Whatever it is, the Trihawk is not a car; it thrusts you into the environment like a motorcycle; it lets you reach out and touch the scenery. The landscape does not begin somewhere beyond the tinted windows; it's right in your lap. A contemporary high-performance automobile soothes, isolates, massages and manages its occupants. The same mentality would install a silver-tongued cruise director on the Space Shuttle. But the Trihawk has an electrifying mechanical presence. The flat-four cacophony surrounds you and the front suspension patters away about an inch below eye level. Other than a motorcycle, what other vehicle lets you use a crossroad pothole for an ashtray?